Center for Emerging Democracies Book Talk on “Democracy in Darkness”

In this talk, Professor Carter will cover how state secrecy came to be seen as despotic in the years preceding the American and French revolutions. She will then examine how revolutionaries who sought to fashion representative governments in North America and France confronted the challenge of determining secrecy’s place in their new regimes. In a context where gaining public trust seemed to demand transparency, was secrecy ever legitimate? Whether in Philadelphia or Paris, establishing popular sovereignty required navigating between an ideological imperative to eradicate secrets from the state and a practical need to limit transparency in government. The fight over this—dividing revolutionaries and vexing founders—would determine the nature of the world’s first representative democracies.