By Daniel R. Williams. 113 Penn St. L. Rev 55.
Daniel R. Williams expands on his previous article After the Gold Rush Part I.
Long ago, in a bygone era of barbarism, cruelty, and darkness, before an Enlightenment era ushered in a human-rights consciousness, before the great revolutions created space for republican government to form and then flourish, there was the “spectacle of the scaffold.” Punishment through horrific torture inflicted in the public square heralded sovereignty through “spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess.” The public square became the forum for the sovereign, “through the body of the criminal,” to reactivate its power: the scaffold in the public square “made the body of the condemned man the place where the vengeance of the sovereign was applied, the anchoring point for a manifestation of power, an opportunity of affirming the dissymetry [sic] of forces.” The public sphere was where sovereignty announced itself . . . [keep reading]