During the eighteenth century, Western Europe underwent a revolutionary transformation. In place of a hierarchical political order organized around hereditary privilege, citizens increasingly pledged fidelity to democratic principles of equality and recast “The People” as a new source of sovereignty. How did individuals become attached to these political ideals and develop a new democratic common sense? This dissertation argues that democratic principles are not (simply) concepts that we have in our heads or that are found in constitutions and ballot boxes. Rather, they are lived practices immanent in the ordinary ways citizens interact with and relate to one another. All political relations are constituted in and through distinct forms of bodily movement and comportment. Every political society presents different forms of conduct and habitus, such as bowing, kneeling, kowtowing, curtsying, genuflecting, handshaking, hat-doffing, hugging, kissing, and even ways of having sex. I argue that the institutionalization of revolutionary changes in forms of embodiment and the displacement of certain practices in favor of others help explain how a political order predicated on status hierarchies transformed into one purportedly rooted in equality and how subjects mired in relations of subordination became newly attached to democratic principles. The dissertation explores how individuals became attached to democratic principles by interrogating fraternity as a central part of the democratic heritage. Across six chapters, I chart a historical arc from the mid sixteenth-century royal courts of Western Europe to the associational world of clubs, societies, and social movements of the eighteenth century to explore the historical formation of fraternity as a hegemonic symbolic idea, bodily practice, and affective relation of political equality. Focusing on England (and later Britain), I investigate how gender and sexuality, especially heterosexual manhood, became political categories capable of overturning entrenched relations of hierarchy and giving rise to new forms of equality and domination. I show how ordinary and everyday forms of conduct organized an aristocratic and monarchical society committed to naturalized hierarchies of class and the sovereign power of the king. I illustrate how the emergence of novel practices of gender and sexuality at the turn of the eighteenth century challenged and displaced dominant forms of political embodiment and gave rise to new egalitarian relations. The exercise of these bodily practices generated new kinds of feelings and sensations that invested them with political meaning and revealed how masculine subjects became attached to fraternity as a symbolic ideal of a democratic society. The historical process in which these bodily practices materialized fraternity as a dominant figure of equality was neither linear nor uncontested. I demonstrate how the history and theory of male citizenship is inseparable from concerns about sodomy. Political struggles over developing gendered and sexualized forms of bodily comportment produced plural and sometimes opposing meanings of freedom and equality. These conflicts reveal how the hegemony of a hetero-patriarchal vision of fraternity underpinning an emerging democratic society in eighteenth-century Britain was neither inevitable nor unavoidable but the contingent result of ongoing corporeal conflicts.