Desire, Disgust, Democracy

Abstract

This chapter argues that Henry Adams’s Democracy: An American Novel (1880) offers a complex meditation on disgust’s capacity either to squelch or to express a desire for the political. Initially, Adams evokes an atmosphere of disgust in order to cultivate in his reader a shared repulsion toward antidemocratic seductions of intimacy, friendship, and attraction. This approach reflects Adams’s advocacy for competency exams, the cornerstone of the civil service reform movement’s bureaucratic effort to take feeling out of political decision-making. By Democracy’s close, however, “disgust” looks like one of the only emotional resources available for combating an apathetic acceptance of democracy’s failings, suggesting that repulsion is desire’s near relation—not its opposite. The chapter thus challenges political philosophers, such as Martha Nussbaum, who repudiate disgust; it also revisits a related strain of literary criticism, focused on Walt Whitman, that uncritically celebrates the suppression of disgust as a necessarily democratic act.