An odd feature of protest and revolutionary discourses is that they seem constantly to reference their own obviousness. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” “This is what democracy looks like.” But if they are indeed “self-evident,” why do such “truths” require revolutions and wide-scale social movements to take hold? Why must they be “declared” in the first place?
The CALA Storytelling Lab’s Andrew Dicus, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor and coordinator of writing and communications courses at NYU SPS, addresses these issues in his article, “Terror and Self-Evidence: Robespierre and the General Will,” published in the current issue of European Romantic Review.
Conducting research that spans early-modern political philosophy, twentieth-century analytic philosophy, British literature, and revolutionary rhetoric in eighteenth-century France, Andrew argues that protest discourses of today have retained critical aspects that modernized political consciousness in the late-eighteenth-century (a revolutionary period for America, France, Haiti, and beyond), but that crucial changes in how they conceptualize “self-evidence” have allowed for expanded, and more robust, bottom-up agency.
In addition to coordinating CALA’s Storytelling Lab and writing courses, Andrew teaches various humanities classes in NYU SPS’s Division of Applied Undergraduate Studies.
