Introduction

Scene, question, and dissertation architecture.

Staging the State examines how constitutional order becomes publicly legible. The project begins with the ratification-era print sphere because the founding archive preserves an unusually visible record of how political authority had to be narrated, paced, voiced, and circulated before it could stabilize as a lived order. Federalist and Anti-Federalist texts were not only arguments about institutions. They were scenes of instruction, alarm, reassurance, and judgment directed toward a public asked to inhabit an unprecedented constitutional form.

The dissertation then carries that founding problem into a broader theoretical inquiry. If the state is always staged through rhetoric, legal form, and public performance, what happens when it is asked to decide matters that exceed civil competence: blasphemy, sacrilege, sincerity, transcendence, or spiritual injury? Separation of church and state becomes important here not only as doctrine, but as an ethics of jurisdictional restraint. The issue is not merely whether the state should intervene, but what it would have to know in order to intervene without pretending to theological mastery.

Why the dissertation takes book form online

This website is the dissertation's native scholarly form. The argument concerns staging, arrangement, circulation, and public legibility, so a linked web structure is more than convenient packaging. It is a formal extension of the method. Each chapter appears as a scene within a larger argumentative sequence, and the table of contents makes that sequence visible while still allowing selective entry, return, and public judgment.

Core argument

At the center of the project is a bounded claim about authority. The state may regulate conduct, adjudicate disputes, and maintain public order. It may not safely govern the soul, define sacrilege as a matter of official truth, or certify transcendence as administrable fact without claiming powers constitutional restraint should deny it. The dissertation advances this claim by reading constitutional discourse as staged action rather than doctrine alone.

Why the fictional cases matter

The project's use of fictional Supreme Court case studies has a clear historical precedent in political theory. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau relied on constructed scenes, above all the state of nature, to render questions of legitimacy, consent, sovereignty, and political obligation more legible. This dissertation extends that tradition from the state of nature to the constitutional courtroom. Its invented cases function as constitutional thought experiments: a constitutional analogue to the state of nature in which adjudication, rather than political origin, becomes the site of theoretical stress.

The analogy is methodological rather than genealogical. The claim is not that modern constitutional adjudication recapitulates the state of nature, nor that the fictional cases recover an original foundation of sovereignty. The point is narrower and more disciplined: constructed scenes can clarify the conditions and limits of political authority by isolating pressures that ordinary institutional life often diffuses.

These cases are therefore not arbitrary satire or decorative storytelling. They are jurisdictional fictions and revelatory hypotheticals, constructed scenes of legitimacy designed to stage adjudicative pressure at the edge of the state's rightful competence. Instead of imagining politics before the state, they imagine constitutional order under pressure. Their purpose is not prediction, but revelation: to show what the state must claim, define, or risk becoming when asked to decide matters involving sacrilege, transcendence, symbolic injury, and spiritual meaning. In that sense, they expose the limits of state authority regarding the spirit of its people.

Nor do these hypotheticals displace historical or doctrinal analysis. They function alongside it. Their value lies in analytic clarification: by intensifying conflicts over sacrilege, transcendence, and spiritual injury, they make newly visible the claims civil authority would have to make in order to govern such matters cleanly.

Chapter trajectory

The chapters move from founding-era discourse to later thought experiments. Chapter 1 establishes ratification as a scene of public judgment. Chapter 2 compares Federalist and Anti-Federalist dramaturgies of scale, legitimacy, fear, and trust. Chapter 3 reframes church-state separation as a problem of jurisdictional humility. Chapters 4 and 5 use Federalists: The Musical to test whether the state can confront sacred offense and metaphysical contract without becoming arbiter of theological fact. The conclusion returns to the Supreme Court as a bounded performer of public judgment in a plural republic.