Capra Contra Schmitt: Two Traditions of Political Romanticism 8:4 | 2005 Bruce Rosenstock

Bruce Rosenstock Introduction

1.

This paper explores two different traditions of political romanticism and their differing critical and artistic receptions in the twentieth century. The first tradition emerged in Europe largely in response to the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, European romanticis m found its most prominent critic in Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). In his Political Romanticism, Schmitt argued that romanticism represents a flight from concrete, political reality into the inconsequential realm of fantasy. Above all else, the romantic subject avoids decision. Intimately connected with Schmitt's rejection of European political romanticism is his embrace of fascism. I will argue that fascism for Schmitt is the precise inversion of politically indecisive romanticism. Fascism concretizes decision in the sovereign will of the dictator and in the popular act of acclamation that, in Schmitt's theory of fascist democracy, legitimizes sovereign dictatorship.
2.

The second tradition of political romanticism has its roots in the American Revolution and finds one of its most most prominent artistic exponents in Frank Capra (1897-1991).1 Intimately connected with Capra's embrace of the American romantic tradition is his rejection of fascism, especially apparent in his movie Meet John Doe (1941).2 My aim in this paper is to lay bare the contrast between the two traditions of political romanticism, one given its theoretical explication and critique in Carl Schmitt's Political Romanticism, the other its artistic expression in the movies of Frank Capra. To understand the theoretical grounding of the American tradition of political romanticism, and to explain Capra's artistic achievement, I turn for guidance

to the work of Stanley Cavell, especially his Pursuits of Happiness in which he offers a philosophical explication of the genre of film he dubs "comedies of remarriage.'' Although Cavell is the most important contemporary exponent of the American tradition of romanticism, he does not deal directly with the theme that is central for Schmitt, namely, the identification of the political with sovereign decision. The thinker who offers the clearest and most direct response to Schmitt's central theme is Hannah Arendt. I will argue that she and Cavell together offer a theoretical elaboration of what I identify as the American tradition of political romanticism.
3.

I have titled my paper "Capra Contra Schmitt'' because I believe that each man, one in his art and the other in his theoretical writing, represents two different traditions of political romanticism at a decisive moment in their histories. This moment brings to the fore the critical relationship between aesthetics and politics in the modern democratic state. Capra's faith is that romantic art in the mass medium of film can sustain and nurture American democracy in its battle against fascism. Schmitt believes that romanticism is the "religion'' of the bourgeois state and must be overcome in order to achieve the authentic democracy of the fascist state.
4.

The overcoming of the indecisiveness of political romanticism would take place, if we follow Schmitt to the logical conclusion of his critique, when a dictator brings into concrete actuality political romanticism's "core'' idea, namely, that "the state is a work of art'' (1986: 125). Richard Wolin correctly diagnosed Schmitt's theory of fascism as the fusion of the political and the aesthetic when he speaks of Schmitt's embrace of a fascist "aesthetics of horror'' (1992: 443). Wolin points out that Benjamin's critique of fascism as the aestheticization of the political grows out of his reading of Schmitt. Benjamin understood from Schmitt that fascism inverts the bourgeois de-politicization of art, transforming the political into the realm where freefloating imagination is given license to test its fantasies

in the living flesh of the state's subjects. Benjamin also saw film as a medium ideally suited to represent and sustain the illusions of fascism. I will argue that Capra's film work attempts to contest this appropriation of film for fascism. I will also argue that Capra's own aesthetic draws deeply from romanticism, but in its American incarnation.
5.

In the next section of the paper I will discuss Schmitt's analysis of political romanticism and relate it to his embrace of fascism as the only hope for what he took to be Europe's inevitable conflict with Bolshevism. In the following section I turn to Cavell's interpretation of the romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau and the film comedies of remarriage as offering a response to the challenge of skepticism. This section will spend considerable time in examining the roots of Cavellian romanticism in Kant's Critique of Judgment. It will extend this philosophical portrait of romanticism by offering an interpretation of the Capra film, It Happened One Night. In the final section of the paper I will turn to Hannah Arendt's analysis of the American Revolution in her work On Revolution. Arendt can help us understand how the American romantic tradition stands in contrast to the romanticism that, as Schmitt argues, bears within itself, as the legacy of the French Revolution, the fantasy of fascist dictatorship.
6.

Helped by Arendt and Cavell, I hope to show that the American romanticism of Frank Capra offers a direct challenge to Schmitt's embrace of fascist dictatorship as the only viable form of democracy. Arendt and Cavell allow us to see that the romantic hero - and the figures of Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) in It Happened One Night will serve us as examples of two such heroes - is the one who can decide to make a promise that re-constitutes fraternity as the space of the political. The decision to make a promise is, in fundamental ways, the inverse of the Schmittian sovereign decision that constitutes the friend-enemy polarity. Perhaps, therefore, the most important political decision is between Capra and Schmitt. This, at least, is the argument of my paper.

Schmitt on Political Romanticism and Sovereign Dictatorship

7.

Schmitt's book Political Romanticism was first published in 1919 and is part of his broad assault on the ideology of the liberal bourgeois democratic state that informs his key texts from the 1920's, including Dictatorship (1921), Political Theology (1922), and Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923). Put succinctly, romanticism is the civil religion of the liberal democratic state. It is only in an individualistically disintegrated society that the aesthetically productive subject could shift the intellectual center into itself, only in a bourgeois world that isolates the individual in the domain of the intellectual, makes the individual its own point of reference, and imposes upon it the entire burden that otherwise was hierarchically distributed among different functions in a social order. In this society, it is left to the private individual to be his own priest. but not only that. Because of the central significance and consistency of the religious, it is also left to him to be his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and his own master builder in the cathedral of his personality. The ultimate roots of romanticism and the romantic phenomenon lie in the private priesthood. (Schmitt 1986: 20) Rejecting Weber's identification of modernity with secularization, Schmitt claims that modern European society is better characterized as embracing a "religion of privacy.'' Schmitt identifies the first and most significant of the bourgeois rights to be the freedom of conscience which turned religion into a private matter outside the bounds of state control. The bourgeois liberal state emerges out of the absolutist state, one of whose major functions, after the catastrophic wars of the early seventeenth century, was to provide a neutral space for the exercise of private religious choice. The sacralization of the private sphere leads to the reverence for private property: "The fact that religion is a private matter gives privacy a religious sanction. In the true sense, the absolute guarantee of absolute private property can exist only where religion is a private

matter ...'' (1996: 28-9). The state's neutrality in relation to conscience becomes, in the liberal state, its neutrality in relation to the exercise of economic self-interest.
8.

The transformation of the absolutist into the liberal state was accompanied, according to Schmitt, by the collapse of the deistic world picture. The metaphysical focal point ceased to be a transcendent God; the place of authority and legitimation came to be occupied by two new "this-worldly realities'' ("diesseitige Realitaten,'' 1925: 86), humanity and history. The idea of humanity as the source of political legitimation comes to the fore in the French Revolution. The idea of history as the source of political legitimation arises as a conservative reaction to the revolutionary impetus of the idea of humanity. Romantic subjectivity wavers indecisively between both these new metaphysical foci. Schmitt breaks with earlier analyses of romanticism by arguing that it is inherently related neither to revolutionary nor to reactionary political philosophies, but to the suspension of any decisive commitment to political action, whether revolutionary or reactionary. The romantic subject may dream of revolution or restoration, but in reality he or she is merely the "neutralized'' agent of the bourgeois order.
9.

Political romanticism as Schmitt characterizes it is only comprehensible as a response to the transformation of the bourgeoisie from an agent of radical social change in the French Revoltuion to an entrenched, conservative class in the middle of the nineteenth century. "The bearer of the romantic movement is the new bourgeioisie. Its epoch begins in the eighteenth century. In 1789, it triumphed with revolutionary violence over the monarch, the nobility, and the Church. In June of 1848, it already stood on the other side of the barricades when it defended itself against the revolutionary proletariat'' (1986: 12). In the course of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie was unable to form stable political institutions rooted in the revolutionary moment. Before explaining how the liberal bourgeois democracies are, according to Schmitt, the breeding ground of romanticism, it will be useful to briefly

sketch his analysis of the nature of the failure of the French Revolution to achieve stable political insitutions. The failure, according to Schmitt,, lay in the eclipse of sovereign dictatorship, the new political reality brought to life by the Revolution. In place of sovereign dictatorship, the authentic expression of popular sovereignty, there arose the depoliticized neutrality of the bourgeois order. Stillborn in the French Revolution, sovereign dictatorship and authentic democracy is, in Schmitt's view, given a second chance with the emergence of fascism in the twentieth century.
10.

In Dictatorship Schmitt explains how in the beginning of the French Revolution the people's power of constituting a new set of laws and institutions for the future was theoretically and practically severed from the legal activity of a constituted government. Using the terms of Emmanuel Sieyes, the French Revolution opened a gap between the people's pouvoir constituant ("constituting power'') and the government's pouvoir constitue ("constituted power''). The reality of the revolution, so to speak, its power and its selfauthorization, was all on the side of the pouvoir constituant which, according to Sieyes, existed in a prepolitical "state of nature.'' The consequence was that any written constitution and any constituted governing body was liable to be suspended or disbanded in the eventuality that a more direct expression of the people's revolutionary power was called for. Schmitt calls the unmediated expression of the people's revolutionary power "sovereign dictatorship.'' It is fundamentally the same as Sieyes' pouvoir constitutant.
11.

Schmitt distinguishes sovereign from "commissioned'' dictatorship. In commissioned dictatorship the constitution itself defines the power of the dictator and is therefore not suspended when a state of emergency calls for the vesting of dictatorial powers in a commissioned officer of the government. Schmitt finds fault with the French constitution of 1793 for failing to provide for such a commissioned dictatorship. As a consequence of this failure, the outbreak of war and the continuing struggle against domestic counter-revolution

led to the complete suspension of the constitution and made it impossible to step out of the revolutionary "state of nature'' into a legitimate political order.3
12.

The liberal bourgeois democracies that Schmitt sees as the breeding ground of romanticism are products of shifting political compromises between the bourgeoisie, traditional monarchies, and, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the rising socialist proletariat. The political compromises of the liberal bourgeois state seek to prevent any future revolutionary upheavals. Characteristic of the bourgeois order was a horror of sovereign dictatorship. Legal formalism and bureaucratic rationality replaced the political decisiveness of the sovereign dictator. The sovereign dictatorship of the people that the French Revolution revealed for the first time was not entirely lost, however. It took root, in a politically neutralized and privatized form, in romantic subjectivity.
13.

Romantic subjectivity begins with a flight from the political as the site of tawdry compromise and failure. As I mentioned above, Schmitt identifies two trajectories that romantic flight may take: towards humanity and towards history, the "this-worldly realities'' that replace God as the new metaphysical foci of the nineteenth century. The first direction is taken by those romantics who seek the creation of a liberated humanity beyond national boundaries. The second direction is chosen by those romantics who yearn for a national identity that is rooted in the historical traditions of the people. The romanticized concepts of humanity and history are, in Schmitt's terms, the twin "demiurges'' of political romanticism. The romantic concept of a liberated humanity (foreshadowed by the freedom of the romantic self) is the inheritance of the French Revolution's dream of creating a society founded upon "the rights of man.'' The romantic concept of the historically rooted people reflects a negative reaction against the French Revolution and whatever measure of success it may have had in breaking down social hierarchies within France and Europe more generally. The romantic seeks to identify

with the supraindividual realities of humanity or history, but what is most significant for him or her, says Schmitt, is that concrete, historical reality is always rejected as inauthentic. To deflate the everyday through ironization is the romantic's common strategy. In fleeing from the concrete into the realm of possibility, whether of a revolutionary humanity or a traditionally rooted people, the romantic seeks refuge in or another "higher'' reality. Although at first the romantic is confident of his or her capacity to create this new reality through the power of the imagination, there soon arises a disillusionment even with the possibility that the ego can fabricate its own reality. "As a result,'' Schmitt writes, "they floated from one reality to another: from the ego to the people, the 'idea,' the state, history, the Church'' and ultimately came to feel that they were themselves the "object of irony of numerous true realities'' (1986: 92). Schmitt identifies this sense of being the plaything of forces beyond one's control as the "disillusionment'' of romanticism, its condition of "despair.'' In despair, the romantic senses every event to be a moment in the inexplicable unfolding of a reality outside his power to change. Romantic subjectivity is the intersection of this higher reality and the ennui of everyday existence. Schmitt calls this "occasionalism,'' the notion that all human agency is illusory and merely the occasio, the point of contact, between a realm of infinite possibilities and the present moment. In place of action, the romantic subject uses the occasion as a point of access into the realm of pure possibility.
14.

Schmitt's discussion of romantic "occasionalism'' permits us to see most clearly how romantic subjectivity structurally parallels sovereign dictatorship. "Political romanticism,'' Schmitt explains, "is a concomitant emotive response of the romantic to a political event. This political event evokes a romantic productivity in an occasional fashion'' (1986: 158). Whatever political position the romantic subject takes up, he or she is simply responding to political change and not directly involved in it. Romantic subjectivity, of course, falsely imagines itself to be the master of its own reality, judging concrete, political reality to be the mere "occasional points of departure'' for the "romantic productivity of the creative ego.'' As a result of this self-

deceptive rejection of concrete political action, the romantic subject's "sublime elevation above definition and decision is transformed into a subservient attendance upon alien power and alien decision'' (1986: 162). In contrast to this kind of passive subjectivity is that of the individual who can discern that a particular moment is the occasion for political decision. Such decisive subjectivity does not respond to an occasion, but creates it.4
15.

In contrast with what he took to be the romantic's refusal to make any political decision that would commit him to a single, finite reality, Schmitt envisioned a politically decisive form of subjectivity characteristic of sovereign dictatorship that would reshape reality in a state of emergency ("Ausnahemzustand''). Schmitt articulates this alternative to romantic subjectivity most fully in what can be read as the companion piece to Political Romanticism, namely, Political Theology. Despite the differences between the two poles of romantically indecisive and politically decisive subjectivities, both share, as Schmitt describes them, a quest for god-like power. We could say that the politically decisive subjectivity, what Schmitt calls the sovereign, is a higher form, a successful form, of romantic subjectivity. The sovereign dictator is a kind of "hyper-romantic'' hero. In order to see how this is so requires a brief examination of Schmitt's ideas about sovereignty more generally. In the course of this examination I will explain how, according to Schmitt, sovereign dictatorship has come into being once again in Europe with the rise of the fascist state. It is such a state that Schmitt hopes will replace the Weimar Republic's liberal bourgeois democracy.
16.

Schmitt developed his ideas about sovereign subjectivity in Political Theology. This book and The Concept of the Political (1927) are Schmitt's most widely known works.5 It is useful to begin with the later book, The Concept of the Political. In it, Schmitt develops the idea that "the specifically political distinction back to which political actions and motives

are able to be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy [Freund und Feind]'' (1932: 14).6 Schmitt understands the nature of the enemy to be the "the other, the stranger, and it suffices for his nature that he be, in an especially intense manner, existentially something other and strange, in order that, in an extreme case, conflicts with him are possible that cannot be decided either through a previously applied general standard [Normierung], or through the ruling of a 'disinterested' and therefore 'impartial' third party'' (1932: 14-5). Because the conflict with the enemy in the "extreme case'' cannot be resolved through normative principles or formal procedures of impartial adjudication, only a life and death struggle, i.e. war, can decide the outcome. Likewise, the decision that an "extreme case'' has in fact arisen cannot be made through appeal to general norms or predefined criteria. The decision that an extreme case exists is an exceptional decision that both inaugurates and exercises its power within a state of emergency. This decision is, Schmitt declares, the defining feature of sovereign power. Schmitt puts this claim in the opening sentence of his book Political Theology: "Sovereign is he who decides in the matter of a state of emergency'' [Souveran ist, wer uber den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet] (1934: 11). The decision of the sovereign about the state of emergency reveals the political as such. The sovereign political decision is not a form of moral judgment, aesthetic judgment, or economic calculation. No matter how a state may be faring from a cultural or economic perspective, if it lacks the power to make the sovereign political decision it is doomed to be overcome by a state that does. We might say that the health or morbidity of the state rests entirely upon this point.7
17.

Schmitt advanced his claims about the concept of the political and the nature of sovereignty as part of an attack on the liberal bourgeois state. Briefly, Schmitt believes that the liberal state seeks to "neutralize'' all political decisions. In the liberal state, bureaucratic expertise and the technological rationality of norms and standards ("technicity'') have almost completely usurped the site of sovereign decision.8 Schmitt embraced the fascist state as the only viable alternative

to liberal bourgeois democracy in what he believed was the "existential'' threat confronting Europe, namely, Bolshevism.
18.

Schmitt considered fascist dictatorship to be Europe's only political option in its confrontation with the Bolshevist dictatorship of the proletariat. But Schmitt did not believe that fascism was the overturning of democracy. Rather, Schmitt took fascism to be democracy's authentic political expression. In Dictatorship Schmitt argued that dictatorship emerges during a "state of emergency'' ("Ausnahmezustand''). Clearly, dictatorship therefore qualifies as the expression of the political par excellence. Schmitt further identifies the "inner dialectic of the concept'' of dictatorship (1964: xvi) to be its power to dispense with normative legality and yet retain legitimacy. Traditionally, the legitimacy of dictatorship had been derived from a special "commission'' granted to the dictator by the sovereign. Schmitt, as we have seen, claimed that a new form of dictatorship, sovereign dictatorship, arose in the course of the French Revolution. In sovereign dictatorship the will of the people comes to direct expression. Sovereign dictatorship is therefore a form legitimate power, although it exists outside any legal constitutional framework. There is no formal method for allowing the people's will to be expressed, such as a secret ballot. The secret ballot merely dissolves the people's will into an aggregate of private wills. Authentic democracy brings the people's will to expression through acclamation. In his defense of what he calls "direct democracy'' Schmitt writes that where there still exists a people [Volk] and wherever it finds itself, even if it is gathered together as a collectivity of spectators at a race course where it demonstrates signs of political life, it manifests its will through acclamation. In reality, there is no type of state that could stand up to such acclamations. Even the absolute prince needs the crowds of his people who line the streets and cry "Hurrah.'' Acclamation is an eternal phenomenon of every political community. No state without a people, no people without acclamations. (1927: 31) Sovereign dictatorship comes into being through

acclamation and creates a new normative order where the word of the dictator expresses the will of the people. As such, it is the law. According to Schmitt, Weimar's constitution contained the "residuum'' of sovereign dictatorship in Article 48, Section 2 that provided emergency powers to the president. Schmitt believed that the use of this Article could liberate Germany from its moribund, depoliticized condition and inaugurate an authentically democratic state.9
19.

Summarizing the argument thus far we can say that Schmitt considered the revolutionary and redemptive potential of sovereign dictatorship to be lying dormant within the constitutional constraints of the moribund liberal state, waiting to be reactivated. Just as Marx in the Communist Manifesto calls for the shattering of religion in the name of an awakening of the authentic consciousness of the working class, Schmitt believes that the reawakening of revolutionary fascist dictatorship - direct democracy - depends upon shattering the religion of the liberal state, namely, romanticism. The romantic subject flees from the bureaucratic formalism and technologized rationality of the liberal state into the realm of imagination where, Schmitt asserts, he becomes a priest of his own god-like ego. Romanticism offers an illusion of freedom and autonomy to the liberal subject that prevents him from achieving true freedom in the "political life'' of direct democracy. The liberal subject must break through the private illusions of romanticism and participate in the decisive acclamation of the sovereign dictator.
20.

In the next section I will discuss Stanley Cavell's very different understanding of romantic subjectivity, one that sees in it a renunciation of god-like sovereignty in favor of a sharply circumscribed, mundane, but commonly shared, humanity. Cavell's interpretation of the nature of romantic subjectivity will provide the basis for a reading of Frank Capra's film, It Happened One Night.

Kant, Capra, Romanticism

21.

Romanticism is, for Cavell, precisely a rejection of the quest for god-like autonomy, what he identifies as the temptation lying behind skepticism. Such a rejection has profound implications for grounding democratic sociality in what Cavell refers to as the "acknowledgment'' of our mutual finitude.10 Skepticism, Cavell claims, expresses the individual's sense that his connection to the world is questionable, based on possibly illusory evidence. The everyday world has lost its moorings for the skeptic. For Cavell, this loss of moorings is endemic to the enterprise of philosophy itself. The skeptic seeks the certitude of knowledge that only a god could possess. The demand that skepticism makes upon the world, that it provide epistemological and metaphysical security, can never be met. The skeptic dwells in a condition of selfimposed exile from the world and its insecurities. The way beyond the skeptic's quest for certitude is shown by romantic writers like Emerson and Thoreau. In his analysis of the Emersonian response to skepticism, Cavell asserts that Emerson writes himself into existence, authors himself, in his address to readers, calling them to risk a venture beyond their self-limiting alienation. This self-authoring, unlike the romantic selfabsorbed play with infinite possibilities that Schmitt describes, risks itself in "the promise that the private and the social will be achieved together'' (1988: 114). The claims that Emerson makes for his writing, Cavell states, are "first, that it proves his human existence (i.e., establishes his right to say 'I,' to tell himself to and from others); second, that what he has proven on his behalf, others are capable of proving on theirs'' (p. 114). This kind of romanticism seeks to build a community precisely through its transfiguring vision of the insecurities of the world as occasions for reconsecrating oneself to the companionate bonds that can link us together. As Raymond Carney puts it in his study of Capra's films as embodiments of Emersonian romanticism, "to reach beyond the self to recognize and honor one's enriching, troubling, stimulating connections with others'' is the central thrust of American romanticism.
22.

Cavell situates the philosophical roots of Emersonian romanticism in Kant. While Cavell frequently names the Critique of Pure Reason as the text to which the romantics are responding, it is more useful to begin with Kant's Critique of Judgment.11This text delineates the realm of the aesthetic as based upon a presentation (Darstellung) that is not "mediated by concepts.'' In summarizing his argument about the philosophical basis of the comedies of remarriage, Cavell makes significant use of Kant's definition of the aesthetic judgment: "uniquely in this genre of comedy, so far as I know, the happiness of marriage is dissociated from any a priori concept of what constitutes domesticity (you might also call marriage in these films the taking of mutual pleasure without a concept-whether two people are married does not necessarily depend on what age they are, or what gender, or whether legally)'' (1988: 178).
23.

Kant argues that the aesthetic judgment takes place when the subject asserts the predicate "beautiful'' of an object not because it is an instance of any objective concept of beauty, but because it can elicit within the subject what Kant calls "the free play of imagination and understanding '' (1952: 58). For Kant, the aesthetic judgment of beauty (the judgment of sublimity is different) results from our sense of an object's - a flower's, say - purely formal harmonies of shape and color, without any reference to the utility of these harmonies. The formal harmony of a tulip, for example, seems to be an "end in itself'' and not purposeful: "A flower ...such as a tulip is regarded as beautiful, because we meet with a certain finality in its perception which, in our estimate of it, is not referred to any end whatsoever'' (80, n. 1). What Kant calls "free beauty'' is something that exceeds instrumental or practical considerations related to the object's use (72-4). Free beauty arouses within us a sympathetic chord, the purposeless delight in the free employment of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding to register such formal harmonies. In contrast, when the subject apprehends an object and identifies it as an instance of a general concept - identifying a flower as a tulip, for instance - there is no free play between the faculty of imagination (which is responsible for the presentation of the sensory manifold as a single object

within space and time) and the faculty of understanding (which is responsible for the conceptual unity that allows us to call the object "tulip''). The subsumption of an object under a concept is entirely governed by objective rules, Kant insists, but the aesthetic judgment lacks such rules: "There can be no objective rule of taste by which what is beautiful can be defined by means of concepts'' (75).
24.

Kant goes further and declares that we do not only depend upon the natural world to give us a sense of the beautiful. Kant says that we humans can also create beauty, and this is the result of genius. Genius arises from the freedom of the imagination to produce representations that do not merely conform to a rule (how to draw a flower, for example) or fall under a general concept. Genius employs its imaginative freedom in order to render an unrepresentable idea, an idea that no single representation could contain. Kant offers the example of a poet who seeks to present heaven and hell in his work (one thinks of Dante, though he is not mentioned by Kant). Neither the blessedness of heaven nor the suffering of hell is part of human experience, but they can be imaginatively represented. Kant claims that the aesthetic imagination can represent that which transcends human experience and he adds that this is true even for things within human experience such as love, hate, envy and so forth that are incapable of being experienced in their completeness - when it creates forms that "animate the mind by opening out a prospect for it of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken'' (177-78). In other words, the aesthetic imagination that is responsible for works of genius awakens a sense of an unending series of new representations of the work's aesthetic idea. The work of genius becomes an example for further aesthetic production. Being exemplary, the work of genius can never be reduced to a technique with fixed rules. Each new product of genius redefines the genre and sets up new rules: "On this showing, the product of genius (in respect of so much in this product as is attributable to genius, and to possible learning or academic instruction) is an example, not for imitation ...but to be followed by another genius-one whom it arouses to a sense of his own originality in putting

freedom from the constraint of rules so into force in his art that for art itself a new rule is won ...'' (181).
25.

What most intellectual historians, including Schmitt, have identified as central for the thinkers and artists after Kant who may be labelled "romantic'' is the possibility of locating human freedom within the imagination as the source of aesthetic creativity.12 The sharp line they will draw between mere rule-following "technique'' and rule-breaking creative genius clearly derives from Kant. Kant's insistence that the work of genius represents the unrepresentable idea by arousing a sense that the work is just one in an unending series of future representations is one of the major sources for the romantic emphasis upon the incompletion or fragmentary nature of the artwork. And, of course, the sharp distinction between beauty and utility that Kant draws leads directly to the romantic emphasis upon artistic freedom from bourgeois economic rationality.
26.

For Cavell, the most important inheritance of Emersonian romanticism from Kant is not found in any of these themes, however. Rather, Cavell points to the problem at the heart of Kant's Critique of Judgment about how the aesthetic judgment can be more than merely a subjective matter of taste, how it is able to be the shared response to the world.13 The claim that our aesthetic judgments are not merely subjective but can be "universally communicated'' allows Kant to respond to the challenge of scepticism. The sceptical position denies not only that we can know that our perceptions match reality, but, more fundamentally, that humans can ever communicate their perceptions to another since there may be an unbridgeable chasm between each person's way of responding to reality. The universalizability of aesthetic judgment would answer this challenge by demonstrating that our cognitive faculties, our imagination and our understanding, are tuned to the same harmony from one person to another. Kant says that without the communicablity of our aesthetic judgments "cognitions and judgments ...would be a conglomerate constituting a mere subjective play of the powers of representation, just as scepticism

would have it'' (83). The defeat of scepticism lies within the terrain of imagination, not within the terrain of concepts. Concepts may be commonly shared by virtue of conventions about how to use words; but imagination cannot be shared unless humans possess some deeply constitutive commonality. Kant calls this "common sense'' and defines it as "the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of scepticism'' (84). In other words, if we cannot share our sense of the beautiful which arises from the "fit'' between our imagination and our understanding, we cannot share anything.
27.

Kant says that we cannot help but feel that our sense of what is beautiful is commonly shared: "we tolerate no one else being of a different opinion'' (84). As Kant says, my judgment is one that I take to be exemplary, just as genius creates the exemplary work of art. Common sense is also, says Kant, a "public'' sense, "a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of every one else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgments'' (151). By its focus upon the sheer pleasure of the object's formal harmony and not upon any "interest'' the object may have for us, the aesthetic judgment is able to be free from prejudice and thus provides a model for how to think with others in mind. Kant writes: "the aesthetic, rather than the intellectual judgment can bear the name of a public sense .... We might even define taste as the faculty of estimating what makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept'' (153). The challenge of scepticism can be met by showing that we share a common "tuning'' between our imaginations and our understanding that permits us to respond to beauty.
28.

The foundation of our ability to judge without prejudice

or ulterior interests rests upon our ability to sense beauty. But, Kant adds, if we never make our sense of the beautiful public we cannot truly be said to feel beauty. Our feeling, once it rises to the level of judgment, asserts itself as universally communicable, and the subject therefore has an interest in realizing this potential for communication. This interest, Kant says, is the result of the empirical fact that humans live together: "The empirical interest in the beautiful exists only in society'' (155). "The beginning of civilization,'' Kant avers, lies in the dissatisfaction with a merely private enjoyment of beauty, when an individual "is not quite satisfied with an Object unless his feeling of delight in it can be shared in communion with others'' (155). This, according to Cavell, is key to understanding the inheritance of Emersonian romanticism from Kant. Cavell, as we saw above, reads Emerson as laying emphasis upon the need to author, to publish, oneself in the address to the other, something Cavell also calls "subjecting yourself ...to intelligibility'' (1988: 115). I take this to be a paraphrase of Kant's idea that the exemplary work of genius and the exemplary aesthetic judgment bears within itself the necessity for being universally communicable. Emerson's romantic inheritance of Kant is to take the concept of exemplary genius and make it, like Kant's aesthetic judgment, the possession of every human. Quoting the fourth sentence of Emerson's "Self-Reliance,'' "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,-that is genius,'' Cavell comments: (One path from these words leads to the transformation of the romantic idea of genius: Genius is not a special endowment like virtuosity, but a stance toward whatever endowment you discover is yours, as if life itself were a gift, and remarkable.) Genius is accordingly the name of the promise that the private and the social will be achieved together, hence of our perception that our lives now take place in the absence of either. (1988: 114). The promise that private and social, or public, cannot be achieved except together goes directly back to Kant's understanding that no aesthetic judgment can be true if it does not claim to be true for everyone, the mark of Emersonian genius. One can hear in this formulation, I know, the voice of dictatorship. It is important to keep

in mind that Kant's, and Emerson's, idea of genius requires that genius open, not close off, the possibility of a response from another. The claim to speak what is true for all others only makes sense if others can find it the occasion to articulate their truth. This is what Cavell means when he describes marriage, following Milton, as a "meet and happy conversation.'' Such a conversation, Cavell insists, is not mere talk, but "articulate responsiveness, expressiveness,'' a "mode of association, a form of life'' (1981: 87) Whether America "is earning the conversation it demands'' in the promise of "its new birth of freedom'' is the question to which the comedies of remarriage are addressed (1981: 15253). We might add, the failure to earn this conversation, call this America's divorce from its constitution, would be marriage of another kind, the unhappy marriage that Milton compares to tyranny (quoted in Cavell 1981: 150).
29.

Cavell's identification of marriage "without the mediation of a concept'' as an emblem for a public space of conversation derives from the strain of American romanticism developed most prominently in Emerson. The difference between Cavell's positive take on American romanticism and Schmitt's negative appraisal of the European romantic tradition can be measured precisely by their respective evaluation of the idea that the political is marked as the site of conversation. Schmitt claims the political indecisiveness of the romantic is revealed in his devotion to "endless conversation'' (1986: 27, 139-40). Where conversation is, for Cavell, the very heart of democratic sociability, for Schmitt it is only an excuse for evading the political. It is hardly accidental that when Schmitt describes the moment when the people emerge from their political alienation, it is the moment of acclamation when they speak with one voice. In the next section of the paper I will, with the help of Arendt, explain the differences between these two "political romanticisms'' as the result of the different legacies of the American and French Revolutions.
30.

Let me try to define more precisely what are the

political implications of the Kantian notion that our capacity to respond to beauty forms the basis of our sociability. It may at first sight seem as if this notion is radically apolitical in that its stress falls on the nonutilitarian, one might say purely imaginative, realm of beauty. Yet this is one of Cavell's points: sociability cannot be reduced to a contract entered into for the sake of economic gain or even sheer survival. Kant puts it this way: "a regard to universal communicability is a thing which every one expects and requires from every one else, just as if it were part of an original compact dictated by humanity itself'' (1952: 155). Communicability, or "conversation'' as Cavell puts it, is its own end. Politics is about maintaining the conditions for this communicability. Another point we can make is that we enter into this shared life of communication in a realm not "mediated by concepts.'' That is, there can be no rules constraining what counts as "civilized'' or "civil'' or "public.'' The implication for politics is that no law can constrain in advance and dictate the shape of our sociability. We must be free and equal partners in the creation of the consensus that Kant identifies as the result of our common sense. We build this consensus with only our confidence that what we feel is, in fact, communicable and will meet with a response from the other. Apart from this initiative, we cannot claim to have a human existence. Cavell, in a passage quoted above, says of Emerson's writing that "it proves his human existence (i.e., proves his right to say 'I,' to tell himself from others and to others)'' (1988: 114). I consent, therefore I exist.
31.

The political romanticism that Cavell claims as an inheritance from Kant is not by any means a pacifist or sentimental utopianism. In fact, it shares with Schmitt the notion that the political is the site of the friend and enemy configuration. However, it understands friend and enemy in a very different way than Schmitt does.
32.

Cavell explains how, precisely, the romantic authors he most frequently appeals to, Emerson and Thoreau, make themselves the enemy of a democratic nation too much in conformity with itself, too secure in its

consensus. For Emerson and Thoreau, writing is a strategy of political resistance, an act chosen in place of what Thoreau calls "running amok'' against society: "I preferred that society should run 'amok' against me, it being the desperate party'' (Walden, VIII,3; quoted in Cavell 1992: 86). This is what Thoreau calls his "neighborliness,'' a form of political friendship we might say. Thoreau draws near, nigh, to his friends - we could also say that he draws them near to him - by addressing them with words that force them to see their Union as built upon arbitrary and unjust exclusions: of the Indian, of the slave. To be Thoreau's neighbor is to withdraw from the Union, to become isolated in order to renew the Union in accordance with the promise of its Constitution. Cavell writes about Walden that it is "a tract of political education, education for membership in the polis. It locates authority in the citizens - those with whom one is in membership - as 'neighbors.' What it shows is that education for citizenship is education for isolation'' (1992: 85). Thoreau no less than Schmitt calls for the people to recognize their friend and their enemy, only their friend is their present enemy (i.e., Thoreau himself) and their future enemy must be, precisely, themselves (in their present constitution). In describing Emerson's writing in his essay "Aversive Thinking,'' Cavell compares Emerson's stance to that of the reader's "other self,'' Aristotle's definition of the friend. "To see Emerson's philosophical authorship as taking up the ancient position of the friend,'' Cavell says, "we have to include the inflection (more brazen in Nietzsche but no less explicit in Emerson) of my friend as my enemy (contesting my present attainments)'' (1990: 59). This kind of authorship seeks to become the enemy of "the state of conformity and despair in what has become of the democratic aspiration'' (59). Emerson's "aversive'' thinking, Cavell claims, "provides for the democratic aspiration the only internal measure of its truth to itself - a voice only this aspiration could have inspired, and, if it is lucky, must inspire'' (59). Emerson thus becomes, in his own person, the enemy and the friend (indeed, lover) of the democratic society: Since his aversion is a continual turning away from society, it is thereby a continual turning toward it. Toward and away; it is a moment of seduction-such as philosophy will contain. It is in response to this seduction from our seductions (conformities,

heteronomies) that the friend (discovered or constructed) represents the standpoint of perfection. (1990: 59) I take this characterization of Emersonian friend/enemy authorship as the "internal measure'' of democracy's truth to itself to be a "politics of friendship.'' I take this phrase from the title of Derrida's book on, primarily, Schmitt's Concept of the Political. Derrida too goes back to Aristotle and Nietzsche in order to recuperate a concept of the enemy who is also a friend, and of a kind of authorship, or address, that, if a community is "lucky,'' calls to it, seduces it, from out of its future, its always unattained moral perfection as Cavell says. Derrida calls this lucky aversiveness "the logic of the perhaps'' (1997: 70). A fuller explication of the commonalites of Emersonian romanticism and Derrida's politics of friendship would require a separate essay. I simply want, now, to point to their deep affinities, and take this as evidence for my claim that Emersonian/Cavellian political romanticism offers a significant alternative to the Schmittian idea that the political is defined by the friend and enemy configuration.14
33.

I have tried thus far to explicate more clearly Cavell's understanding of how Kant informs the romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau. I hope to have shown how the political implications of this romantic inheritance directly contest Schmitt's critique of political romanticism as the expression of liberal, bourgeois subjectivity's incapacity to make a decision. Schmitt's turn to fascism in order to discover authentic political decision in the acclamation of the people of a dictator shares with Emersonian romanticism an aversion to the false sense of community that is really just an agreement to maintain the status quo in the liberal bourgeois state. But Emersonian romanticism calls for a new form of neighborliness that begins with self-enmity aroused by a voice that is both friend (to one's future self) and enemy (of one's present self). The call of this voice, if it is lucky, arouses a public "conversation'' and conversion. Schmitt has no faith in this voice - he does not hear it in the European romantic tradition - and as a result he voices the call for a dictator who can decide a different kind of friend-enemy configuration. Otherwise

put, Schmitt's politics offers no space for neighborliness.

34.

The (re)turn to conversation in place of mere conformity is staged in the comedies of remarriage. It is to Cavell's analysis of these comedies and, in particular, Capra's It Happened One Night, that I will now turn.
35.

It is one of the major burdens of Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness to identify the comedies of remarriage as precisely that popular art form in which the American political genius emerges. These film romances, Cavell insists, are "of national importance'' (1984: 172). The comedy of remarriage is, in Cavell's analysis, a political allegory. It stages the founding of the social contract marriage - after the "fall of man,'' that is, after the loss of the "natural'' harmony of man and woman in Eden. It is not accident that two of the films in the genre make overt reference in their titles to the story of Eden: Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve'' (1941) and George Cukor's "Adam's Rib'' (1949).
36.

The political allegory of the comedies of remarriage describes the recovery of a state of grace after the exile of the primal couple from paradise. The sociality that follows the expulsion from paradise and precedes the recovery of grace is not, in Cavell's rephrasing of this history, one of Hobbesian war, nor is it Rousseauan innocence. It is the sociality of "stupidity in the face of the riddle of intimacy,'' the inability to live together with one's closest "helpmeet'' without reducing that togetherness to a mere formality, or to an economic instrumentality. The comedy of remarriage charts the path to grace that is not achieved through an act of entering into a contract, but through a surrender to "transience'' and "homelessness'' as the shared experience of human togetherness, and as the site of forgiveness and reconciliation. In reconciling the woman to the husband from whom she has been alienated, the comedy of remarriage challenges us to think about the very nature of human togetherness.

They ask us to think about the basis of the social contract and about what constitutes a union, what makes these two into one, what binds, you may say sanctifies in marriage. When is marriage an honorable estate? In raising this question these films imply not only that the church has lost its power over this authentication but that society as a whole cannot be granted it. In thus questioning the legitimacy of marriage, the question of the legitimacy of society is simultaneously raised, even allegorized. (Cavell 1981: 53) The comedies of remarriage do not call for a repudiation of contracts and the formalities of authentication, but for a sanctification of these contracts through a rededication to them beyond any legitimating power, beyond any guarantees, whether legal, epistemological, or metaphysical.
37.

Let us, then, consider the Frank Capra film It Happened One Night (1934). In Cavell's analysis, this film explores the epistemological limits to any social contract, that is, the limits to our knowledge of ourselves and others that might serve somehow to anchor or guarantee the viability of our social fabrications. Operating within the American romantic tradition, the comedies of remarriage, and It Happened One Night most particularly, are struggling to think through themes of human togetherness within a postKantian matrix. The noumenal realm of the moral law serves to explicate what it takes to become a member of a human community, a will to act together: This realm is also a world "beyond'' the world we inhabit, a noumenal realm, open to reason, standing to reason; but I am not fated to be debarred from it as I am from the realm of things-in-themselves, by my sensuous nature; for the perfected human community can be achieved, it may at last be experienced, it is in principle presentable. Yet, there is between me and this realm of reason also something that may present itself as a barrier-the fact that I cannot reach this realm alone. (1981: 79) The path beyond solipsism into sociality is the path taken by an act of the will to join the community of self-legislators, but this community does not and can not present itself beforehand as an already constituted

body with, as we might say, "naturalization papers'' available to those who approach its borders. This community is created through the will to join it, ever again renewed. We cannot picture this community as a constituted unity with defined borders; it is presented to us as the aspiration of the "better angels of our nature.'' If we do not achieve it, it is due, as Cavell says in explicating the Kantian doctrine of the evil will, "to our willing against it, to the presence of moral evil. This takes moral evil as the will to exempt oneself, to isolate oneself, from the human community. It is a choice of inhumanity, of monstrousness'' (1981: 80). In the realm of the human, knowledge is indeed limited, but the will is free to dwell within the isolated space of that limitation or to dwell together with others in the absence of epistemological certainty about the constitution of the community into which one is about to enter. The demand for this kind of assurance and certainty forecloses the grace of betrothal. This is one of the leitmotifs of Cavell's readings of the American philosophical tradition.
38.

Cavell pays special attention to the motif of the "barrier-screen'' in It Happened One Night. The barrierscreen is a blanket, thrown over a clothesline, that the protagonists use as a makeshift divider in the auto camp cottages they share. The barrier-screen, Cavell claims, stages the problems confronting us in our choice to dwell together despite the absence of epistemological or metaphysical guarantees. It is the physical representation of the barrier that separates us as noumenal selves from one another. It can only fall, as Cavell says, when both parties cease to act alone. Since the barrier-screen functions so importantly, the scene in which it is erected is an apt point at which to begin the analysis of the film.
39.

Peter Warne (Clark Gable), a newspaper man, has found a runaway, the heiress of a great fortune, Ellie Andrews (Cluadette Colbert). Ellie had just eloped but, "kidnaped'' by her father, she had not been able to consummate her marriage. Her father wants to dissolve the marriage, suspecting the husband, rightly it turns

out, of being a fortune-seeker. Ellie manages to escape from her father's yacht, anchored off the Florida coast, and, nearly broke, she sets off to be reunited with her husband in New York. Peter, recognizing her on a night bus they happen to share, plans to milk the situation for a great story as he pretends to assist Ellie in making her escape. At the end of their three-day trip to New York, they discover that they have fallen in love with one another. On their first night they find themselves sharing a cabin at an auto park and Peter constructs the makeshift barrier to separate their beds and offer the woman the privacy to undress and him a respite from "prying eyes.'' The blanket is nothing more than a symbolic barrier, but Gable identifies as the "walls of Jericho.'' He has no trumpet, he tells Ellie, so she can consider herself safe.
40.

As Cavell points out, any viewer familiar with the conventions of the Hollywood romance of the period will know that, once having identified the blanket with the walls of Jericho, the final scene of the movie will show us the collapse of the "walls.'' But however it will finally dismantle the symbolic structure, the film wants us to imagine that the barrier is no less unbreachable than were the walls of Jericho and that what it will take to have them tumble is nothing less than a miracle, a breach of the natural order. It will require, in other words, something like what Kant requires of humans if they are to become more than sensuous beings, namely, a willingness to join a human community without the assurance of knowing in advance who dwells there, or even if there is a "there'' there.
41.

At the end of the film, Peter and Ellie, now married, return to the auto park. They have bought a toy trumpet and, from outside the cabin, we hear its playful notes, and then we see the barrier-screen pulled down. We do not see the hands that pull it down, suggesting that it was a mutual act, an overcoming of the enmity separating the Israelites and the Canaanites inside Jericho. (Peter had, in fact, identified Ellie with the Israelites when he had asked her, after he first set up the barrier, to cross to the other side and "join the

Israelites.'')
42.

Before Peter and Ellie are able to tear down the walls of Jericho, they must overcome the obstacle of the marriage of Ellie to King Westley, the man with whom she had eloped. Since this is a comedy of remarriage, the couple must marry only having first been lost to one another. Understanding how it happens that Gable "remarries'' Colbert will allow me to bring out another important theme of this movie, and several other Capra movies, namely, the imagined world of the stars. I will also say something of the historical situation in which the film was made, namely, the rise of German fascism.
43.

On the evening of the final day of their trip to New York, Ellie makes a declaration of love and a proposal of marriage to Peter. She turns to him because he has just shared with her, as he lay in bed on his side of the barrier, his dream of love. Peter says that he dreams of finding "somebody that's real, somebody that's alive'' to share a life with him on a Pacific island he once saw where "the stars are so close over your head that you feel you could reach right up and stir them around.'' On this island, he says, "you feel as if you're part of something big and marvelous.'' Cavell doesn't make this point, but it seems that Peter's words could nicely describe the experience of watching these stars above our heads in the movie theater. Ellie crosses over to his side of the barrier and tells him that she is the girl of his dreams. Peter remains silent and somewhat later he leaves Ellie as she sleeps on her side of the "walls of Jericho.'' Peter has gone off to sell his story - now the big news is that Ellie Andrews will not marry King Westley, but him - to his newspaper editor. He wants to get an advance on "the biggest scoop of the year'' so that, as he tells his editor, "the walls of Jericho can fall.''
44.

Peter's reverie about the Pacific Island where the stars "are so close you feel you could reach right up and stir them around'' is an emblematic moment for Capra's film. Ellie's gauze-lit face beside Peter's side of the

blanket appears in the following shot. She has crossed the barrier, and she proceeds to announce her willingness to join Peter in the world of his dream. Her face seems both to look upon Peter and also reflect her own reverie of the star-filled sky. Her enraptured face on the screen draws the viewer into the reverie and represents, in its haloed light, the object of the viewer's reverie: the face of the star. Capra in his autobiography twice identifies our higher selves - we might say our noumenal selves - with the stars, once calling humans a "miracle born of time and star dust,'' and in another place "a divine mingle-mangle of guts and star dust'' (1971: 177,495). The moment of private reverie in Capra's films captures the astral self's vision of its authentic home. Such a private reverie occurs in Meet John Doe when John Doe (Gary Cooper) reads his radio speech about a world lived as if every day were Christmas. As he speaks, we see the face of the hardbitten editor of the newspaper. His gaze is that of such a visionary reverie of the world evoked by John Doe's words. It is a world where we are all stars, or, rather, angels. The opening of Capra's most famous movie, It's a Wonderful Life, is of the starry night sky. As we hear the voice-over dialogue between God and the angels, stars alternately pulse in brightness, in harmony with the dialogue. Capra seems to be familiar with the tradition, given its classic expression in Cicero's Dream of Scipio, that our immortal selves are astral in nature. But our angelic, divine selves can only come into being when our private reverie is made public, when it has been become political (this, too, is a Ciceronian claim). For Capra, this means that our reverie must awaken another self and call the other to join us in the realm of the stars. In It's a Wonderful Life, the angel's task, required in order to get his wings, is precisely to allow George (Jimmy Stewart) to acknowledge what it means to be a star, and at the conclusion of the film we see George's face as it is transfigured by a reverie evoked by his daughter's words about the ringing of a bell, that it signals that an angel has just acquired his wings. A world that offers no occasion for realizing in public one's private reverie - a world without stars - is what George is permitted to see when his tutelary angel, Clarence, removes him from the world. This removal is, first of all, meant to represent the world as it has evolved in the absence of George's existence. But it can

also be understood to be the world as seen through anyone's eyes when the "star dust'' has been taken from them. Such a world lacks the possibility of any transfiguring vision. Capra would say, it lacks the possibility of Christmas. What each of us contributes to the world, then, is this possibility. In this film, the star is Jimmy Stewart, but only because he allows us to see our own stardom.
45.

Since Capra connects the thematic of stardom with Christmas, we can be sure that he is invoking the Matthean tradition of the star that guided the magi to the infant Jesus. The star points to the Messiah, and signals messianic natality. Capra's Jesus is very much an Emersonian one, the figuration of our own authentic selves, our own stardom. Capra seeks to awaken the viewer's stardom by haloing the face of his stars on screen in moments of private reverie. He both exalts the face and exalts the viewer. But this is no mere narcissistic identification of viewer and star; rather, it is an invitation to create - or direct, we might say - a shared world. The face of the star is the emblem of Kantian - and Emersonian - genius as both exemplary and common, the revelation of stardom in the "mug.''15 Capra's message, made explicit in Meet John Doe, is that this face is all that stands between us and the mass media seductions of a fascist spectacle that seeks to reduce our common stardom to the "guts'' of a mob. For Capra, the only pure political deed is the communication of one's inner vision of the starry realm, subjecting oneself to intelligibility as Cavell puts it. There is a risk is that the deed will be used to serve partisan political ends, or that it will be silenced by the cries of a mob (as it is in Meet John Doe), or that it will be considered insanity (as it is in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town). Ultimately, the communication must be translated into the mundane rhythms of day-to-day life, the life of marriage to begin with. This is the domestication of stardom, to be sure, but it is also the acknowledgment that we have "guts,'' or "bellies,'' that also have claims upon us. (This is what Odysseus reminds Achilles of in the Iliad (Bk. 19). The flame that burns like a star over Achilles is a signal of his connection to divinity, but it also signals his loss of humanity. Only Odysseus with his hungering belly can

return home in the West's most famous "comedy of remarriage.'')

46.

Let us pick up the story of Peter and Ellie. Before Peter returns from his editor with the advance on the story giving him the money he needs to accept Ellie's proposal of marriage to him, and make his own to her, Ellie has awakened to find him gone. She thinks he has left her and she calls her father to come and get her. She returns with him to hold a public ceremony of marriage to King Westley. Her father unwillingly acknowledges that Ellie has achieved her independence. Ellie, for her part, continues to long for Peter, but she sees no hope to escape her status as the "brat'' that Peter has teasingly named her. Peter's apparent rejection of her drives her to abandon herself to an unhappy marriage with King Westley. On the day of her public ceremony, she seeks to drown her self-disgust with alcohol. The press and newsreel crews surround her house. The public wants this marriage, and Ellie is willing to give them what it wants. We know, as does Ellie, that it is an entirely false, one might even say degraded, image of happiness that is seducing the public. The great moment that all are awaiting is the arrival of King Westley in an "autogyro,'' an airplane with helicopter-like wings attached above the fuselage. Together with her desperate appeal to King Westley to "get on a merry-go-round and never get off,'' the reference to the auto-gyro suggests that the adventure on the road with Peter has ended with merely narcissistic play, going nowhere.
47.

As her father walks Ellie to the altar, he tells her that Peter does in fact still want her - he had met with him earlier to settle the account of $36.92 that Peter had spent during his trip with Ellie - and that "it would make an old man happy'' to see her run away and join him. He has even prepared a getaway car. At the last minute, just before she pronounces "I do,'' she runs for the car and drives away.
48.

I have rehearsed the story of Ellie's aborted public

marriage to King Westley because I believe it can be seen as a political allegory of the compromise with fascism that people of Ellie's class might be tempted to make. This is something that Capra will explicitly depict in his later film, Meet John Doe (1941). Since It Happened One Night was made during 1933, Capra was not, of course, shaping his story to reflect Hitler's astute manipulation of both aristocrats and industrialists to gain the position of Chancellor on January 30, 1933. What I am claiming is that Capra is portraying the moral decline of Ellie as a representative of her class. This decline was something Capra understood could be manipulated for political ends. The portrayal of King Westley is precisely of a decadent aristocrat who is interested only in parasiting upon the wealth of the industrialist father. The swashbuckling, romantic aviator had become in the 1930s, after the successful transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh in 1929, a popular heroic icon. We see this figure most famously in the figure played by Roland Toutain in Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939). Capra shows King Westley to be an effete, morally bankrupt blueblood. Capra is pointing to the possibility that a wealthy industrialist and a corrupted aristocrat posing as a national hero could destroy the dream of an authentic marriage, based on mutual acknowledgment and consensus, between the common man (Gable) and the aristocratic elite (Colbert). A different kind of corrupt romance is depicted in Meet John Doe between the economically struggling newspaperwoman (Barbara Stanwyck) and a swashbuckling paramilitary leader, the nephew of a newspaper magnate with ambitions to stage a fascist coup. In both films, the averted marriage of the female protagonist is an allegory of the public's dangerous romance with heroes constructed by and for the mass media.
49.

It is a testament to Capra's own sense for the potential of film as a propaganda medium that the scene of King Westley arriving by plane at his wedding, a moment eagerly awaited by camera crews looking for newsreel footage, foreshadows the opening of the most significant fascist propaganda film ever made, released just a little over a year after It Happened One Night (theatrically released on January 1, 1934 at Radio City),

namely, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens (1935, released on March 28 at UFA-Palast am Zoo in Berlin).16 Capra's film places before its viewers two seductions, one toward a dream of "something big and marvelous,'' another of a false romance staged before eager newsreel cameras. If I am right that Peter's dream is of a world the viewers themselves hunger for when they come to see stars above their heads, then the film positions the viewers in two possible roles: the public consuming the falsehood of the newsreels or the public dreaming of "something big and marvelous.'' It asks the viewers to decide between the world's news and, one might say, a new world. In one position, they will come as spectators only to applaud, or acclaim, the stars. In the other, they will join them.

Arendt, On Revolution, and American Romanticism

50.

Hannah Arendt's reflections on the American Revolution can help us understand why it is that Cavellian romanticism seems to have its home - and its experience of homelessness - in America.17 I do not mean to claim that the kind of political romanticism that Cavell identifies in Emerson and Thoreau is unique to the American continent. The fact is, Cavell shows in a number of his essays that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein all address their readers with that stance of "aversion,'' or of "friendship-inenmity,'' so characteristic of Emerson's and Thoreau's authorial strategy. But it cannot be denied that Cavell's reading of the comedies of remarriage depends upon something unique in the American setting. Capra, I think, is only possible as an American director, that is, as a director working within the American tradition. Capra himself says of his films that they were all his way of saying, "Thanks, America.'' At issue here is whether political romanticism must only be the refuge of politically indecisive, alienated subjectivities within the liberal democratic state, as Schmitt claims, or whether it can have, as Cavell argues, a decisive political role within the democratic state. I will argue that the issue dividing Schmitt and Cavell, or Schmitt and Capra, reflects the difference between political

romanticism understood as a response to the French Revolution and political romanticism understood as a response to the American Revolution.
51.

Given the close connection Schmitt discovers between the romantic subjectivity and the French Revolution's failure, perhaps we can explain the political significance of Emersonian romanticism as Cavell expresses it to lie in how it rather responds to the success of the American Revolution. By "success'' I mean, specifically, the successful separation from British domination announced in the Declaration of Independence and the successful realization of the institutions proposed in the American Constitution. But although we can see pretty clearly how the American revolution succeeded where the French failed, it is important to examine how, more precisely, the American revolution succeeded in solving the dilemma posed by the severance of pouvoir constitutant and pouvoir constitutue that Schmitt, following Sieyes, identifies as the central problem of the French Revolution. Schmitt, as we saw above, believes that the "residuum'' of sovereign dictatorship within a constitution alone can breach the gap. The American solution, and here I rely upon the analysis of Hannah Arendt in On Revolution, is to dismantle the twin pillars of sovereignty itself, power and authority, and refashion the nature of the political.18 This is what will open the space for and, in fact, demand the voice of political romanticism in America.
52.

Hannah Arendt, like Schmitt, identifies the critical issue for the French Revolution to be how to translate the revolutionary pouvoir constitutant into the legal structures of the pouvoir constitutue. Where the French Revolution failed to do this, the American Revolution succeeded. The great and fateful misfortune of the French Revolution was that none of the constituent assemblies could command enough authority to lay down the law of the land; the reproach rightly levelled against them was always the same: they lacked the power to constitute by definition; they themselves were

unconstitutional. Theoretically, the fateful blunder of the men of the French Revolution consisted in their almost automatic, uncritical belief that power and law spring from the selfsame source. Conversely, the great good fortune of the American Revolution was that the people of the colonies, prior to their conflict with England, were organized in self-governing bodies, that the revolution - to speak the language of the eighteenth century - did not throw them into a state of nature, that there never was any serious questioning of the pouvoir constituant of those who framed the state constitutions and, eventually, the Constitution of the United States. (1990: 165) The power to constitute the laws of the republic was not severed from the constituted institutions which that power was supposed to create. Power, Arendt suggests, is always constituted within the realm of the political and is never found in a prepolitical "state of nature.'' Power emerges simultaneously with the mutual promising that constitutes the realm of the political. Arendt traces the power that was unleashed in the revolution to the Pilgrims of the Mayflower Compact and the "confidence they had in their own power, granted and confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to combine themselves together into a 'civil Body Politick' which, held together solely by the strength of mutual promise 'in the Presence of God and one another', supposedly was powerful enough to 'enact, constitute, and frame' all necessary laws and instruments of government'' (1990: 167). Arendt's emphasis here is upon the "mutual promise'' that, she will argue, brings power into being: "binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in existence'' (175). The private motives of the individuals who come together and form the covenant are not important, only that they understand themselves to be incapable of surviving apart from the mutual pact they enter into. "Homogeneity of past and origin,'' Arendt concludes, "the decisive principle of the nation-state, is not required'' (174). What was discovered, and proved, in America was that "the making and keeping of promises ...in the realm of politics may well be the highest human faculty'' (175). A state of nature does not precede the mutual promising of covenant-making; rather, mutual promising is preceded by an act of

severance from a prior compact. We can say, in other words, that political power is always a kind of remarriage after prior divorce.
53.

The problem of political promises that are "worldbuilding,'' Arendt points out, is that they bind not only those who make them, but also their posterity. By what authority can a promise bind the future? If the authority is thought to rest in some transcendent popular will that underwrites the legal constitution, we have lost the power of promise. The power of the promise resides in the mutual pledging of a plurality of humans, not in any single will, even if it is imagined to somehow be indivisible. It was the idea that power resides in the unanimity of the popular will and that this will authorizes the law that Arendt says was the error that led to the failure of the French Revolution to produce a lasting constitution. And we can also see how the homogeneity of the social will stands opposed to the conversational heterogeneity required for the pursuit of happiness in marriage, or in a democratic sociality that is exemplified as (re)marriage.
54.

What authority, then, stands behind the mutual pledges by which the Founding Fathers bound themselves when they joined together to sign the Declaration of Independence and, later, the Constitution? Arendt points out that there is evidence to think that the authority was what was announced in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, namely, "the laws of nature and nature's God.'' If this was in reality the source of authority invoked by the founders, it would be, for Arendt who believes in neither natural law nor God, an illusory authority. She is willing to admit the possibility that only such an illusion can supply adequate authority to maintain in perpetuity the institutions created through mutual pledging. But Arendt argues that, almost without the notice of the founders, a new kind of authority was discovered. Arendt, like Emerson and Thoreau before her and Cavell after her, believes that the American revolution "made a new beginning in the very midst of the history of Western mankind'' (1990: 194). Cavell finds this

same thought to lie behind Emerson's words in the essay "Experience,'' "I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.'' Cavell makes much of the expression "I have found.'' He connects these words to the idea of political founding, and thus suggests that Emerson's writing, far from being seen as, like other romanticisms, purely concerned with the individual, is truly political: "The endlessly repeated idea that Emerson was only interested in finding the individual should give way to or make way for the idea that this quest was his way of founding a nation, writing its constitution, constituting its citizens'' (1989: 93). For Cavell, Emerson's authorship is the re-enactment of the nation's founding. And this is exactly what Arendt declares to be the nature of America's self-authorship, its authority. The act of foundation, says Arendt, creates the authority upon which to build the Union in perpetuity. And it calls for a renewal of the founding self-authorship in each generation. The literary voices calling for renewal, like those of Emerson and Thoreau, are both authorized by the Constitution and reconstitute its authority.
55.

The authority of the act of founding is, according to Arendt, born with the act itself. It comes from the newness of the act, the fact of a beginning having been made. The act of founding has no transcendent authority; it is its own "absolute.'' In words that might almost be taken as a commentary on Emerson's enigmatic phrase "this new yet unapproachable America,'' Arendt describes how: this 'absolute' lies in the very act of beginning itself. In a way, this has always been known, though it was never fully articulated in conceptual thought for the simple reason that the beginning itself, prior to the era of revolution, has always been shrouded in mystery and remained an object of speculation. The foundation which now, for the first time, had occurred in broad daylight to be witnessed by all who were present had been, for thousands of years, the object of foundation legends in which imagination tried to reach out into a past and to an event which memory could not reach. Whatever we may find out about the factual truth of such legends, their historical significance lies in how

the human mind attempted to solve the problem of the beginning, of an unconnected, new event breaking into the continuous sequence of historical time. Arendt elsewhere uses the term "natality'' to refer to the "absolute'' of the "new event breaking into the continuous sequence of historical time.'' Capra, describing the birth of his second child, says that the "first triumphant cry of the newborn babe'' is "I am! I am! Unique, individual; a miracle born of time and star dust'' (1971: 177). Capra's recurrent use of the theme of Christmas, of messianic natality, as emblematic of the miracle of our divine "stardom'' is paralleled in Arendt's notion that the meaning of messianic natality is "the affirmation of the divinity of birth as such'' (1990: 204). By placing the authority of founding in human natality, Arendt contests the claim that it is rather "dictating violence'' (213) that is the source of revolutionary authority. Whether Arendt has Schmitt, Benjamin (who himself acknowledged his debt to Schmitt), or someone else in mind here, her opposition of natality to violence may be taken as fundamental to the opposition she is constructing between the French and American revolutions. And, I would add, it is fundamental to the opposition between the two varieties of romanticism I have described in this paper. If we return to the quotation of Emerson, "I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West,'' we see the same linkage between messianic birth ("born again'' is a Pauline metaphor for becoming a "new man'' in Christ) and founding that Arendt is arguing for. What is more, Emerson, like Arendt, sees this natality as a radical rupture with the prepolitical "state of nature.'' And we can now understand why America is "unapproachable.'' The new beginning of a founding birth cannot be approached. It recedes into the past and is "shrouded in mystery'' the moment it occurs, if it is a true beginning, that is, one that can bind the future to itself. As Arendt says, "the great good fortune that smiled upon the American republic ...consisted in the extraordinary capacity to look upon yesterday with the eyes of centuries to come'' (1990: 198).
56.

But how can the new beginning remain new? How can it not become disconnected from the present in which,

if it is to retain its authority, it must live? Arendt points to the Supreme Court as the institution responsible for a "kind of continuous constitution-making'' (1990: 200), but she understands that no single institution is sufficient to maintain the newness of the moment of foundation. She is fully aware that the greatest dilemma that America faces is to retain the twin faces of the act of founding, namely, its newness and its age, as if it brought into birth a being already centuries old. "It is as though,'' Arendt writes, "men wished to create a world which could be trusted to last forever, precisely because they knew how novel everything was that their age attempted to do'' (224).
57.

In the end Arendt sees the only hope for maintaining the newness of foundation to be "memory and recollection'' (1990: 280). "And since the storehouse of memory is kept and watched over by poets, whose business it is to find and make the words we live by,'' Arendt, like Cavell, asserts the decisive value of political romanticism, the kind of art that can awaken us to ourselves, make stars of us. Cavell's description of the message of Thoreau's Walden, articulates what is at stake in the memory work of political romanticism: The essential message of the social contract is that political institutions require justification, that they are absolutely without sanctity, that power over us is held on trust from us, that institutions have no authority other than the authority we lend them, that we are their architects, that they are therefore artifacts .... (1992: 82)
58.

The fragility of our foundations demands that we, first, withdraw from the house into which we are born in order to examine what it is we have inherited, and what promises it holds. If our metaphor for this were marriage, we would say that we must begin with divorce. And then we must reenter the house, lending its foundations our trust and confidence. Only in this way will the house stand. The task must be renewed every day. Call its accomplishment the unacclaimed triumph of romanticism. Bruce Rosenstock is an associate professor in the

Program for the Study of Religion and the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Currently a Fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, he is working on a book entitled Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn to Cavell. He can reached at brsnstck@uiuc.edu.

Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). --. 1982. Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). --. 1990. On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books). Benhabib, Seyla. 1994. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications). Canguilhem, George. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books). Capra, Frank. 1971. The Name above the Title (New York: Macmillan). Carney, Raymond. 1986. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cavell, Stanley. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). --. 1984. Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). --. 1988. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). --. 1989. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson and Wittgenstein (Albuquerque,

NM: Living Batch Press). --. 1990. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). --. 1992. The Senses of Walden, Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). --. 1995. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell). Curtis, Kimberley. 1999. Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Cornell: Cornell University Press). Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, George (London: Verso). Ferreira, Bernardo. 2002. "Sujeito e ordem: romanticismo e dicisionismo no pensamento de Carl Schmitt,'' Dados 45(4): 599-648. Kalyvas, Andreas. 2004. "From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism,'' Political Theory 32(3): 320-46. Kant, Immanuel. 1952. The Critique of Judgment, trans. Meredith, James Creed (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Mbembe, Achille. 2003. "Necropolitics,'' Public Culture 15(1): 11-40. McCormick, John P. 1997. Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Schmitt, Carl. 1925. Politische Romantik, Zweite Auflage (Munchen und Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot). --. 1926. Die Geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus, 2 Aufl. (Munchen und Berlin: Cuncker & Humblot). --. 1927. Volksentscheid und Volksbegehren: Ein

Beitrag zur Auslegung der Weimarer Verfassung und zur Lehre von der unmittelbaren Demokratie (Berlin und Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter). --. 1932. Der Begriff des Politschen, mit einer Rede uber das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungnen und Entpolitisierungen neu herausgegeben (Duncker & Humblot). --. 1934. Politische Theologie, Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveranitat, Zweite Ausgabe (Munchen und Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot). --. 1964. Die Diktatur: Von den Anfangen des modernen Souveranitatsgedanken bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf, Driite Auflage (Duncker & Humblot). --. 1976. The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). --. 1986. Political Romanticism, trans. Oakes, Guy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). --. 1988. Positionen und Begriffen: im Kampf mit Weimar - Genf - Versailles 1923-1939, 2nd. ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot). --. 1996. Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulman (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press). Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Wolfe, Alan. 2004. "A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics,'' The Chronicle of Higher Education 50(30): B16. Wolin, Richard. 1992. "Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror,'' Political Theory 20(3): 424-447.

NOTES
1

(1897-1991).My placement of Capra within the canon of American Romanticism is informed primarily by the work of Stanley Cavell, as I will make clear in what follows. I am also indebted to Raymond Carney's study of Capra in American Vision (1986). Carney, like Cavell, places Capra within the tradition of American Romanticism. For Carney, the "central inquiry'' of American romanticism, which he distinguishes from the European romantic tradition, "is the adequacy or inadequacy of social, verbal, and artistic systems to represent the energies of the imagination in publicly visible and enactable forms of expression and behavior'' (p. 55). The emphasis in Carney's description falls on the concern with "publicly visible and enactable forms.''
2

In his autobiography, Capra says that he made Meet John Doe to reveal "the agony of disillusionment, and the wild dark passions of mobs'' that were being manipulated by the "little 'fuhrers' ...springing up in America'' (1971: 297). He claims that all his movies after 1934 were responding to the challenge of an uncanny "little faceless man'' who one day accused him of being "an offense to God'' for not using art to resist Hitler, "that evil man ... desperately trying to poison the world with hate'' (176).
3

It is important to note that Schmitt's historical study of dictatorship was designed to promote his own solution to the theoretical and practical severance of the people's pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitue. Schmitt thought that he had identified a "residuum of a sovereign dictatorship'' (1964: 241) in Article 48, Section 2 of the the Weimar Republic's constitution that provides the president with broad emergency powers. He proposed that this residuum be reactivated in order to stave off Weimar's political disintegration.
4

The structural parallels between sovereign dictatorship and romanticism are detailed in the insightful essay of Bernardo Ferreira, "Sujeito e Ordem'': "...in opposition to the privatization, immobility, passivity, lack of definition, nihilism, and 'eternal dialogue' of romanticism, Schmitt places an image of decision [the

political act of sovereign dictatorship] as the political act par excellence, an act that confronts the necessity of a public intervention within reality, of a substantive direction for concrete experience, of a normative refashioning of social life'' (2002: 633; translation mine). Richard Wolin (1992: 446, n. 28) also points to the structural relationship between the occasionalism of political romanticism and Schmitt's own decisionism.
5

Alan Wolfe (2004) even suggests that Schmitt's ideas have gained such wide currency that they have influenced contemporary American conservative politicians. Although this claim is perhaps exaggerated, I find Wolfe's brief opinion piece to be directly on target when he contrasts Schmitt's view of liberal democracy with the liberal tradition of "Thomas Paine and the American founders.'' A more nuanced exploration of the relationship between modern conservative political thinking and Carl Schmitt can be found in McCormick (1997): 304-5. McCormick's book is the best treatment of Schmitt's major writings from the Weimar period available in English.
6

Translations from The Concept of the Political are mine. I have consulted the English translation of George Schwab (1976), unfortunately marred in places by inaccuracies and omissions.
7

The definition of sovereignty as the power to act outside all normative frameworks during a time of crisis is part of Schmitt's attack on legal positivism. The attack on the positivist definition of health in medical science by Canguilhem precisely parallels Schmitt's definition of sovereignty: "Health,'' Canguilhem writes, "is the possibility of transcending the norm, which defines the momentary normal, the possibility of tolerating infractions of the habitual norm and instituting new norms in new situations'' (1991: 19798). Canguilhem's work originally appeared in France in 1943 and, as Foucault points out, offers an analysis of "the concept of life'' (21). Foucault offers in his notion of "biopolitics'' a conflation of Schmitt's concept of the political and Canguilhem's concept of life that has been widely influential in recent leftist critiques of the modern state. See, for example, Mbembe (2003). Such critiques seem to leave no alternative to an agonal

Schmittian politics of friend and enemy. This paper seeks to sketch such an alternative in the tradition of American romanticism.
8

Schmitt addressed himself to the failure of liberal, parliamentary democracy and the need for a fascist alternative in several of his writings from the 1920's, particularly Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (1926) and Volksentscheid und Volksbegehren (1927).
9

In Dictatorship Schmitt concludes that the president could not simply cancel the constitution itself (1964: 202). He will later alter this opinion with Hitler's ascension to the presidency. But the groundwork is already laid in Dictatorship when Schmitt declares that the president can assume the power of summary execution - something denied him in Article 48 - if his opponent "threatens the unity of the state'' (1964: 203). In other words, the president becomes judge over the life and death of the individuals within the state and therefore assumes the position of sovereign dictator. Commenting on Hitler's Reichstag speech of July 13, 1934 in which Hitler announced his purge of the SA the previous month in what he called the "Night of the Long Knives,'' Schmitt (in an article published in August 1934 entitled "Der Fuhrer schutzt das Recht,'' republished in Schmitt (1988): 199-203) defends Hitler's description of his summary execution of sixtyone men and killing of thirteen others during alleged escape attempts (and allowing three to commit suicide) as displaying the "authentic jurisdiction'' ("echte Gerichtsbarkeit'') of Hitler's judgeship (Richtertum). Hitler's right to put these men to death "was not under the auspices of justice, but was rather itself the highest justice'' (200). Schmitt concludes his defense of the Fuhrer by declaring him to be the ultimate judge of the nation as well as the embodiment of the ultimate source of law itself - "the people's right to life'' ("das Lebensrecht des Volkes,'' '200).
10

To be sure, Cavell nowhere that I am aware of uses the expression "political romanticism.'' However, he insists that he is working within the romantic tradition (especially of Emerson and Thoreau) and that his thinking is about the conditions of democratic sociality.

An extended discussion of the interconnection between American romanticism and American democracy can be found in Cavell (1988): 4-26, and the thematic is central to his earlier book, Senses of Walden.
11

Cavell talks extensively about the Critique of Judgment in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (1990: xxvi-xxxi) where he is interested in "the aesthetic aspect of (moral) judgment'' as offering a way to understand his own and Emerson's "perfectionism'' (xxxi). See also Cavell (1995): 34-5 for a discussion of Emerson's appropriation of Kant's notion of aesthetic judgment.
12

See, for a brief account along these lines, Taylor (1989): 379-80 who points out the importance of Kant's notion of "the aesthetic object as manifesting an order for which no adequate concept could be found.''
13

This is also the central problematic in Arendt's discussion of Kant as a political philosopher. Their common emphasis upon the "conceptless'' basis of sociality in their reception of the Kantian critique of judgment can perhaps explain the many congruities between Arendt's and Cavell's thinking. Cavell never to my knowledge refers to Arendt. Arendt (1982): 65-85 offers an extended discussion of the political dimension of the Critique of Judgment. For a sympathetic treatment of Arendt's Kantian politics, see Curtis (1999). Seyla Benhabib (1994): 185-98 offers a succinct treatment of Arendt's debt to Kant in a book that remains the best treatment of Arendt's thought in English (its second edition was published in 2003).
14

How it is that Derrida formulates what I am arguing is an American romantic political philosophy would also require a separate essay, touching on the significance of the biblical tradition of covenanting behind the American political tradition - Arendt discusses this in On Revolution (1990: 175)- and the appropriation of Kant in Hermann Cohen's interpretation of the biblical foundations of Judaism. Common to both American romanticism and the Derridean politics of friendship is the biblical idea that the nation is a never quite fully achieved promise.

15

Sharing the biblical and Kantian ancestry of this emblem is Rosenzweig's image of the divine face within six-pointed star, the "star of redemption.''
16

Capra, as is well known, directed a series war films, "Why We Fight,'' from 1943 to 1945 that are considered among the most effective propaganda films ever made. Capra himself praised Riefenstahl's film as "the classic, powerhouse propaganda film of our times'' whose opening was "a masterstroke of god-building'' (1971: 328).
17

Andreas Kalyvas (2004) offers a comparison of Schmitt's decisionism and Arendt's political theory. I completely agree with the contrast he draws between the two positions, and I hope that the following section will help to clarify Arendt's deep affinity for the American tradition of political romanticism running from Emerson to Cavell. Kalyvas does not note the important place of promising and covenanting in providing the enduring power behind the authority of natality, the "miracle'' of the new beginning of which the will is capable.
18

Although she never refers to Schmitt in this book, there are numerous places where she seems to be deploying some of Schmitt's arguments in both Dictatorship and Political Theology, for example in her discussion of the emergence of the political notion of sovereignty from the theological one 1990: 159-62). Arendt admits to finding the writings of Schmitt "still arresting'' in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1973: 339). Bruce Rosenstock is an associate professor in the Program for the Study of Religion and the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Currently a Fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, he is working on a book entitled Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn to Cavell. He can reached at brsnstck@uiuc.edu.

<hr size=2 width="100%" align=center>

Copyright 2005, Bruce Rosenstock and The Johns Hopkins University Press