What is Intellectual in Intellectual History? On Discourse and the Body in the Study of Democracy

This paper considers the possibilities of centering the material body as a site of and resource for the history and theory of democracy. It argues that by foregrounding the body as an object of intellectual history, we can methodologically queer interpretative practices of political theory. The paper begins by revisiting Quentin Skinner’s foundational arguments for intellectual history by outlining how intellectual historians took inspiration from the linguistic turn of the mid-20th century in order to respond to dominant Marxian accounts of interpretation. Intellectual historians such as Skinner argued that language is not an ideological effect of the material relations of production but in fact an independent form of social action. They argued that the discursive circulation of ideas has world-constituting effects, and in so doing, established the contextual study of language as central to intellectual history. Having outlined the role of discourse as an object and method of study, the paper shows how this view of language finds affinity with dominant political historiographies of the democratic transformations of the 18th century. Turning to the work of Claude Lefort and Jürgen Habermas, I argue that despite deep disagreements between the traditions of radical and deliberative democracy both authors view democracy’s historical emergence as the result of the destruction of the king’s two bodies and the liberation of symbolic discourse. I suggest that this historiography of democracy has unwittingly organized general methodological approaches in democratic theory and intellectual history around questions of discourse. To provide an alternative method of political theorizing, the paper presents an alternate historiography of democracy by turning to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. I (HS). While the conception of power developed in HS has been widely influential among political theorists, Foucault’s insights are rarely read in the context of his wider discussion on the emergence of sexuality as a category of politics. Accordingly, I contend that HS is rarely read by political theorists as a text of queer political theory. By attending to Foucault’s historical account of sexuality, I argue that HS opens new considerations on the role of bodies in the study of politics. To showcase the methodological possibilities this alternative perspective makes possible, the paper ends by providing a queer-feminist rereading of the bourgeois public sphere. Focusing on freemasonry as the largest fraternal organization in the 18th century, I show how new corporeal practices of homosociality premised on women’s exclusion enabled bourgeois men to establish new democratic relations of equality. By attending to the political significance of the material body for analyzing the bourgeois public sphere, the paper thus provides one instance of how a queer-feminist practice of intellectual history can open new possibilities for research beyond a narrow focus on discourse.