UCLA

This dissertation examines some contested political meanings of movement and motion within modern political thought. I focus in particular on the broad period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries associated with the “democratic revolution,” and I examine several currents of thought in which a particular form, idea, or metaphor of movement becomes an object of political reflection, knowledge, or debate. These include juridical sovereignty claims that aimed to authorize controls on mobility, social-scientific discourses that understood and sought to manage migration as a natural phenomenon, ideas of the mobile crowd within crowd psychology, early satirical discussions of the “mob” just after the term was coined, and uses of the term “movement” to conceptualize social and political changes associated with democracy. Excavating these sometimes forgotten currents of political thought helps to challenge and decenter the dominant spatial imaginary of democratic theory. That spatial imaginary envisions democracy in terms of bounded, isomorphic spaces of people, territory, and sovereignty, in which movement seems thinkable only as an aberration or disruption. By contrast, in the historical counternarratives I explore here, movement is not peripheral to political thought. Instead, reflections on movement are entangled with attempts to theorize the dynamic and temporal dimensions of democratic experience. Amid the social and political transformations of the democratic revolution, thinking about movement becomes a vector for theorizing conditions of uncertainty and indeterminacy, and for reflecting on how to respond. These counternarratives can help to reframe anxieties about movement: anxieties accompany discussions of movement, not because movement inherently threatens or undermines political life, but because preoccupations with movement reflect anxieties inseparable from politics and especially democratic politics.