Jeremy Engels

My research investigates the rhetorical foundations of democratic practices, in all their beauty, in all their ugliness, and ultimately in all their perplexity. My first book, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (Michigan State, 2010), investigates, through detailed historical case studies, how talk of "the enemy" functions to coordinate political action--all the while theorizing the limits of such talk and its inappropriateness in republics/democracies. I am currently beginning a new line of research investigating how theorists of democracy from Ancient Greece and Rome forward through the Renaissance and Enlightenment and into the twentieth century have theorized the practices of rhetoric and deliberation and their relationship to democracy--how, in short, theorists have attempted to develop a rhetoric suitable to democratic governance. This line of research will produce multiple projects over the coming years; most immediately, I am working on my second book, The Story of "Democracy", which theorizes how the word democracy was defined, redefined, altered, stretched, and eventually hollowed-out by democratic theorists and political players during the long nineteenth century in the United States.

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