"Government and Manners" Cosmopolitanism and the "Spirit" of Liberal Democracy in The Federalist and Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond

• Published in: Early American literature Vol. 54; no. 1; pp. 135 - 162
• Main Author: REZNICK, SCOTT M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Carolina Press 01-01-2019
• Subjects: Anderson, Amanda; Brown, Charles Brockden; Democracy; Gothic literature; Gothic novels; Government regulation; Laws, regulations and rules; Novels; Political science; Slauter, Eric; United Kingdom; Violence; White, Edward Higgins; United Kingdom
• ISSN: 0012-8163; 1534-147X
• DOI: 10.1353/eal.2019.0008

This article attempts an interpretive reorientation toward Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novel Ormond by examining the eighteenth-century political ideas it engages. Locating what I call, following Amanda Anderson, a "cosmopolitan ideal" at the core of democratic life, Ormond, I argue, registers the influence of both Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and The Federalist on Brown's thought concerning the relationship between political institutions and the "spirit"—the manners, customs, and practices—of a given people. Emphasizing these elements of the novel's concern with the nature of political analysis and reflection in a democratic world constantly threatened by violence, danger, and deceit requires us, I contend, to reassess the role of Sophia Courtland in the novel. Far from the voice of a narrow conservatism that critics have long attacked, Sophia, when properly situated in her eighteenth-century context, emerges as the novel's most astute analyst of the relationship between political ideas and the "spirit" that provides their motive force—a faculty that Ormond, following Montesquieu and Publius, suggests is necessary to the stability and survival of liberal democracy.