ODSECS 39: Katlyn Carter

ODSECS 39: Katlyn Carter

Democracy in Darkness

Abstract: Democracy in Darkness is an urgent exploration into the way decisions and debates about the place of secrecy in politics during the Age of Revolutions shaped representative democracy. In this talk, 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.

Bio: Katlyn Marie Carter is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame where she teaches classes on colonial and revolutionary America, the Constitution, and history of the media. She writes about the origins of representative democracy in the eighteenth century, specializing in the American and French Revolutions. In addition to Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale University Press, 2023), she has published in the Journal of the Early Republic and French History. Her public scholarship includes written numerous op-eds for The Washington Post, TIME, and the Age of Revolutions blog, for which she serves as an editor.