C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 1–2. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000015 Pr...
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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 1–2. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000015 Printed in the United Kingdom
editorial In recent decades the discipline of history has experienced an unprecedented expansion of its range of subjects. As rich as the new diversity is, it may seem to sacrifice disciplinary coherence to sprawl. More striking, however, is the discipline’s capacity to retain its grip on the interpretive and explanatory agenda that continues to make history a distinct way of understanding the human condition. Intellectual history has developed in much the same way. Not so long ago it was regarded by many as an endangered species, its natural habitat having been laid waste by social and cultural historians who rejected its elitism and by historians of ideas who preferred a habitat free of historical clutter. This prognosis notwithstanding, intellectual history has re-emerged as an expanded but still focused disciplinary enterprise, anchored in the belief that texts and the discourses in which they are embedded are multiple points of entry into human creativity in its profuse variety of historical forms, and that their study is essential to understanding the nature of cultural life and the meaning of civilization itself. Modern Intellectual History is concerned with the historicity of textual performances, whether written, printed, visual or musical. Our aim is to encourage scholarship that illuminates the interactions between texts and contexts and thereby recovers contextually the meanings of texts, their significance, and the processes of their reception. By describing texts as performances we want to imply, first, that they are products of individual agency, and, second, that agency is a more complicated matter than has often been supposed. We do not mean to deny that a text may have an “integrity” of its own, transcending any particular context. We are, in fact, eager to encourage debate about that possibility. We also realize that as there are many kinds of texts, so there are many kinds of contexts, from intellectual traditions fashioned over the longue dur´ee to immediate social milieus. What a contextual approach means and entails will therefore vary with the ideas explored and the questions posed. However, we also find a growing convergence of views across several disciplines about what distinguishes contextual understanding from other kinds of knowledge—and that too is a matter on which we are eager to encourage discussion in these pages. Hence, even as we seek to identify what makes intellectual history a distinct form of inquiry, we intend to open it out to its neighbors in and beyond the discipline of history. This turn outward requires moving beyond binaries that close off possibilities. For example, it seems overly restrictive to locate intellectual 1
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history on the “elite” side of any putative distinction between elite and popular culture; our criteria for inclusion make the provenance of textual performances less important than what the scholar does with them. Likewise we see no point in neatly dividing intellectual from cultural history: many forms of the new cultural history are also intellectual history as MIH defines it. And we do not believe that intellectual historians have to choose between an “idealist” history of ideas and an approach that reduces ideas to rationales for social interests. Between those two extremes there is plenty of room for original and significant work on the relations between ideas and social experience. And so Modern Intellectual History will serve as a meeting ground and a mediator for hermeneutically minded scholars with an historical orientation, whether their interest is in the history of literature, science, philosophy, law, religion, political thought, economic thought, social theory, psychology, anthropology, art, or music. It defines “modern” to include the entire period from the origins of the Enlightenment in the mid-seventeenth century to the present. Because we believe that Europeanists and Americanists can profit greatly from each other’s work, and because there is a growing body of historical scholarship on the trans-Atlantic world, the early issues will devote roughly equal space to Europe and the United States. But—as several contributions to this issue attest— we are also keenly aware that, with the demise of empires and the end of the Cold War, intellectual history is in a new and unique position to give itself and the larger discipline a global reach. To that end, we are committed to promoting new ways of understanding cultural exchanges between the West and non-West over the past two and a half centuries. Intellectual history is best thought of as a discipline in the making. We warmly welcome all who are interested in furthering that process to read and contribute to Modern Intellectual History, the first journal explicitly devoted to its propagation.
C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 3–25. DOI: 10.1017/S147924430300009X Printed in the United Kingdom
global commerce and the question of sovereignty in the eighteenth-century provinces* emma rothschild Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge
The paper is concerned with disputes over sovereignty and global commerce in the 1760s and 1770s. The eighteenth-century revolution in economic science has been identified with agricultural reforms, and with the definition of national economies. The economists of the time, including Turgot, Mirabeau, Dupont de Nemours, Baudeau and Adam Smith, were also intensely interested in the merchant sovereigns of the French, English and Dutch East India companies, and in the new colonial ventures of the post-Seven Years War period. Their writings on global commerce were sometimes extraordinarily detailed (about herrings, for example, or bye-laws) and often untheoretical. Turgot was for a brief period minister of the navy and of the colonies. The older Mirabeau described the “Spaniard” as “the true Mogul of America,” and the cod of the North Atlantic as “the inexhaustible Peru of the Dutch.” But the economists’ writings on global connections were the occasion for some of their most profound reflections on the political consequences of laissez-faire, on theories of sovereignty, on the difficulties of transporting information or instructions over very large distances, and on the changing relationships between power, law and commerce. The disputes over long-distance commerce provide an interesting insight, the paper suggests, into ways of thinking which were at the same time scientific and administrative, global and provincial.
The 1760s and 1770s, especially in the maritime provinces of Europe, were a time of extraordinary inventiveness in political economy. There are moments of creativity in economic thought, as in almost every other part of life, and the third quarter of the eighteenth century was one of the most prodigious of these moments. Dupont de Nemours in 1768, invoking the precedents of Confucius, *
I am most grateful to the librarians of the Sraffa collection in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Pryme collection in the Cambridge University Library; and to Bernard Bailyn, Justine Crump, Nicholas Phillipson, Amartya Sen, Rosie Vaughan, and the editors and anonymous referees of this journal for helpful comments. An earlier version of the paper was presented as a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of European Economic Thought, Paris, January 31, 2003.
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Pythagoras, Democritus, Socrates, Galileo, Descartes, and (a little bathetically) Christian Wolff, announced the arrival of “a new science in Europe.” “Around 1750,” in Dupont’s later description, two men of genius, Franc¸ois Quesnay and Vincent de Gournay, began to investigate the “nature of things,” and to determine the principles of a science of political economy.1 By 1776, the year in which Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations and A.-R.-J. Turgot defended his six reform edicts, the new science was well established. By 1782, the “useless, lewd, and twisted” views associated with economic science, in the description of one of Turgot’s theological opponents, were beginning “to go a little out of fashion.”2 In an epoch of almost obsessive preoccupation with newness—new sciences, new systems of trade, new music, objects wholly new in the world—the revolution in economic thought was genuinely innovative. Quesnay and his followers conceived of national economies, for the first time, as vast systems of interdependent flows; Turgot described them as constituted by the interconnected transactions of millions of individual agents. All individuals, the poor as well as the rich, the agricultural labourers as well as the great merchants, were identified as part of a single economic system. The wealth of nations was identified with the well-being of the “great body of the people.”3 The principle of government was identified with the choices of the individual. “Every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him,” Smith wrote; the maxim to be heeded by the statesman, Turgot suggested in his obituary of Vincent de Gournay, was “laissez-nous faire.”4 The major concerns of the economists and their critics, in the political disputes of the 1760s and 1770s, are well known. They were interested in grain prices and the regulation of agriculture; in the reform of indirect taxes; in the restrictive monopolies of guilds and apprenticeships; and in export bounties and import restrictions. These were all matters of discussion, in almost all major European countries, and they have been the subject of extensive investigation by historians, including historians of economic thought. But there was an additional economic question which was at least as conspicuous in public discussion at the time, and which was of particular importance in the more distant provinces of the French and English empires. This was the question of global commerce, in which the national economies of the mid-eighteenth century were connected to much larger 1 2 3 4
Dupont de Nemours, De l’origine et des progr`es d’une science nouvelle (London, 1768), 1–3; “Notice,” in Oeuvres de Mr. Turgot, ed. Dupont de Nemours (Paris: Delance, 1808), 3:310. [J. B. De La Porte], Le d´efenseur de l’usure confondu, ou r´efutation de l’ouvrage intitul´e: Th´eorie de l’int´erˆet d’argent (Paris: Morin, 1782), 3, 9. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) (hereafter WN), 11. ´ WN, 456; “Eloge de Vincent de Gournay” (1759), in A. R. J. Turgot, Oeuvres de Turgot et Documents le Concernant, ed. Gustave Schelle (Paris: Alcan, 1913–23), 1:620.
global commerce and the question of sovereignty
empires; of commerce with the “new worlds” of America and the opulent worlds of Asia, or with the “two Indies.” It is the politics of oceanic commerce, and its relationship to eighteenth-century economic theory, that I want to consider. I will be concerned, in particular, with one set of political and philosophical disputes, over sovereignty and global commerce, which was of intense interest to many of the economists. “I am quite sick of this our Sovereignty,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1770, and the most abstract questions of sovereignty and power were the subject, at the time, of continuing parliamentary, popular, and literary discussion.5 The contributions of the economists to these discussions were concerned, for the most part, with extremely detailed questions about fisheries, corporations, shipping, and the bye-laws of East India companies; they were not, at first sight, works of theory. But the disputes of the 1760s and 1770s over long-forgotten regulations were also the occasion, I will suggest, for some of the economists’ most profound reflections on the political consequences of laissez-faire, and on the distinction between economic and political interests. The relationship between the local and the global, or between the “local situation” of individuals and the great interconnected worlds of the statesmen, was at the heart of the economists’ theories. It was at the heart, too, of the Atlantic (or Atlantic–Asiatic) politics of sovereignty. The economists, in Dupont’s broad sense of the French ´economistes or physiocrats and their more or less critical sympathisers, were a distinctively cosmopolitan collection of men. Dupont included Hume and Beccaria in Gournay’s school, and Pietro Verri, the Margrave of Baden, and a Chancellor of Lithuania called Chreptowicz in Quesnay’s school; the eclectic school, to which he assigned Turgot and Adam Smith, included “a couple of Germans, some Swiss, three Spaniards.”6 But the economists were also connected in multiple respects to a much larger world of colonial and mercantile administration. They were well informed about the local difficulties of communication, regulation, revenue, and political power in the distant provinces of the European empires. They were themselves, at least on occasion, provincials. Some of the greatest of the economic writings of the period were the product of provincial settings. The abb´e Galiani wrote Della Moneta as a young man of 22, brought to Naples from the small Abruzzi town of Chieti. Turgot wrote his most important works of economic theory while he was travelling, as intendant, in a remote and impoverished province, the Limousin, whose inhabitants were renowned across Europe as living mostly on chestnuts and water. Adam Smith grew up in a small Fife seaside town, Kirkcaldy, that was both profoundly isolated 5 6
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William B. Wilcox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 17:334. Dupont de Nemours, “Notice,” 310, 314–16.
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from the metropolitan existence of Versailles and Westminster, and connected, especially by the licit and illicit commerce in goods and people of which both Smith and his father were the invigilators, to the wider worlds of the Baltic and the North Atlantic. He started the Wealth of Nations in 1764 in Toulouse—“I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time,” he wrote to David Hume, of a provincial existence in respect of which his life “at Glasgow was a pleasurable, dissipated life in comparison”—and he returned to his mother’s home in Kirkcaldy to complete it.7 The economists were interested, in their own provincial circumstances, in the communications between local and global events. They were familiar with the intimate experience of waiting for letters, books, carriers, instructions from Versailles or London, news of storms and far-off wars; with the distance between their own knowledge and the knowledge of princes and sovereigns. They were also familiar with the ways in which power and sovereignty were transformed, over vast and oceanic distances. Bernard Bailyn has identified one of the sources of the extraordinary creativity in late eighteenth-century political and constitutional thought in the “provincialism” of the American revolutionaries; in the uncertainty of their provincial situation, and in their willingness to question the established wisdom of an imperial or metropolitan world to which they were connected, but to which they did not belong.8 There was something of this provincialism and this inventiveness in the economic revolutionaries, as well.
a jumble of empires The period of the economists’ revolution was one of continuing political and public interest in oceanic commerce, and in its consequences for sovereignty. The new colonial connections of the 1760s and 1770s, and the exchange of distant provinces and privileges in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, were celebrated (or lamented over) in a profusion of semi-economic, semi-geographical, semipopular writings, of which the abb´e Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes was only the most elaborate. “When has the entire earth ever been so closely joined together, by so few threads?” Johann Gottfried Herder asked in 1774, of the new Papierkultur of the times, in which the works of Voltaire were followed
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Letter to David Hume of July 5, 1764, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 102. Smith served as Commissioner of Customs from 1778 until his death in 1790; his father, the older Adam Smith, who died in 1723, was Comptroller of Customs in Kirkcaldy. Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), chap. 1.
global commerce and the question of sovereignty
“from Lisbon to Kamchatka, from Zembla to the colonies of India”: “‘Our system of commerce!’—Can one imagine anything more refined than this all-embracing science?”9 The most popular of the forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary France, Louis-S´ebastien Mercier’s L’An 2440 of 1771, was, like Raynal’s Histoire, a compendium of excursions into commerce and power; an idyll, in part, of future commerce (the destruction of “these great companies which absorbed all individual fortunes” and of the global wars in which “kings become merchants,” the abolition of slavery and of “absolute sovereignty,” the “entire and absolute freedom of commerce and navigation”) and present transformation (“everything is revolution on this globe”).10 The Seven Years War had been in Raynal’s description “une guerre, pour ainsi dire universelle,” and it had inspired a new and almost universal discussion of the politics of commerce and conquest. “The inhabitants of the great capital cities, who are never in a position to experience directly the misfortunes of the war, and whose leisure is amused by talking about houses destroyed by bombs, and thousands of men slaughtered, would perhaps regret the void that peace might leave in their conversations. But they are sensitive to the loss of their money,” Dupont wrote in 1769, in a study of the French Compagnie des Indes. Smith used a similar image, some years later, in the Wealth of Nations: “in great empires the people who live in the capital . . . feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies.”11 The new colonies and conquests were collected together, in the wartime and postwar discussions, in a jumble of empires. The older Mirabeau, in L’ami des hommes, described the “Spaniard” as “the true Mogul of America,” and the cod of the North Atlantic as “the inexhaustible Peru of the Dutch.” Galiani spoke in his Dialogues sur le commerce des bl´es of the “Nabob Arminius;” Quesnay denounced the “Carthaginian constitution” of the British; the frontispiece of another of the popular economic works of the times, the Noblesse commer¸cante by the abb´e Coyer, shows a young man about to embark on a sailing ship, to “serve the nation by becoming rich in commerce,” while leaving behind him a heap of armour and coats of arms, of an almost German or Polish sort, “remnants
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Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774) (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), 69–70, 74, 107. Louis S´ebastien Mercier, L’An 2440: Rˆeve s’il en fut jamais (1771) (Paris: La D´ecouverte, 1999), 165, 227, 260–61, 275; Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of PreRevolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 63–5. [Abb´e Raynal], Histoire philosophique et politique des ´etablissemens et du commerce des Europ´eens dans les deux Indes (Amsterdam, 1770), 6:406; Dupont de Nemours, Du commerce et de la compagnie des Indes (Amsterdam, 1769), 62; WN, 920.
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of the Gothic spirit.”12 In the words of John Burgoyne MP, later the prisoner of the American colonists, speaking in a parliamentary debate of 1772 about the East India Company, there was a “chaos where every element and principle of government, and charters, and firmauns, and the rights of conquests, and the rights of subjects, and the different functions and interests of merchants, and statesmen, and lawyers, and kings, are huddled together into one promiscuous tumult and confusion.”13 The economists were intimately involved in this tumult of philosophical reflection. Several of them were engaged in an immediate way in colonial and company administration. A prosopography of the revolution in economic science would suggest myriad connections, from the brother of Mirabeau (the intendant of Guadeloupe) and the brother of Turgot (the governor of Guyane) to Mercier de la Rivi`ere (the intendant of Martinique), Pierre Poivre (the intendant of the Ile de France, or Mauritius), and Dupont de Nemours (who aspired to Poivre’s position, and married his widow); from Gournay, the merchant in Cadiz, to Hume, the merchant (temporarily) in Bristol; from Andr´e Morellet’s uncle (a ship-boy from Lyon, who became a captain in the Compagnie des Indes) to his brother (in the Ile de France); from Smith’s Fife friends the Oswalds, with their African and West Indian interests, to his Dumfriesshire friends the Johnstones, who used their East India company interests to defeat the Oswalds in Smith’s own seaside town of Kirkcaldy. Turgot was himself, for a brief period in 1774, Minister of the Navy and of the Colonies. But the economists were also preoccupied with theories of sovereignty, and with the complicated, changing relationships between power, law, and commerce. The French economists were the exponents of an absolute sovereignty which was founded on a divine order “of perfect justice, of perfect liberty, and of perfect equality” (in Smith’s description), and which was defined, in particular, in opposition to an antiquated “feudal government” of lords and corporations, or “all these little sovereignties.”14 But the sovereignty of the state was at the same time called into question by the new circumstances of colonial and chartered commerce, over oceanic distances. “The spirit of an extensive and intricate trading interest pervades the whole, always qualifying, and often controlling, 12
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[Mirabeau], L’ami des hommes, ou trait´e de la population, 5th edn (Hamburg: Chr´etien H´erold, 1760), 3:237–8, 273–4; Ferdinand Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des bl´es (1770) (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 143; [Franc¸ois Quesnay], “Remarques sur l’opinion de l’auteur de l’esprit des lois concernant les colonies” (1766), in Fran¸cois Quesnay et la physiocratie ´ (Paris: Institut National d’Etudes D´emographiques, 1958), 2:785; Abb´e Coyer, La noblesse commer¸cante (London, 1756), 3, 12. Debate of April 13, 1772, in The Parliamentary History of England (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), vol. 17, cols. 456–7. “Foire” (1757), in Turgot, Oeuvres, 1:580–81; WN, 669.
global commerce and the question of sovereignty
every general idea of constitution and government,” Edmund Burke wrote in 1769, of the disputes over the East India and other chartered companies; “in such a case, to talk of the rights of sovereignty, is quite idle.”15 The global connections of the mid-eighteenth century were regulated by two great systems of monopoly. One, which governed the commerce with America, was the colonial system, by which each empire attempted to exclude the merchants of all other nations from its own colonies. The other was the system of exclusive companies, which governed the commerce with the East Indies, and by which the empires attempted to exclude all merchants other than those of a single, privileged company. “Monopoly is the great engine of both; but it is a different sort of monopoly,” as Smith concluded.16 There was a different sort of sovereignty, in turn, in the different systems of commerce. In the first, or colonial, system, the European sovereign was required to exercise power at a great distance, and in circumstances, often, of very imperfect and very untimely information. In the second system, of the companies, the sovereign delegated the exercise of power to private individuals who were themselves both sovereigns and merchants. The colonial and company systems were the occasion, in these circumstances, for the economists to explore some of the most profound difficulties of their own conceptual universe. The national economies that they defined, with their circular flows of commodities and money and labour, were themselves a constituent of much larger and global interconnections. The economic interest of the nation was limited by other, political, interests. The sovereignty of the nation (or the sovereign) over its own territory was limited by the influence of other sovereigns or other individuals, and the influence of the nation extended, like its interests, far beyond its territory. Its sovereignty, in these more distant manifestations, was partial, impeded, divided; it was shared with subaltern governments or insubordinate companies. Even the individual citizen—the centre of the economists’ universe, whose judgements were the foundation of the entire system of laissez-faire—had multiple interests and multiple identities, as a consumer, a producer, a producer in a particular branch of industry, a citizen of a particular state, an owner of capital, even as a participant in a particular company or corporation.
four kinds of sovereignty These dilemmas of colonial and commercial policy were described at considerable length in 1765 and 1766, in two sequences of articles in the early 15 16
Observations on a Late State of the Nation (1769), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 2:176, 194. WN, 630.
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´ em´erides du citoyen and Le journal de issues of the economists’ journals Les Eph´ l’agriculture. Global commerce was the destiny of modern times, in the account ´ em´erides, a young canon from the of the abb´e Baudeau, the editor of the Eph´ Loire valley, who later became an expert on druids, and the “mitred provost” of Widziniski in Poland.17 Is there a Frenchman or Frenchwoman, Baudeau asked, who could be induced to “forget the memory of tobacco, of sugar, and of muslins?” Or, as he wrote in an “Explication” of Quesnay’s “Tableau e´ conomique,” in one of innumerable evocations of the new, feminine consumer of global delights, “You see, madame, in a simple breakfast, united before your eyes and in your hands the productions of all climates and of the two hemispheres:” cups and a tray from China, coffee from Arabia, sugar “cultivated in America by unhappy Africans,” a coffeepot made of metal from Potosi, linen from Riga, worked by Dutch industry, together, less exotically, with bread and cream from the French countryside. For Raynal, this “taste for luxuries and commodities has induced a love of work, which is today the principal force of states.” For Baudeau, it was a “necessary evil,” to be investigated according to the “true maxims of patriotic good sense.”18 There were in these circumstances, in Baudeau’s account, four alternative strategies for the European states, or four ways of reconciling the interests of sovereignty and of global commerce. The first and most advantageous was to produce all the commodities one desired on one’s own territory. The second was to take possession of a territory that produced them, and to colonise it; this was the colonial system. The third was to send one’s own nationals to seek them; this was the system of the companies. The fourth, and least advantageous, was to buy the commodities from other countries; this was the system of free global commerce, or the “scheme of voluntary, unconnected settlers” that the poet William Julius Mickle later attributed to Adam Smith.19 The first strategy was naturally attractive to the physiocrats, with their predilection for absolute sovereignty, and also for agriculture, for primary production, and, within primary production, for the activities that were most 17 18
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“Notice sur la vie et les travaux de l’abb´e Baudeau,” in Eug`ene Daire, Physiocrates (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846), 2:645–52. ´ em´erides du citoyen, ou chronique de [Abb´e Baudeau], “Du commerce des Indes,” in Eph´ l’esprit national, vol. 1, no. 8 (November 29, 1765), 117, 121–3; [Baudeau], Explication du tableau ´economique, a` madame de *** (Paris: Delalain, 1776), 90–91; Raynal, Histoire, 7:99. ´ em´erides, see Jean On the authorship of the anonymous articles on colonies in the Eph´ Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France a` la fin de l’ancien r´egime: L’´evolution du r´egime de ‘l’Exclusif’ de 1763 a` 1789 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972), 15–16. [Baudeau], “Du commerce des Indes,” pp. 123–5; [William Julius Mickle], A Candid Examination of the Reasons for Depriving the East-India Company of its Charter (London: J. Bew and J. Sewell, 1779), 18.
global commerce and the question of sovereignty
similar to agriculture. (One of the economists’ favoured comparisons was thus between hunting and fishing, to the distinct disadvantage of the former. Mirabeau, for example, described the “primary, immense utility and surprising facility” of fisheries, in contrast to the “secondary, limited utility and dependent character” of the fur business; Baudeau reduced the benefits of the Canadian trade to the acquisition of a “bizarre and fairly inconvenient head covering,” or to the “hat chapter.”) But the strategy of autonomous production was excluded, as Baudeau conceded, for many of the most valued commodities. Coffee, chocolate, and other colonial goods demanded all the “ardour of the equinoctial lands,” and it was impossible to prevail upon elephants, tigers, and ermine to multiply in France.20 ´ em´erides scheme, was to acquire a The second best strategy, in the Eph´ “new Province,” in a convenient climate: to found “modern Colonies.” All the prosperous countries of Europe had colonies, in Baudeau’s account. Even the flourishing parts of Germany could be considered as participating in the colonial system of the Dutch, and the tragic languor of uncolonial Poland was enough to make patriots groan. The many Frances of the modern world—“la France Afriquaine, Asiatique, Am´eriquaine”—now constituted, in the spirit of the trader and the citizen, as for the public administration, no more than a single body politic with “la France Europ´eenne.”21 It was this prospect of a multi-climatic and multicultural empire that so troubled the economists, and over which they were so divided among themselves. The new provinces of the post-1763 settlements were different in multiple respects from the provinces of European France or England, and they posed quite new problems for the economists’ theories. The modern colonies, in Baudeau’s account, were “colonies of culture and of commerce,” in “continual correspondence” with the metropolis.22 But different climates and cultures, or agricultures, were believed to impose different kinds of sovereignty; different spirits of the law, in Montesquieu’s sense. One difficulty was thus that the new, dispersed empires seemed to require a diversity of laws and political principles. The political conditions for economic success were everywhere similar, in the science of the French economists. The sacred rights of property, for Quesnay, and the sacred rights of persons, for Turgot and Smith, were uniform and universal. But the colonial world seemed to impose
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´ em´erides du [Baudeau], “Des colonies franc¸oises aux indes occidentales,” pt 1, in Eph´ citoyen, vol. 2, no. 3 (January 10, 1766), 34–5, and pt 3, in vol. 3, no. 4 (March 14, 1766), 62–3; Mirabeau, L’ami des hommes, 3:273. ´ em´erides du citoyen, vol. 2, no. 4 (January [Baudeau], “Des colonies franc¸oises,” pt 2, in Eph´ 13, 1766), 52–3, 58; pt 1, p. 35; [Baudeau], “Du commerce des Indes,” 114. [Baudeau], “Des colonies franc¸oises,” pt 1, 35, 37.
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political difference. The very system of colonial monopoly—in the French empire, the “Exclusif ” whereby the colonies were prohibited from all commerce other than with France—was a violation of the uniform and sacred rights of property that the economists favoured in Europe. The diversity of climates seemed to require a diversity of personal characteristics, and personal rights. It imposed Montesquieu’s world of circumstance, in opposition to the economists’ world of principle. The question of slavery, above all, divided the economists throughout the 1760s and 1770s. “Slavery is against nature, although in certain countries it may be founded on a natural reason,” Montesquieu had written in his account of climate and enervation in De l’Esprit des Lois, and the cultivation by enslaved Africans which expanded so prodigiously in the French and the British empires after 1763 was justified, for several of the economists, by nature and circumstance.23 For Le Mercier, the theorist of “the absolute just and unjust,” freedom of commerce in Martinique thus required freedom for the colonists to supply themselves with slaves from Guinea or anywhere else.24 For Turgot, by contrast, there was no justification of slavery. “What does all this fine eulogy of Virginia mean?” he ´ em´erides published an article about Virginia wrote to Dupont, when the Eph´ (“a flourishing country which has no towns”); “Is that you do not know that this Virginia is a colony with negroes?” Turgot rejected, even, the characteristic argument of the economists that slavery was never profitable: “humanity is not sufficiently happy that injustice is always punished immediately.”25 Another difficulty of colonial policy was that the new provinces were not only colonies of commerce, or Carthaginian establishments. They had been established for political as well as economic reasons, and their existence called into question the distinction between “Political Economy and pure Politics,” which the subsequent generation of economists associated with the theorists of the 1770s.26 Quesnay thus criticised Montesquieu for his suggestion that “the extension of commerce was the only purpose of the establishment of colonies,” when the real purposes were far more disparate: to extend the domination of the 23 24
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C.-L. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois (1748) (Paris: Garnier, 1973), 1:265–7. This was part of the “general plan of commerce,” much like the freedom of the European provinces to buy beasts of burden (“les n`egres sont les bestiaux dont la Martinique a besoin”) from wherever they were to be found. Le Mercier de la Rivi`ere, L’ordre naturel et essentiel des soci´et´es politiques (London: Jean Nourse, 1767), 1:16; Le Mercier, “M´emoire au roi, sur l’administration de la Martinique,” quoted in Andr´e Labrouqu`ere, Les id´ees coloniales des physiocrates (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1927), 65, 113. Letters to Dupont de Nemours of November 7, 1769 and February 20, 1770, in Oeuvres de Turgot, 3:70, 378. George Pryme, An Introductory Lecture and Syllabus, to a Course Delivered in the University of Cambridge, on the Principles of Political Economy (Cambridge: Smith, 1823), 6.
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sovereign, to increase political power by adding new provinces, to enhance naval power. “The Colonies exist and should exist by the State, with the State, and for the State,” another author observed in the Journal de l’agriculture; yet another contributor on colonial policy invoked Roman virtue in respect of the conflicts between the interests of a colony and of a merchant, and between the colonial and the defensive roles of the navy, or the choice between “two unhappy necessities; salus populi suprema lex esto.”27 But the national objective in the colonies was itself, in Quesnay’s description, “a complication of opposing interests,” or a “confusion, disorder and absurdity” of the interests of traders and shippers, colonists and sovereigns, “voituriers” who represented their own interests as the interests of the nation. Even Montesquieu’s neo-Grecian language of the “metropolis,” in Quesnay’s account, served to obscure the differences between a republic of merchants (like Holland), “in which the shippers maintain their own ambassadors,” and an agricultural empire (like France), “in which it is necessary to distinguish the sovereign, the State, the nation, and the traders who undertake foreign commerce.” In the “confusion and obscurity of ideas” that was characteristic of the colonial enterprise, Quesnay wrote, the “State, the nation, the metropolis, the shippers have been confounded under the name of metropolis.”28 Yet a further difficulty of colonial policy, for the economists, was the distance, in space and time and information, between the European sovereigns and their colonies. Even if the English or the French states wished to extend their own laws around the globe, and even if they could identify a true public or national interest in doing so, they would encounter imposing practical difficulties. “The European colonies in America are more remote than the most distant provinces of the greatest empires which had ever been known before,” Smith wrote in the Wealth of Nations, and this “extrˆeme e´ loignement,” on which Montesquieu also commented, was considered to be of decisive political importance. The distance of the colonies “from the eye of the sovereign” led to an “unavoidable ignorance of administration,” in Smith’s account, while the colonial governments were uninformed about the “whole empire”: “it is not their business, and they have no regular means of information concerning it.”29 The dilemmas of colonial policy were exemplified, for the French economists, in the most tragic catastrophe of Ancien R´egime colonization, the expedition to 27
28 29
Quesnay, “Remarques,” 782; “Extrait d’un M´emoire intitul´e Observations, &c.,” Journal de l’agriculture, du commerce, et des finances, vol. 4, pt 2 (February 1766), 214; “Observations sur le m´emoire qui traite des loix prohibitives du commerce e´ tranger dans nos colonies,” Journal de l’agriculture, vol. 4, pt 1 (January 1766), 106. Quesnay, “Remarques,” 782–90. The reference is to De l’Esprit des Lois, 2:60: “M´etropole ´ qui a fond´e la colonie.” est, dans le langage des anciens, l’Etat WN, 586, 619; Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois, 2:61.
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Kourou of 1763–5. Even before the end of the Seven Years War, the French minister of colonies, the duc de Choiseul, had determined that France should console itself for the loss of Canada with a new colonial enterprise, in a more propitious southern climate. In Raynal’s severe description, the “court of Versailles” fixed its gaze, in 1763, upon Guyana, “this vast country, which had for a long time been decorated with the magnificent name of Equinoctial France,” and which the abb´e Baudeau described as “the continent of Guyana.” The new settlement on the Kourou river was to be a project by which the nation would forget its calamities, and the faults of its rulers: the “hope of better fortune could amuse its leisure, deceive its malignity.”30 The new colony was to be a land of enlightenment. There would be freedom of commerce and freedom of conscience; the colonial government was to “avoid everything which could give an impression of monopoly;” there would be “a free and national population;” the governor and the intendant were instructed to “encourage marriages between whites and Indian women;” there would be no slaves (or at least no new slaves, and “only in the last extremity”).31 The French economists and philosophers were intimately concerned in the new adventure. Choiseul designated as the first governor of the new colony Turgot’s ´ older brother, the former soldier and enthusiastic botanist Etienne-Franc ¸ ois Turgot, and Turgot was himself involved in the early stages of the project. Voltaire attempted to recruit oppressed Protestants to the settlement, with the help of the brother of Jacques Necker; Diderot despatched the young nephew of his companion Sophie Volland, whom he described as his “little cousin from Cayenne.”32 But the expedition to Kourou ended in heart-breaking tragedy. Of the 17,000 hopeful emigrants who arrived at the French Atlantic ports in 1763 and 1764, many died while waiting to embark. An estimated 13,000 actually left for Guyana. Of these, fewer than 1,000 remained by the end of the decade. Some 3,000 returned to Europe; 8,000–9,000 men, women, and children died in Guyana, of epidemics, hunger, floods, fires. “The state deplored this loss, and pursued and punished its
30
31
32
Raynal, Histoire, 5:19; [Baudeau], “Des colonies franc¸oises,” pt 3, 61. On Turgot’s involvement in the Kourou expedition, see Emma Rothschild, “Turgot and the Navy: Commerce, Oceans, and the ‘Canaille Des Colonies’” (Cambridge: Centre for History and Economics, 2003). Royal instructions of September 20, 1763 in Archives Nationales, Colonies, Correspondance a` l’arriv´ee en provenance de la Guyane Franc¸aise, C14/26/255–257, quoted in Rothschild, “Turgot and the Navy.” Letter of March 19, 1764 in Voltaire’s Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Institut et Mus´ee Voltaire, 1963), 54:205; letter of October 20, 1765 in Denis Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997), 542.
global commerce and the question of sovereignty
´ authors,” Raynal wrote; E.-F. Turgot was banished, by a lettre de cachet, from the proximity of the king; the legal consequences of “this horrible tragedy” persisted throughout the last decades of the Ancien R´egime.33 The Kourou expedition was taken as evidence, by the economists’ opponents, of their incapacity in global and colonial affairs. They and their patrons had little knowledge of the “relations which nature has placed between land and men,” Raynal wrote; they ignored the vast difference between the North and the South in America, the one destined for free and industrious men, and the other “made, it seems, for despotism,” to be occupied “only by absolute monarchies, and peopled by slaves.” They had confused the political interest in naval power (a “boulevard to defend the French possessions”), the philosophical interest in the “rights of humanity,” and a supposed economic interest. The economic interests of the state, the colonists, and the colonial officials, who were authorised to trade on their own account, were themselves a confusion of opposing hopes. Raynal referred seven times in a few pages, in his last account of the tragedy, to the “minist`ere de Versailles,” the “cour de Versailles.”34 The philosophers and the economists had been vanquished, above all, by distance. All the European empires of the times sought to bring with them, to New England or Nova Scotia or “la France e´ quinoxiale,” the depiction of their own sovereignty. “Let them carry across the ocean into the woods and deserts of America the images of the British constitution,” Burke urged the North American colonists in 1766.35 The colonisers of Guyana carried with them a diverse collection of constitutional arrangements. Choiseul and his cousin (another duc de Choiseul) were endowed with rights of “propri´et´e, seigneurie et justice” over some of the new settlements; concession-holders from the German principalities were endowed with rights over other colonists designated as vassals; the principal instructions to the governor required a “simple code of laws,” a “jurisprudence as close as possible to natural law,” and a municipal administration which respected the “liberty of citizens.”36 But these disparate images of European sovereignty ´ were simply lost in the oceanic journey between Versailles and the colonies. E.-F. Turgot’s first letter to Choiseul, when he eventually arrived in Guyana, late at
33 34
35 36
Raynal, Histoire, 5:27–8. Raynal, Histoire, 5:21–2, 24; [Abb´e Raynal], Histoire philosophique et politique des ´etablissemens et du commerce des Europ´eens dans les deux Indes (Geneva: Pellet, 1781), 7:21, 25–7, 30, 37, 39. Manuscript of a speech of February 3, 1766, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 2:49. ´ E. Daubigny, Choiseul et la France d’outre-mer apr`es le trait´e de Paris: Etude sur la politique coloniale au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Hachette, 1892), 38–40; Instructions of September 20, 1763, A.N.-Col., C14/26/256.
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night and soaking wet, described a “theatre of the greatest horrors . . . I cannot depict for you the disorder as great as it is.”37 The conception of a multi-climatic empire, for all these reasons, posed the most troublesome dilemmas for the economists. The system of colonial monopoly was a violation of the conditions of economic success. The interdependent system of economic flows extended far beyond the territory of the national economy, and the sovereignty of the national state. The sovereignty the state could exercise, at an oceanic distance, was of necessity ill-informed, incomplete, and oppressive. The gravest of all the consequences of colonial policy, for the economists, was that it set their own principles, of perfect liberty and perfect justice, in conflict with one another. The “sacred purpose” of national advantage, as Quesnay suggested in his comments on Montesquieu and colonies, was counterposed to the “irrevocable, beneficent and sacred” law by which individuals participate in global commerce. Adam Smith’s own kindest comment, on the colonies “of England,” was to describe their policy as “only somewhat less illiberal and oppressive than that of any of the rest.”38
merchants as sovereigns Baudeau’s third strategy, of sending one’s own nationals to seek the prizes of global commerce, was the system of the East India companies, and it raised apparently very different problems. It was a system of sovereignty and monopoly for the rich and populated parts of the globe. India, China, and even the Turkish empire were widely considered, in the period of the economists’ revolution, to be the most opulent countries on earth. Bengal, Lord Clive said in the House of Commons in 1772, was a “paradise of the earth,” whose “superfluity” of “very curious and valuable manufactures” is sufficient “for the use of the whole globe.”39 Voltaire, too, described Bengal in 1773 as “a province which passes for the most beautiful, the richest, and the most delicious country of the universe.”40 The European governments had long presumed that their merchants, if they were to succeed in these exotic territories, would require military and naval protection. But where the governments paid for such protection in the colonial system, in exchange for an exclusive commerce for their own subjects, the company system offered a different bargain. The companies of merchants were themselves to pay for the costs of forts, navies and public administration, and the
37 38 39 40
Letter of December 20, 1764, A.N.-Col., C14/27/26. Quesnay, “Remarques,” 782–4; WN, 590. Debate of March 30, 1772, in Parliamentary History, vol. 17, col. 354. “Fragments historiques sur l’Inde et sur le g´en´eral Lally” (1773), in Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot (Paris: Lef e` vre, 1832), 47:353.
global commerce and the question of sovereignty
governments in exchange offered exclusive rights to the companies. The French, English, Dutch, Swedish, Prussian, Estonian, and other East India companies were thus endowed, at least in principle, with exclusive rights to the commerce between their own countries and the entire world to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. The East India companies had been prominent in European politics since the early years of the seventeenth century. The abb´e Morellet, in 1769, sketched an outline of the “birth and successive destruction” of more than 60 European companies with exclusive privileges, from Genoa to Denmark, and including no fewer than 33 in France; Adam Smith, citing Morellet, mentioned a few more companies, which he described as “nuisances in every respect,” and nurseries of “disorderly conduct.”41 But in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, the French and English India companies assumed a quite new political importance. They had long exerted a despotic power over other merchants, through the elaborate privileges of their charters (that all ships coming from the Indies should land at the company’s ports in France, that all their goods should be stored in warehouses locked with two keys, and so forth). They were now considered to exercise an almost despotic power over the government itself. In the East, the companies were themselves sovereigns. Vincent de Gournay, even before the war, had observed that the expenditures of the Compagnie des Indes were hardly “analogous to the spirit of commerce.”42 By the 1760s, the companies were constructing forts, and collecting taxes, and paying the salaries of soldiers and civil servants and judges. The Compagnie had expended its resources on forts, roads, arsenals, churches, hospitals, civil judges, “in a word, all the expenses of sovereignty,” Jacques Necker observed in 1769. The English East India Company coined money, and participated in the ceremonies of the Moghul court, and organised municipal elections in Calcutta. “By progressive steps the Company have become sovereigns of that empire,” Lord Clive said of Bengal, and “they have traded not only as merchants, but as sovereigns.”43 It was in this setting of global scandal that the economists sought to implement their capacious principles of laissez-faire and economic interdependence. Both Dupont and Morellet wrote extensive works about the Compagnie des Indes in 1769. Morellet was depicted, in a contemporary print, as a “gros dogue 41 42
43
Abb´e Morellet, Examen de la r´eponse de M. N** au m´emoire de M. l’Abb´e Morellet, sur la compagnie des Indes; Par l’Auteur du m´emoire (Paris: Desaint, 1769), 34; WN, 641, 755. Vincent de Gournay, “Observations sur la rapport fait a` M. le Contrˆoleur-G´en´eral” (1755), in abb´e Morellet, M´emoire sur la situation actuelle de la compagnie des Indes (Paris: Desaint, 1769), x. Jacques Necker, “R´eponse au m´emoire de M. l’abb´e Morellet sur la compagnie des Indes” (1769), in Oeuvres Compl`etes de M. Necker (Paris: Treuttel and W¨urtz, 1821), 15:142; debate of March 30, 1772, in Parliamentary History, vol. 17, cols. 355, 358.
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d’Angleterre,” eyes blazing, teeth bared, hair standing on end, and about to devour the assembled shareholders of the company. His polemics, which led directly to the suspension of the company’s privilege, were concerned, above all, with the relationship between “sovereignty” and the “market economy” (l’´economie marchande). A “company which is both commercial and conquering is a monster which cannot survive for long,” Morellet wrote, and the Indies should rather be a “monument to the freedom of commerce.”44 The Compagnie had been “destined from its birth to ruin and destruction,” Dupont wrote, also in 1769, of a society of commerce to which had been confided “all the rights of sovereignty, forts, artillery, troops, an Empire six thousand leagues from the body of the State.” For Voltaire, in his defense of the Irish–French General Lally de Tolendal, the Compagnie was a “corpse with two heads,” and a travesty of the state. Lally, the vanquished commander in southern India, was executed for having “betrayed the interests of the King, of the state, and of the Compagnie des Indes.”45 The economists’ solution was to separate the commercial and the sovereign roles of the companies. This was Gournay’s recommendation in 1755: “it will be necessary, sooner or later, that commerce abandons the Companies, or that the Companies abandon commerce,” to become representatives of the state, “charged only with the upkeep of forts.” The Compagnie des Indes would become a sort of French consulate, in Morellet’s scheme of 1769, or a “truly French Company of all the nation’s merchants,” advising on a multitude of individual transactions between French and Indian entrepreneurs.46 This was Adam Smith’s scheme, too. “The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever,” he wrote in the Wealth of Nations. The clerks of the company, like the officials of a colonial administration, were “at ten thousand miles distance, and consequently almost quite out of sight,” and they were also, “it seems, incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns, even after they have become such.” This was even the received wisdom of at least some factions in English political life. “If by some means sovereignty and law are not separated from trade,” John Burgoyne said in the House of Commons, in the same debate of 1772 over the promiscuous confusion of principles, “India and Great Britain will be sunk and overwhelmed, never to rise again.”47 But the system of commerce without sovereignty, for the economists’ opponents, was no more than a metaphysical speculation. Smith’s prospect of a
44 45 46 47
Lettres d’Andr´e Morellet, ed. Dorothy Medlin, Jean-Claude David and Paul Leclerc (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991), 1:121, n. 8; Morellet, Examen, 71. Necker, “R´eponse,” 142; Dupont, Du commerce des Indes, 198–9; Voltaire, “Fragments,” 409–10, 416. Gournay, “Observations,” xvi, xxiii; Morellet, M´emoire, 160. WN, 570, 637–8; debate of April 13, 1772, in Parliamentary History, vol. 17, col. 458.
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“free trade with Asia,” in William Mickle’s account, or of “voluntary unconnected adventurers,” would be a phantom in the absence of the exercise of sovereign power. It would lead to political conflicts as in the North American colonies, or to “something exceedingly like the Portuguese plan,” of a hostile country “governed by the troops and officers of a distant sovereign,” and thereby to “human caprice and arbitrary power” (“their governors carried to India the image of the court of Lisbon . . . ”).48 Morellet, in his own prospect of free commerce to and within India, suggested that French merchants in the East Indies should depend, for their security, on the protection of the native sovereigns. Even Dupont, who had speculated that France could simply rent merchants, as sovereigns rented mercenaries, or as great proprietors rented horses when they had errands to be done in the streets of Paris, was at this point unconvinced: “And we should think that the Nabobs are more enlightened than the Czars!”49 Commerce without corporate monopoly, or without the sovereignty of the companies, would be no more, in the end, than colonization. The economists were once again confronted, as in the colonial crisis, with the limits of their own system, and with their own internal differences. The interdependent flow of economic transactions, in the company as in the colonial monopoly, was difficult to confine within the frontiers of a national economy. The subjects of the British and French sovereigns lived in all corners of the earth, and their corporate quasisubjects, including the East India companies who were themselves sovereigns, lived everywhere and nowhere. The individual agents or contracting parties who were at the heart of the economists’ system had multiple interests and multiple identities. The speculative merchant, in Smith’s description, is “a corn merchant this year, and a wine merchant the next, and a sugar, tobacco, or tea merchant the year after.” “These are men, who have no connexions with the state, who can enjoy their revenue in any part of the globe in which they choose to reside,” David Hume wrote of the owners of government obligations, which “can be transferred in an instant.”50 Their interests were not only economic, and they sought to pursue even their economic interests, on occasion, by political means. The interests of the state were similarly multifarious. The enterprise of defining the true interests of society was troublesome, under the best of circumstances, for the more consistent of the economists. Every individual, as Smith and Turgot insisted, was a better judge of his own interests than any statesman or lawgiver
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“Portuguese Asia,” in Luis de Cam¨oens, The Lusiad; or, the Discovery of India. An Epic Poem, trans. William Julius Mickle, 2nd edn (Oxford: Jackson and Lister, 1778), clxvii, clxx, clxxxvi; Mickle, Examination, 17–18, 20, 26. Dupont, Du commerce des Indes, 36, 254. WN, 130; “Of Public Credit,” in David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 357–8.
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could be. But who, then, was to be the best judge of the interests of the society? Who was to evaluate the conflicting interests of different powerful groups, one of whose interests was to convey that their own interests were identical with the interests of the state? How were the “political” interests of the state to be distinguished from its “economic” interests? How was the state to pursue its interests outside the dominion of its own sovereignty, including in the territories over which its own exclusive companies were sovereign? And how, even, was the state to pursue its own subjects, in a world in which, in Smith’s description, capital “may wander about from place to place,” and where “the proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country.”51
“real mediocrity” At least some of the economists of the 1770s were enticed, in these circumstances, by Baudeau’s fourth and least favoured alternative, of commerce without sovereignty. Morellet was willing to imagine the establishment of a completely free trade in India, even if the English, the Chinese, and the East India companies were opposed. The “Indian coasts and islands,” he wrote, were populated by “civilised nations,” who were no strangers to justice and reason. French merchants in the East Indies could depend, if not on the protection of the native sovereigns, at least on a competition between different “princes of India,” such that commerce would flow to the states with the lowest duties and the least rigorous policies. His criticism of the French company was indeed a eulogy to the “genius of the Indians” in respect of commerce, to Indian merchants rich in capital, to the natural capacity of Indians to be far more than “commissaries and employees” of European companies, and to the prospect of an infinite extension of the “commerce d’Inde en Inde”; “the Indians like every other nation will engage in commerce, if commerce brings them great profits.”52 European merchants, in a system of universal commerce, would compete as individuals, and not as subjects of sovereigns. The French would compete, as traders, with the Indians; they would compete, as consumers of oriental or American commodities, with the Poles and the Swiss. Even if the shippers of French flour and wine “were to be Arabs or Algonquins,” Baudeau wrote in 1771, the commerce would be of advantage to the French producers. “The English, the French, and the Spanish” would sell their commodities “exactly as the Swiss do today,” Turgot wrote to the English economist Josiah Tucker in 1770, looking forward with joy, “as a citizen of the world,” to the impending separation of 51 52
WN, 364, 848–9. Morellet, M´emoire, 155, 159, 193–4, 211.
global commerce and the question of sovereignty
the British (and all other) North American colonies. The illusion of an exclusive commerce, he said, was an “abominable idol,” comparable to the mania of conquest and to religious intolerance: “how many millions of people have been immolated to these three monsters!”53 Turgot even held out to Louis XVI, in his last memorandum as minister of finance, the prospect of a virtually Swiss future of unsovereign commerce. Coffee and cotton were no cheaper in France than in countries without colonies, such as “the Austrian Netherlands or Switzerland,” he suggested, and the “Flemish and Swiss” manufacturers had no difficulty in selling their products. Even for “the state considered as a political power,” or for “France, considered as a political state,” the best outcome was a complete separation of the colonies and the metropolis. The “true value of colonies for a nation,” he had written to Dupont in 1766, could be reduced to “the advantage of extending its language in a larger space.”54 Adam Smith’s conclusions were very similar. The scheme of voluntary, unconnected settlers that was attributed to him by Mickle was entirely suppositious.55 But Smith’s idyll, no less than Turgot’s, was one of free commerce with India and America. Smith was unconvinced, like Morellet, that forts were needed in Indostan, or in the territories of the Indians (“that mild and gentle people”). He was unconvinced that the climate of the West Indies imposed cultivation by hand, and by African slaves (“in the opinion of many, the drill plough might be introduced into it with great advantage”). The golden dreams of empire should be diminished to their due, modest proportions; the earlier manoeuvres of the English East India Company “must have been but as a drop of water in the immense ocean of Indian commerce.” The colonial monopoly was itself mere loss, to “the great body of the people.” This was the point, in the end, of Smith’s celebrated peroration about America, in the last words of the Wealth of Nations; that Great Britain should “endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.”56 Some of the economists of the 1760s and 1770s were even prepared to contemplate a sort of pacific and universal sovereignty. Smith’s elaborate schemes 53
54 55
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[Abb´e Baudeau], Premi`ere Introduction a` la philosophie ´economique (1771), in Daire, Physiocrates, 2:731; letter of September 12, 1770 to Josiah Tucker, in Oeuvres de Turgot, 3:422. Letter of February 20, 1766 to Dupont de Nemours, in Oeuvres de Turgot, 2:512; Turgot, “R´eflexions,” 394, 396–7. “According to the ingenious and learned Dr. Smith, ‘a free commerce with India would naturally spring up in the most beautiful order,’” Mickle wrote, in a sentence without any basis in Smith’s own words. Mickle, Examination, 16, 18. WN, 586, 732, 748, 947.
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of oceanic representation—a British–American constitution evolving over time, in which “the seat of the empire would then naturally remove itself” to the most opulent provinces, or, in an evocatively French locution, a “states-general of the British Empire,” with “fair and equal representation of all those different provinces”—imposed an etiolated version of sovereignty.57 Quesnay invoked the sacred law by which all reasonable creatures participate in the “commerce of the universe:” “it is thus that all tradable goods spread across the globe are consumed for the profit of humanity as a whole. It is thus that no wealth can belong exclusively to any nation.”58 Turgot was preoccupied with the constitutional principles of federative republics, and with procedures for extradition, asylum, and the resolution of disputes over changes in the course of rivers. Condorcet looked forward, in 1786, to a tribunal that would judge, on behalf of all nations, “the execution of laws of commerce, seizures of foreign vessels, violations of territory, the interpretation of treaties, successions, etc.”59 Even the depredations of the English East India Company, according to a book on commercial policy published anonymously in Cambridge, England, in July 1776, could be expected to become the subject of dispute, eventually, in a new global senate. The deputies from Bengal, Bihar and Orissa would arrive at the new senate (in Rome), the author imagined, to “ask justice of this assembly against England.” Do they charge the wrong “as by the authority of their state,” they would be asked, or “occasioned by the improper desires of private persons?” “This we know not,” they would answer.60
provincial life It is easy to see why the opinions of the eighteenth-century economists about global commerce have been the subject of rather little recent interest. Even the greatest of the economic theorists explored some of their most profound ideas in the course of highly empirical observations about the events of ordinary economic life. To the extent that the history of economic thought is about the origins of important or luminous ideas, it is a history with little concern for occasional, unsystematic observations. To the extent that it is the history of continuing or important policies, it has little room for the reform of long-obsolete
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WN, 625–6, 933. Quesnay, “Remarques,” 783–4. Condorcet, Vie de M. Turgot (1786), in Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1847–9), 5:214–15; “De l’influence de la r´evolution d’Am´erique sur l’Europe” (1786), in ibid., 8:22. [Anon.], A Short History of English Transactions in the East-Indies (Cambridge: Fletcher and Hodson, 1776), 158–9.
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establishments. The history of political economy has been widely understood, at least since Joseph Schumpeter’s monumental study, as the history of a subset of scientific writings on economic subjects, identified as “economic analysis.” Even Smith’s and Turgot’s writings on colonies and exclusive companies would be of little interest, on this austere view. (Schumpeter indeed described Turgot as “first and last, a great civil servant,” and said of the Wealth of Nations that it “contained no really novel ideas”).61 The mid-eighteenth-century discussions of global commerce have been of rather modest interest to other sorts of history, as well. In the complicated, continuously changing relationship between the past and the present, it is understandably difficult for political or administrative historians to summon up great enthusiasm for the history of unsuccessful institutions, like the Compagnie des Indes in the 1760s, or the Tonnage Bounty upon the Herring Buss Fishery about which Smith wrote at such inordinate length in his additions to the Wealth of Nations. There is a political difficulty, of a familiar sort, in respect of the misfortunes of the national past; as J. R. Seeley wrote of the attitude of nineteenthcentury British historians to the American Revolution: “They describe the war, apologise for our defeats, make the most of our successes . . . and then dismiss the whole subject, as if it were tedious and did not interest them.”62 There is also a different sort of difficulty, to do with political states of mind. I am reasonably confident that the details of the policies of the Compagnie des Indes, or of the price of fish, were of intense interest, at least for a short period of time in the 1760s and 1770s, to considerable numbers of people in England and France. But it is extraordinarily difficult, now, to think oneself into a state of mind in which important questions of political principle, political friendship, and economic destiny were discussed in these terms, of bye-laws and of herrings. The writings with which this essay has been concerned are anomalous in terms of the distinction between more or less lofty sorts of thought. But they also transgress a different distinction, between national and colonial (or international) history, or between the history of Europe and the history of the expansion of Europe. The economists of the 1760s and early 1770s were writing immediately before the prodigious transformation in national identity, national sovereignty, and national historiography of the period of the American and the French revolutions (to which their own ideas of a national economy contributed in important respects). But the distinction between interior and exterior events was much less fixed, for Turgot or for Smith in the 1770s. The history of the 61 62
Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 3, 185, 246. J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1888), 150–51.
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French or British governments was a history, in substantial part, of corporations and colonies and exclusive companies. Like the distinction between political observation and political or economic theory, the frontier between the nation and the world was much less well identified for them than it is for us. It is just this indistinction, in fact, that is so intriguing about the economists’ ideas. They did not, in their writings on colonies and companies, invent new or enduring concepts. But they explored the limits of their existing concepts, sometimes in extraordinarily profound respects. They examined the limits of the economy (or the system of interdependent economic forces), and its relationship to the state, “considered as a political power.” They looked at the limits of the idyll of free commerce, at home and overseas. They examined the economic and other interests of individuals and states, and the multiple interests and identities of individuals, colonies, corporations, and companies. The investigation of unsuccessful ideas has been of much less interest, in general, to the history of economic thought than to other kinds of intellectual history. This is perhaps unfortunate. But the particular opportunities of the 1760s and 1770s are not even, now, entirely obsolete. In the continuing ebb and flow of economic history, they are once again of present interest. The powerful semisovereign corporations of the early or pre-colonial period are thus of somewhat greater interest in our own (post-colonial) times than they were in the heyday of imperial power in the nineteenth century. So too are the preoccupations of the mid-eighteenth-century economists with the limits of laissez-faire, and the limits of sovereignty. How is it possible, for example, to depict the activities of the state in a world of imperfect sovereignty and asymmetric information? What is the theory of the multinational, multicultural and multi-jurisdiction corporation? How is national income or national wealth to be measured, in a universe of imputed, invisible, or intra-corporate flows? And how, above all, is freedom of commerce to be reconciled with other, equally imposing and even more exigent objectives? The disputes of the 1760s and 1770s over global commerce may even be of interest, finally, in respect of a rather different historical inquiry. All history is concerned, in one way or another, with Ranke’s question of how it really was, in the mind or in the world. The period with which this essay has been concerned, especially in France, has been the object of intense historical interest. It is the most famous pre-revolutionary period in history, and the question of what people were thinking about—or of the ideological origins of the French Revolution—has been an object of continuous interest since the 1790s.63 The writings that have been the subject of this paper, from Raynal’s Histoire, with its beautiful Javanese and 63
See Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12–27.
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lascivious Peruvians, to Smith’s observations on herrings, suggest that one of the things people were thinking about was global commerce, and its connections to global and local politics. The story has returned, in the end, to provincialism. The word provincia, much used by Cicero, is thought to be a contraction of pro-noventia, or pro-nuntia, and thus to be associated in its etymology with nuntius, or “a bearer of news, one who brings intelligence,” and by extension “a command, order, injunction.”64 I said at the outset that some of the greatest of the economists of the 1760s and 1770s were provincial, or at least found themselves in provincial and isolated circumstances. But they were at the same time interested, even enthralled, by the new and literally global world of commerce. They were interested, in particular, in the possibility (or impossibility) of transporting information, or injunctions, or sovereignty, over very large distances. It was perhaps this juxtaposition of the provincial and the oceanic, the immediate and the universal, of power and of the limits of power, that was itself, as it was for the constitutional revolutionaries of the same epoch, a source of their own prodigious imagination.
64
provincia, nuntius, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 27–54. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000039 Printed in the United Kingdom
the dialectic of liberty: law and religion in anglo-american culture robert a. ferguson School of Law, Columbia University
The separation of church and state disguised the coordination of two very different conceptions of liberty at work in Revolutionary America, one with a religious basis in radical Protestant thought and the other with a legal basis in the secular Enlightenment. The essay combines the disciplines of law, literature, and intellectual history to investigate these contrasting formulations and their changing relationship. Crosscultural analysis of the language of protest in both England and America gives the investigation a crucial focus. It also explains a larger movement from direct influence to refraction in Anglo-American relations. The interdisciplinary approach is critical to understanding how the same language came to mean different things. Exegesis of the common law tradition in England and close rhetorical analysis of pulpit oratory and legal pamphleteering in Revolutionary America reveal a striking shift in the meaning of liberty as legal explanation trumped religious protest in the process of national formations. Properly understood, the paradoxical role of the American lawyer was to cap revolutionary impulses through the manipulation of the language of a bible culture. Legal positivism replaced natural law as a ruling impulse in the definition of rights, and a republic based on the right of revolution became a nation state where the test of membership would be loyalty. The long-term result has been that the citizen faces a permanent and often puzzling dichotomy best understood in dialectical terms. National identity, while secular, responds to providential invocation in the American republic of laws, and protest finds its most potent voice in religious expression.
Liberty in the eighteenth century was simultaneously the most cherished right that a people could possess and the most volatile term of distinction in political debate. “There is no word that admits of more various significations and has made more various impressions than that of liberty,” Montesquieu wrote in 1748. By 1776, the English-speaking world assumed “there is not a word in the whole compass of language which expresses so much of what is important and excellent”: most agreed that “the sound of that single word, LIBERTY, should be 27
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equal to an army of other words.”1 Liberty, in consequence, emerged as the term of choice in disagreement, spawning literal armies of words in the pamphlet wars of the Anglo-American conflict. Since liberty covered all that was right, it could be turned into anything that was needed, and the same writer often used the term in different ways without distinguishing between connotations. Universal resort has, in fact, complicated the question of origins. What are the actual roots of the discourse on liberty in early America and what do they suggest about the ideological dimensions of its continuing use? The eighteenth century experienced a strategic and now largely hidden conflict over the idea of liberty—a conflict with significance for the modern body politic. Two competing modes of thought established a republic based on liberty in America. The first mode, new-world Protestantism, provided the oppositional platform from which insecure provincials challenged their mother country. Clergymen were the rhetorical masters of a bible culture, and they used their knowledge to produce the moral differentiation, the dissenting vocabulary, the prospect of union, and the weekly indoctrination from the pulpit that colonials needed in order to come together against the power and hegemony of the British empire. Not for nothing did the loyalist historian Peter Oliver name the ministry “the black regiment” with “so active a Part in the Rebellion.”2 The second contributing mode of thought drew upon the idea of law. The idea itself came through English common law and the legal treatises of the European Enlightenment, but Americans quickly made these sources their own. American legal thought created its own oppositional discourse, and it triumphed in the making of the republic. For while ministers gave Revolutionary Americans much of their courage to fight, lawyers defined the event and capped its directions. Wasn’t it logical for early republican lawyers to replace colonial ministers in shaping the republic?3 Many have said so, but the chronological argument 1
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Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner Press, 1949), 149 (Bk 11, No. 2); Richard Price, “Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America,” Hibernian Magazine 6 (1776), 77; Thomas Bernard, An Appeal to the Public, Stating and Considering the Objections to the Quebec Bill (London, 1774), 28. Peter Oliver, Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (1781), ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schultz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 41. See also Alice M. Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1928); Alan E. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); and Richard H. Brown, “Spreading the Word: Rural Clergymen and the Communication Network of 18th-Century New England,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 94 (1982), 1–14. Edmund S. Morgan, “The American Revolution Considered as an Intellectual Movement,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr and Morton White, eds., Paths of American Thought (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 11.
the dialectic of liberty: law and religion in anglo-american culture
falters over the issue of origins, and it fails to assess how liberty operates as the lynchpin of choice in cultural understandings. When in crisis, the sometimes loosely joined United States have needed all of their intellectual resources, one of which has been “In God We Trust.” Providence has always been a resource in articulating the promised liberty of America. In the crucible of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln permanently attached the national mission of liberty to religious understandings through his Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, and Second Inaugural. One of his last acts would be to urge his cabinet to devise an amendment that would bring God into the fabric of the Constitution.4 The recognition that religious explanation joins legal explanation in the construction of American liberty leaves many questions unanswered.5 If the religious sources of liberty are powerful and significant, why did they disappear from civil discourse so rapidly in the early republic? Where, in the continuing dialectic, are the religious contributions to civil and political liberty in American life? How did religious and legal sources of liberty interact to produce a distinct American understanding? What, if anything, does a closer look at religious explanation restore to a balanced understanding of American liberty? The following four sections take up each of these questions in turn and in order of difficulty.
i The removal of religious voices from political discourse in the postRevolutionary era remains one of the neglected stories in American history. There are essentially three reasons for ecclesiastical disenfranchisement, and each reflects a corresponding strength in the legal temperament. First, the rise of the commercial republic undercut the ministry on both financial and rhetorical grounds even as it enhanced the legal profession.6 Second, the doctrine of separation of church and state—with enforcement by the legal profession— silenced the ministry on issues crucial to republican formations.7 Third,
4 5
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Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson, 3 vols. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1909–11), 2:190. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965); J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660– 1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–45, 296–372. Emory Elliott, “The Dove and Serpent: The Clergy in the American Revolution,” American Quarterly 31 (Summer 1979), 187–203, and Don Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 152–4. Leonard W. Levy, “State Establishments of Religion,” in The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986), 25–62, and Michael W. McConnell, “The Origins and Historical Understanding of Free Exercise of Religion,” Harvard Law Review 103 (May 1990), 1436–7.
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secularization provided alternatives to religious explanations of phenomena.8 Science, psychology, economics, and history, as well as law, challenged religious exegesis, but it was legal thought that co-opted political interpretation from the pulpit and qualified most vestiges of public religious explanation. Courts today restrict religious expression in the civic sphere whenever the secular interest of the state is thought to be present.9 Nothing proves the rivalry between legal and religious thought in America more conclusively than the clumsiness of law in dealing with religious issues. With some exasperation, Justice Byron White complained in 1973 that “one cannot seriously believe that the history of the First Amendment furnishes unequivocal answers to many of the fundamental issues of church–state relations.” “In the end,” he added defensively, “the courts have fashioned answers to these questions as best they can.”10 Their best, however, has not been good enough for most critics. Leading commentators describe an “Alice in Wonderland” quality in Supreme Court treatment of the religious provisions of the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution. As Leonard Levy has observed, “the Court exercises a freedom almost legislative in character, bringing us close to the intolerable, a Humpty Dumpty Court,” where language means whatever the court says it means.11 More recent observers find “little doctrinal stability,” an “ahistorical manner,” “inattention to original meaning,” and willful inconsistencies in the judiciary’s approaches to religious issues.12 Legal confusion and cultural acrimony achieved new heights in June of 2002, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided that the Pledge of Allegiance could be unconstitutional for containing the phrase “one nation under God.”13 These difficulties belong to a longstanding dialectic in which law and religion have shared the national arena.
8 9
10 11 12 13
Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 24 (1967), 3–43. See Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971) (forbidding “an excessive government entanglement with religion”); County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties, 492 U.S. 573 (1989) (holding unconstitutional a display of a nativity scene on the main staircase of a county courthouse); Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1984) (forbidding a one-minute period of silence in public schools “for meditation or voluntary prayer”); and Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992) (forbidding prayers as part of an official school graduation ceremony). Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist, 413 U.S. 756, 820 (1973). Levy, The Establishment Clause, 180–81, and Philip B. Kurland, “The Religion Clauses and the Burger Court,” Catholic University Law Review 34 (Fall 1984), 14. Jesse H. Choper, “A Century of Religious Freedom,” California Law Review 88 (December 2000), 1741, and McConnell, “Origins and Historical Understanding,” 1410–15. Michael A. Newdow v. U.S. Congress, United States of America, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (June 26, 2002), No. 00-16423 (D.C. No. CV-00-00495MLS/Pan), and the New York Times, June 27, 2002.
the dialectic of liberty: law and religion in anglo-american culture
Hardest to appreciate in the rivalry have been the linguistic homologies that allowed eighteenth-century law to subsume religious thought. Law took the place of religion in civil discourse through structural equivalencies. Providence could be found in Nature as “Nature’s God” and, therefore, in something called “the law of nature.” It followed that rights once sacred because “antecedent to all earthly government” and “derived from the great Legislator of the universe” could enter legal lexicons instead as inalienable rights, or as natural rights, or even as man-made rights, as long as they began from time immemorial or time out of memory.14 Eighteenth-century religious understandings found little to fault in these transitions. Patriots, most of whom were believers, welcomed progress in legal rights as part of a divine plan. They saw correspondences in the forms of presentation: scripture to precedent, dogma to doctrine, liturgy to procedure, sin to crime, the voice of God to the voice of the people. And there were good reasons for their presumed familiarity. Each parallel and resemblance referred back to legal origins in religious thought, and every lawyer’s use of them took the form of professional instinct. Law carved its emerging place out of medieval Christian conceptions of authority and organization. The law took what the Church could give it—often a great deal—and it continued to take at every opportunity. The parallels remind us that the shift towards legal explanation in the early republic should not be overstated. Ministers remained active in celebrating “the sacred cause of liberty,” in shaping “visions of a republican millennium,” and in crafting the so-called Second Great Awakening, a revivalist event that reached many Americans in the 1790s.15 Religious fervor may even have increased within the general culture. Nevertheless, religious discourse had less to do with civic identity in the early republic than in the colonial period, and it fell increasingly under the sway of natural legal rights.16 One can go further. The proficiency with which the law superseded religion in republican formations has created a conceptual divide in the history of ideas. Religious displacement from civic
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John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, and Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1850–56), 3:449, 462; 4:292. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957; rpt New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 30–55, 232–3, 241. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), and Donald G. Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830,” American Quarterly 21 (Spring 1969), 23–43. Charles Evans, “preface to vol. 3,” in Evans, ed., American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of All Books, Pamphlets, and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America, 1639–1800 (Chicago: Blakely Press, 1905), 3:vii, and Clark, The Language of Liberty, 44–5.
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discourse has made it harder to determine how early Americans actually thought about the public sphere, and the ease with which law supplanted its philosophical rival has made it just as difficult to differentiate what remains from what has been displaced in public understandings. A minor incident within a major event can signal the dimensions of the problem. The most daring American military campaign in the course of the Revolution—a campaign doomed to failure from the outset—involved the invasion of Canada in 1775 with the conquest of Quebec as its goal. The Reverend Samuel Spring, chaplain of the Revolutionary brigade that marched on Quebec, tells us that before the expedition set off he gave a rallying sermon to the troops over the grave of George Whitefield, the leading revivalist of the Great Awakening in the 1740s. But Spring did more than preach. Eye-witness accounts reveal that he descended into the grave itself to remove the collar and wristbands of Whitefield, who had died five years before, and that he solemnly distributed pieces from the articles of clothing to the officers of the expedition in a pledge of their righteous cause.17 Quebec had been targeted because of colonial reactions to the Quebec Act of 1774, in which Parliament validated Roman Catholicism in Canada. American patriots saw the Quebec Act as a Jesuitical plot and their own response as the struggle of liberty against arbitrary power and papal tyranny. To take Quebec would secure the continent for a Protestant vision of this world—and the next!18 Whitefield, the great itinerant preacher who won converts in mass revivals all over America, stood for three useful propositions: first, the inter-colonial character of the Great Awakening and, hence, the projected unity of the Revolutionary brigade; second, God’s imminent involvement in American destiny, which certified the connection between political and religious rights; and third, the power of the religious voice in American thought, which made ministers guardians of liberty. There is a balance within the dialectic to be struck here. Even relatively secular Americans had little choice but to think through a religious frame of reference: it was the mental equipment that people brought to daily life and the ordering device for history and communal well-being. Furthermore, the root of this 17
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Samuel Peters, “Genuine History of Gen. Arnold, by an old Acquaintance,” Political Magazine [London] 1 (Nov.–Dec. 1780), 746; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 23–4, 383; J. T. Headley, The Chaplains and Clergy of the Revolution (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864), 92–3. Samuel Sherwood, The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness: An Address on the Times (1776), in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 512. See Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, 74–9, and Stephen J. Stein, “An Apocalyptic Rationale for the American Revolution,” Early American Literature 9 (Winter 1975), 211–25.
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conception required the thinker to accept a premise that Samuel Adams, the organizer of Boston mobs, gave most succinctly. In words that came from many lips throughout the crisis, Adams claimed: “The Religion and public Liberty of a People are intimately connected; their interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together.”19
ii What did it mean to think that public liberty and religion would rise or fall so certainly together? Although the first radical dissenters in religion colonized America for a variety of reasons (including commercial gain), their eighteenthcentury descendants gave priority to one motivation. By 1765, the first settlers came for religious liberty, a vital first freedom. But while “the first place is due religion,” it was “a love of universal liberty” that supplied the real motivation for settlement, thereby joining the first Puritans to the Sons of Liberty a century and a half later. The connection, however artificial, was ideologically momentous: it created an account that was at once legally correct (based on precedent) and religiously sound (part of God’s plan). John Adams summarized the premises involved: “I always considered the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”20 The same narrative put the colonies and the colonial speaker at the center of human history. John Adams assumed Americans knew the most about the spread of liberty because either a new kind or a special degree of liberty— they amounted to the same thing for Adams—had been born in America. Colonials of all persuasions easily accepted this flattering account, although it was a European, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who offered the most graphic expression. Reshaping an ugly image to explain how religion worked to the benefit of America, Crevecoeur thought he knew why religious belief would lead to harmony instead of persecution in “the most perfect society now existing in the world.” Religion resembled gunpowder. In Europe, where it was confined, it tended to explode; in America, spread to the four winds, the gunpowder of religion burned harmlessly but with a glorious flame for all to enjoy.21 19
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Samuel Adams, “Article Signed ‘Valerius Poplicola’” (Boston Gazette, October 5, 1772), in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 2 vols. (1906; New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1968), 2:336. John Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” in Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 3:445–64. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, “Letter III: What Is An American?”, Letters from an American Farmer (1782) (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 36, 47.
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The claims of Adams, Crevecoeur, and many others sound like naive exercises in self-aggrandizement, and so they were. They allowed everyone who believed them to feel important. But the same claims were central to unifying formations, and behind them was a religious fervor that lent conviction to mere assertion and place to provincialism. In 1742 Jonathan Edwards, the greatest philosopher of early America, supplied an elaborate rendition of the free society in America and what it meant for the world and beyond. The earthly fulfillment of this society added an electrifying dimension to divine promise. “The days are coming when the saints shall reign on earth,” observed Edwards in a direct appeal to civic leaders. All Americans were meant to unite in “a strange revolution” that would “renew the world of mankind.” “This work will begin in America,” Edwards insisted, and he already saw “the first fruits of that glorious day.”22 One did not have to be a revivalist to emphasize the connection of religious and civil liberty in the formation of a unified society. In A Discourse on the Christian Union from 1760, Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, called on all Americans to “stand fast in the liberty wherewith the gospel has made us free.” Stiles drew analogies between “the equality and independence of every congregational apostolic church” and the freedom in harmony of “the thirteen provinces on this continent.” What were churches if not little colonies? Stiles found “the same principles may take place in confederating a multitude of lesser bodies, as in confederating larger bodies, such as provinces, cantons, and kingdoms.”23 The Revolution translated these confederating aspects of religious liberty into political action. The premises from Edwards and Stiles left no need for disagreement: a religious people deserved to be free. Thus far, the religious components of liberty in eighteenth-century America can be traced with some assurance. But how many eighteenth-century Americans listened to ministers who preached like Jonathan Edwards and Ezra Stiles? Even if they listened, and even if churchgoing was the major social activity of the time, did Americans act upon such statements? Historians disagree over these issues and debate the intricacies of denominational, class, and regional difference. If, however, the investigation turns not on belief but on political understanding, a broader connection can be seen. The radical dissenting basis of religion in eighteenth-century America, roughly 75 percent of the population as opposed to
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Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England, in Peter N. Carroll, ed., Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution (Waltham, MA: Ginn-Baisdell, 1970), 2–9. Ezra Stiles, A Discourse on the Christian Union, in Carroll, ed., Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution, 69–70.
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less than 10 percent in England, made a difference in politics.24 How much of a difference? That is the obvious question that remains. A good answer must carry beyond religious liberty and toward a general conception of liberty from a religious perspective. One of the shrewdest observers of the times, Edmund Burke, gave a celebrated summary of the American situation before Parliament in 1775: Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people, is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are protestants; and of that kind, which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.25
A great deal lay behind Burke’s recognition of a “free spirit” and “principle of energy,” particularly in his related implication that both characteristics flowed from religion and toward a political stance about authority. Burke saw the religious temperament that would attach certain ideas about liberty to republican inceptions. Dissenting Protestantism in America—“adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion”—measured temporal authority in severe terms. Worldly leaders were suspect, and that suspicion led to expansive notions of civil liberty for the subject and an implied equality of consequences for all. American ministers never tired of noting that kings and counselors went down in the end just like ordinary people. Three of the most renowned rejoinders to authority in colonial America took this route, all from ministers who raised conceptions of liberty through the deaths of kings: they were Benjamin Colman’s Government the Pillar of the Earth in 1730, Jonathan Mayhew’s A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers in 1750, and Samuel Davies’s On the Death of His Late Majesty, King George II in 1760. Benjamin Colman, pastor of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, preached before the civil authorities of Massachusetts. He began by proclaiming that any speaker filled with the Spirit had the right to address “nobles and rulers, captains and the mighty men” in order to “lay ’em low before God.” He finished by denouncing all temporal authority as ephemeral and suspect in the best of circumstances. Colman took his text from 1 Samuel: “For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and He hath set the world upon them.” The leaders in front of
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See Sacvan Bercovitch, “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution,” Massachusetts Review 17 (1976), 597–630, and Clark, The Language of Liberty, 13. Edmund Burke,“On Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols. (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1803), 3:52, 54–5.
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him were God’s earthly pillars, but every one of them would soon “moulder into dust”; that is, if God’s “pleasure” didn’t destroy them first (“he disposes of them as he pleases”). The godly ruler was to be obeyed, but what of the ungodly ruler? Colman placed his own trust in Samson, the warrior who tore down the pillars of the Philistines. “Put not your Trust in Princes,” he thundered. “We must not look too much at the loftiness of any, nor lean too much on any earthly pillar.”26 The rhetorical power in Colman’s challenge had several prongs. A minister could use the veil of scripture to say what no secular speaker would dare to utter, and this level of freedom of speech belonged by implication to any one of God’s vessels when properly inspired. Then, too, and even when trivialized, civil authority had no rhetorical counter to a minister who questioned the world through the guiding hand of providence. Jonathan Mayhew took up the problem of the ungodly ruler with a vengeance. The gist of Mayhew’s position in A Discourse on Unlimited Submission came when he announced the right to “speak freely” in America. Speaking freely meant choosing between polar opposites. True Protestants lived “on the side of liberty, the Bible, and common sense, in opposition to tyranny, priestcraft, and nonsense.” Common sense clarified scripture and liberty; both came directly from heaven and reached down to the people’s earthly capacity, enabling them to act as proper judges when a ruler oppressed them. The execution of Charles I was Mayhew’s announced theme, but it served in A Discourse on Unlimited Submission to claim a general liberty to overthrow ungodly rulers.27 Samuel Davies’s eulogy for George II in 1760 applied the patterns of Colman and Mayhew to another aspect of liberty that would figure prominently in Revolutionary rhetoric. The Virginia evangelist and new president of the College of New Jersey chose an ambiguous text from 2 Samuel for his sermon, “How are the Mighty fallen!” George was mighty, but he had fallen. Everyone agreed that George II had been a good monarch, but the question was whether George III could rise to the same level, and this uncertainty, like the ambiguity in the scriptural text, supplied an opening. The people had the right to judge between a good and a bad king; for only a king who preserved liberty and the Protestant religion would find willing obedience in America. Davies then turned to the subject of how the people would exercise their judgement.
26
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Benjamin Colman, Government the Pillar of the Earth: A Sermon Preached at the Lecture in Boston, Before His Excellency, Jonathan Belcher, Esq; Captain General and Commander in Chief, August 13th, 1730 (Boston, MA: T. Hancock, 1730). Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (1750), in Carroll, ed., Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution, 30, 41.
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His description of the people’s happiness under George II allowed Davies to take the next step toward a right of happiness. George II had known the “godlike pleasure of making multitudes happy.” The colonies, by enjoying his success in a “happy reign” of 34 years, had also grown accustomed to it. Again and again, Davies emphasized the happiness of the people. “Happy!” he warbled, “thrice happy, to live under a reign so gentle and auspicious!” No one could raise a circumstance of life so intensely without contemplation of the opposite condition. What if the people were not happy? Repeating the virtues in George II that George III would have to live up to, Davies raised worries that would become a refrain in America. There was a danger of “evil counselors” and “mischievous influence.” He closed on an ominous note that would be long remembered. “We can be certain,” Davies warned, “of almost nothing but what is past.” The gloom in this cautionary note brought the subject of liberty to the edge of a curious inversion. The pursuit of happiness as a positive right would prove most immediately useful to experts on unhappiness.28 Gad Hitchcock, pastor of Pembroke Church in Boston, would be that expert in 1774, when he preached what he called his “moving sermon.” The performance was moving because his nominal host, General Thomas Gage, the new military governor of Massachusetts, stalked out in the middle with his retinue in tow. Hitchcock copied other ministers by cloaking himself in the veil of scripture. His text came from Proverbs 29:2: “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” In a performance filled with suspense, Hitchcock steadfastly clung to the sorrows of his people, leaving to his audience the implied conclusion of evil rulers. “The people mourn!” he repeated over and over again in tones of drawn-out sadness. “It is, however, certain that the people mourn!”29 The adroitness in this strategy lay in the impossibility of a response. If the people were the best judges of their own happiness, and if the people were supposed to be happy and they were not happy, who but their leaders could be at fault? Unhappiness became its own sufficient indictment. The pursuit of happiness as part of liberty had many sources, but Christian theology offered something more: complete happiness. Its radical Protestant variants in colonial America added the certitude of typological verification (biblical scripture carried into historical parallels) and millennialism (the conviction that God’s plan included a 1,000-year reign of happiness on earth).
28 29
Samuel Davies, On the Death of His Late Majesty, King George II, in Carroll, ed., Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution, 17–23. Gad Hitchcock, An Election Sermon (1774), in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983), 1:281–304.
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Religion in America knew what to do with happiness as a realizable social goal. The relevant biblical quotation that appeared everywhere on Revolutionary lips came from the fourth chapter of the book of Micah. The passage began with a still acclaimed notion of peace (“they shall beat their swords into plowshares”), but the emphasis in eighteenth-century understandings fell upon the personal happiness that would result therefrom: “they shall sit every man under his vine and his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it.” The passage offers an example of the dialectic of liberty at work. The farmer secure on his own land joined Lockean, common law, continental legal, and religious notions. Inasmuch as security through the right of property appealed to every commonwealth theory of government and law, the passage welcomed recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. That said, an expansive reading put the emphasis in the quotation squarely on “every man,” not just the landowner, and this more general vision of propertied ease played better in boundless America, where the religious context of the passage added to that significance. The figure under his own vine and fig tree was important because he was unafraid. He had achieved tranquility. Montesquieu gave the often cited legal version of the definition in The Spirit of the Laws. “The political liberty of the subject,” he wrote, “is a tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety.”30 There was a paradox in the definition that only a religious perspective could solve. In a legal or political frame of reference, the notion of tranquility vied with a “country or Whig” impulse, the need for vigilance. How could anyone be tranquil in the enjoyment of liberty while remaining ever alert against the many dangers that threatened? Although a religious temperament also required vigilance, the focus of attention involved more manageable sources and a different mechanism of control. The secular lover of liberty worried about a plethora of external pressures on liberty— tyranny, faction, luxury, the ignorant multitude, minority interests, Indian attack, imbalance in government, economic failure, foreign invasion, civil war, incompetent leadership, dissident groups, individual traitors, and so on. The list was endless and largely beyond the observer’s control. True, the enlightened observer could turn embattled participant, but then all sense of tranquility would be lost. By way of contrast, a religious temperament lumped every difficulty into one comprehensive category: sin.31 The category itself was large but ideologically under control. The first directive against sin asked each person to look within; 30 31
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 151 (Bk 11, No. 6). Samuel West, A Sermon Preached before the Honorable Council, and the Honorable House of Representatives of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, May 29th, 1776, in Carroll, ed., Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution, 146, and Sherwood, The Church’s
the dialectic of liberty: law and religion in anglo-american culture
only then did one reach for the external world and blame it for one’s troubles. The message from the pulpit was simple. Solve the inner problem of sin and everything would follow in combinations of the godly people of America. In the crisis of the Revolution, minister after minister intoned with the tranquility of conviction, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”32 In America, the biblical man who sat unafraid under his own vine and fig tree became a symbol of liberty because “God hath spoken it.” Civil or legal and spiritual liberty were inseparable but with primacy given to a religious frame of reference. Nathaniel Niles, minister and lawyer, displayed how this conflated conception of liberty would operate in Two Discourses on Liberty, a sermon delivered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1774. Liberty was the highest earthly good, but Niles substantiated the claim by proving that civil liberty depended on spiritual liberty: “the former without the latter, is but a body without a soul.” Because the civil and spiritual elements were inseparable and the blessings of heaven, liberty was a duty as well as a right: “it is a loan of heaven, for which we must account with the great God.” The individual Christian was to unite with the whole in a cosmic vision of America’s struggle with England. Niles’s metaphor for union turned the individual into a drop in the river of God. “The smallest particles have their influence,” he observed. God would take care of the whole if each of his servants exercised a part in proper godliness. If you accepted God, spiritual liberty united America.33 It is almost impossible to exaggerate the confidence with which the religious view of liberty galvanized colonial Americans and clarified each stage of America’s uncertain struggle with England. The vast majority involved in that struggle believed that cosmic forces dictated the nature and degree of civic well-being. Historical events contained a spiritual significance—all pointing toward the spread of liberty. “This was from God” ran a typical explanation from the pulpit when Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, “that God who made us free, who gave us our birth-right liberty.”34 Ministers told their anxious flocks that only
32
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Flight into the Wilderness, in Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 523–5. Samuel Langdon, Government corrupted by Vice, and recovered by Righteousness, A Sermon Preached Before the Honorable Congress of the Colony of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England . . . the 31st Day of May, 1775, and David Jones, Defensive War in a just Cause SINLESS, A Sermon Preached On the Day of the Continental Fast (1775), in Carroll, ed., Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution, 141, 146. Nathaniel Niles, Two Discourses on Liberty, in Hyneman and Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:258–9, 270–74. Joseph Emerson, A Thanksgiving-Sermon Preach’d at Pepperrell, July 24, 1766 . . . On Account of the Repeal of the Stamp-Act, in Carroll, ed., Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution, 89–90.
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authentic religion could make a citizen bold or a soldier brave; only such a person would grasp the true nature of liberty.35 Similar assumptions held sway in the Revolutionary army. When Ethan Allen, elected leader of the Green Mountain Boys of New Hampshire, demanded the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga of its British commander in 1775, he did so “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.”36 What happened to this confidence and control of American destiny through a religious conception of liberty as the source of collective happiness? After the Revolution, ministers maintained the spiritual keeping of their congregations, but they lost the capacity to represent the gathered community in political thought. Benjamin Colman’s crumbling pillars in Government the Pillar of the Earth back in 1730 gave a clue as to what would occur. The confidence of the ministry to speak on civil affairs came from a premise that Colman rendered with great precision. “As government is the pillar of the earth,” he preached then, “so religion is the pillar of government.”37 Americans stopped believing that statement in quite the same way as they went about the formation of republican institutions. Religion remained a concern and for many a central concern, but it was no longer the pillar, no longer the explanatory tool, no longer the primal voice of liberty. The keeping of liberty had passed to the legal mind in America. Something, however, had been lost in the process, and at moments communal sense of that loss would lead to resurgence in the religious side of the dialectic. Religion spoke to the people in a way that law never can. For while the law possesses many virtues, it smells of the lamp, of calculation and reason, of an elitist response; none of these elements ever tells the wistfully searching subject much about happiness.38
iii What difference did passage to a secular discourse on liberty make? Each of the freedoms just noted in religious discourse—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the emerging ideal of equality, even the pursuit of happiness—were entrenched in legal argument well before the Revolution, and lawyers quickly inscribed each liberty in the republican framework. The question, then, remains 35
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Samuel West, On the Right to Rebel Against Governors (1776), and Simeon Howard, A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston (1773), in Hyneman and Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:432, 200. George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (New York: World Publishing Co., 1957), 66, 51, 40, 339, 428, 433. Colman, Government the Pillar of the Earth, 22. John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 56–9.
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a serious one. What, if anything, has been lost to discussions of liberty by removing religious voices from civic discourse? Religion and law were competing frames of reference in the eighteenth century because they thought differently about common conceptions of authority and legitimacy. If religion demanded a higher faith and the truth of revelation, the law placed its own narrower faith in human artifice and the power of argument. Religion, particularly in its revivalist mode, touched the affections and called on heaven; law insisted on reason and sought answers in human behavior. Religion assumed divine protection; law protected the rights of those who held proper standing within its rules and who knew how to complain when those rights were infringed. Religion ordered the cosmos; law decided individual cases in dispute. Religion sought all-or-nothing answers; the watchword in every legal answer was balance. Religion searched for the spirit in the word; law classified words for use. These distinctions can be exaggerated, but even as approximations they led eighteenth-century proponents of each framework to regard civil liberty in different ways. Although eighteenth-century law agreed with religion in making liberty an absolute value, it approached the subject in more instrumental ways. Civil liberty and social happiness in a legal understanding depended less on abstractions like virtue and righteousness and more on a well-made constitution and a proper set of laws.39 The civil liberty to be sought became, in consequence, less a cosmic aspiration and more a calculation of what a culture could bear to receive within its available conformities and conventions. Liberty could thrive in a legal understanding only in keeping with existing communal customs.40 Philosophically, the legal notion of civil liberty rested on a cautious, nearly redundant foundation. Liberty existed where it could be tolerated; it depended on a rule of law, which is to say on the degree to which ruler and ruled agreed to be governed.41 These tactical considerations meant that the law recognized civil liberty through an enumeration of values in context, and the context in colonial America was English common law. As Englishmen, eighteenth-century Americans claimed the right to life, the right of habeas corpus, the right of free speech, the right to a public trial before a jury of one’s peers, the right of property, and the related protections of the British constitution. They also understood that these rights extended somewhat vaguely to a right to resist oppression. But this last
39 40 41
John Adams, “Preface,” Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1787–8), in Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 4:284–7, 292–4, 298. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 292 (Bk 19, Sect. 2). E. P. Thompson, “The Rule of Law,” in Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Acts (New York: Random House, 1975), 258–69.
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right remained very abstract, and it was further qualified by uncertainty over the import of the term “oppression” and by the assumption that the British constitution provided the perfect vehicle of liberty for everyone fortunate enough to fall under its sway. Notably, the clearest justification for resisting oppression in Anglo-American culture came from the one non-lawyer to contribute greatly to an English concept of law, John Locke, though even Locke, at the end of The Second Treatise of Government, qualified the right of resistance, and claimed limited ground for it through natural law. Locke deliberately eschewed all argument based on English common law and the ancient constitution, an extraordinary absence in the political theory of the times. Only “a long train of Abuses,” language repeated in the Declaration of Independence, should arouse the people. Of regime change, Locke dealt only in circumlocutions, writing of “Cases whereby a King may Un-king himself.”42 The triggering term for action, oppression, was a floating signifier in the legal rhetoric of the eighteenth century. The point on the continuum between unwarranted intrusion, which called for redress, and oppression, which might justify resistance, could be identified in different ways, and it could also be treason to talk too much about the distinction or to define the line too finely. The American Sons of Liberty tried to handle the problem by removing all middle ground between the polarities of liberty and slavery to justify rebellion.43 Here, of course, was the answer to Samuel Johnson’s celebrated jibe: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”44 The two greatest discursive productions of the legal mind in America during the Revolutionary period were John Dickinson’s Letters From A Farmer in Pennsylvania and the collaboration of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in The Federalist. The two pamphlet series—12 letters by Dickinson in 1767 and 1768, 85 by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in 1787 and 1788—illustrated the propositions noted above, but they did more. Written at the beginning and the end of the Revolutionary period, they reflected the problems and the continuities of American legal attitudes toward liberty. As Dickinson’s letters awakened the colonies to a qualified but sustained spirit of resistance, so The Federalist formalized the accomplishment of republican formations in the ratification fight over the Federal Constitution. Dickinson, though unwillingly, brought Americans to the edge of rebellion; The Federalist, quite willingly, capped the Revolution in 42 43 44
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, student edn, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 76–9, 405, 418–22. John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1–84. Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny; an Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (1775), in Donald J. Green, ed., Political Writings: The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume X (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 454.
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the name of a new order.45 Together, they placed legal restraints on the concept of liberty in contradistinction to the more open-ended avowals of religious thought. Dickinson was “the penman of the Revolution,” centrally involved in every major formal inter-colonial document of law from the Stamp Act in 1765 to the Federal Constitution in 1787. Nevertheless, he was known best in the eighteenth century for his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Letters galvanized American opposition against “taxation without representation” as no other writing.46 It offered the best legal explanation of the colonial right to resist British authority. Dickinson could boast “a greater knowledge in history, and the laws and constitution of my country than is generally attained by men of my class.”47 He then confirmed it by festooning his arguments with footnotes from authorities in English and continental law. But this legal erudition, based on four years of study at the Middle Temple in London, would prove to be a straitjacket on the subject of liberty. Dickinson’s commitment to liberty came through the British constitution and common law, and it restricted him to a theory of resistance within the British empire. Although every letter from the Farmer summoned Americans to resist British encroachments, he insisted that “the cause of liberty is a cause of too much dignity to be sullied by turbulence and tumult” (III:17). Resistance by force could be justified only when “the people are FULLY CONVINCED that any further submission will be destructive to their happiness.” Even then, Dickinson refused to contemplate formal rupture between England and her colonies: “we are as much dependent on Great Britain, as a perfectly free people can be on another” (II:8; III:18–20). He agreed with English commentators like Samuel Johnson, who noted that the rights of Englishmen came with legal obligations; the assertion of the former included accountability to the latter.48 Acceptance of English law left Dickinson with another problem. Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania repeatedly posed a question to which there was no
45 46
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See Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). Carl F. Kaestle, “The Public Reaction to John Dickinson’s Farmer’s Letters,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 78 (1969), 323–59, and Pierre Marambaud, “Dickinson’s Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania as Political Discourse: Ideology, Imagery, and Rhetoric,” Early American Literature 12 (1977), 63–72. John Dickinson, “Letter I,” Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1767–8), in Forrest McDonald, ed., Empire and Nation: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson and Letters from the Federal Farmer, Richard Henry Lee (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc., 1999), I:3. All references in the text are to this edition, first by letter number (roman numerals) and then page number (arabic numerals) for easy identification. Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny, 424–5, 429.
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answer. Where was colonial unity when it was most needed (II:14; IV:24–5; VI:36; VIII:46–7; X:65–7; XI:77)? The colonies in 1767 were not opposing Parliament’s newest incursions against colonial liberties with anything like the unified zeal that had led them to thwart the Stamp Act just two years before, and this was true even though the new Townshend Act of 1767 (with its duties on glass, paper, and other imports) and the equally new Declaratory Act (insisting on parliamentary supremacy over the colonies in all matters) were as dangerous to American liberties as the Stamp Act had been. Colonists had to realize that only unified opposition could preserve liberty (X:67–8). Dickinson complained: “we have already forgot the reasons that urged us with unexampled unanimity, to exert ourselves two years ago” (XII:81). This “unexampled unanimity” proved harder for Dickinson to project than it was for reformist ministers, who orchestrated continental harmony through their vision of a religious liberty peculiar to the new world. Colonial solidarity of any kind was a rarity in a British empire where colonies dealt with the mother country more frequently than with each other. Dickinson’s stress upon chartered membership in that empire only underlined the issue. The British constitution secured liberties everywhere in the empire but through Britain. Dickinson could call for colonial unity all he wanted, but he had to admit “these colonies are dependent on Great-Britain” with its “legal power to make laws for preserving that dependence.” Parliament possessed both the legal right and the political duty “to preserve [colonial] dependence, and the connection of the whole in good order” (V:27–8). No twist of the common law could challenge the supremacy of British authority. The dilemma for the colonial legal mind in the act of resistance can best be seen in the controlling legal text of the era.49 William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9) unified law, nation, and history around a proposition taken from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, a source that doubled the credibility of the basic claim in Anglo-American legal circles. In Blackstone’s words, “a learned French authority [Montesquieu] . . . hath not scrupled to profess . . . that the English is the only nation in the world, where political or civil liberty is the direct end of its constitution.” All of English history revealed the recovery of ancient liberties and rights through a proper constitution that was slowly achieving perfection. That constitution achieved permanence— “ESTO PERPETUA!”—because it was proper and perfect for all concerned. Every grievance could be resolved by constitutional remedy. “The vigour of our free constitution,” Blackstone explained, “has always delivered the nation from these 49
Daniel J. Boorstin, “Preface to the Beacon Press Edition,” The Mysterious Science of the Law: An Essay on Blackstone’s Commentaries Showing How Blackstone . . . Made of the Law at Once a Conservative and a Mysterious Science (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958).
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embarrassments [attacks on liberty], and as soon as the convulsions consequent on the struggle have been over, the balance of our rights and liberties has settled to its proper level.”50 Always? The common law tied everyone to its own common solution: remonstrance, yes; rebellion, no. Lawyers more radical than Dickinson worked to solve this legal dilemma. As resistance mounted, they found it expedient to tie English rights to natural rights, and they were helped by the fact that natural law functioned as a parallel source of liberty in the eighteenth century, rendering the connection to English liberties plausible.51 James Otis, the lawyer whom John Adams termed “the earliest and the principal founder” of the Revolution,52 showed the way in The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted (1764). Otis realized that a guarantee of rights through the colonial charters would always remain unstable. Parliament could revoke the charters of colonial rights whenever it wished to do so; that was what parliamentary supremacy meant. It could not, however, touch English rights deemed natural, and Otis used the distinction to declare “every British subject born on the continent of America or in any other of the British dominions is by the law of God and nature, by the common law, and by act of Parliament (exclusive of all charters from the crown) entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent, and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great Britain.”53 The success of Revolutionary rhetoric depended on how well lawyers manipulated Otis’s grab bag of legal authorities on liberty. There were legal rights, they began to insist, that didn’t need to be written out.54 Matters came to a head in 1774 when Congress debated whether to rely on natural law as well as British law in its responses to the crown, and John Adams, who often saw farther than others in the 1770s, had the winning argument. Asked “whether we should recur to the law of nature, as well as to the British constitution,” Adams announced himself “very strenuous for retaining and insisting on it, as a
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52 53
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William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9), facsimile of the 1st edn, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 1:140–41, 123; 4:400–36 (emphasis added). Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, pp. 25–8; also Daniel T. Rogers, “Natural Rights,” in Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 45–66. John Adams to William Tudor, June 1, 1818, in Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 10:317. James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 426, 442–4, and Robert H. Webking, “James Otis,” The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 16, 25. Edmund S. Morgan, ed., “Massachusetts Stamp Act Resolves,” Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 56.
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resource to which We might be driven by Parliament much sooner than We were aware.”55 The balance tilted toward natural law and away from British rights in the Revolution. But while Adams and other lawyers raised natural law in defense of liberty at each turn in the contest, every use carried them back to a rival frame of reference. Arguments based on natural law turned in the end on a religious conception of liberty, and that conception, based on the order of the universe rather than on contextual exposition, would force lawyers to be more open-ended and vague about liberty than they could long accept with comfort.56 To the extent that a benevolent natural world was essential to the concept of inalienable or inherent liberty, it depended on a design antecedent to human society. Somewhere, there had to be an earlier force in the universe that sustained natural rights for those rights to have universal validity beyond a British frame of reference. An eighteenth-century American who wanted to sustain challenges to British authority had no real alternative. If the universal order proved to be arbitrary in its treatment of individual human beings, then who could argue against the presence of arbitrary authority in England or, more particularly, against the exercise of that authority elsewhere? The rights of Englishmen in America meant so much more if the British sovereign who professed to rule by divine law was concurrently bound by God’s will in a way for anyone to observe through the design of nature. Colonial ministers reached for this orientation by confirming the design of nature as part of God’s plan; lawyers then made it visible and practical by arguing that natural law constrained civil law. The Reverend Samuel West decided the law of nature prevented “anything that is immoral, or contrary to the will of God, and injurious to their fellow-creatures.” Natural law was as “unchangeable as the Deity himself, being a transcript of his moral perfections.”57 For James Otis, who thought “a lawyer ought never to be without a volume of natural or public law, or moral philosophy, on his table or in his pocket,” the same divine hold of natural law over human action in society allowed an argument that many would use. Since government had “an everlasting foundation in the unchangeable will of GOD, the author of nature, whose laws never vary,” violations of natural law were illegal. “If such a proceeding is a breach of the law of nature,” Otis wrote, “no law of society can make it just.”58 55
56 57 58
John Adams, diary, Sept 8, 1774, and autobiography, in L. C. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 2:128–30; 3:309. Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, 23–7. Samuel West, On the Right to Rebel Against Governors, in Hyneman and Lutz, eds., American Political Writing During the Founding Era, 1:414. John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, January 14, 1818, in Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 10:275, and Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Bailyn, ed.,
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These arguments served the Revolution well, but they raised problems in the peace that followed. The right of the people to turn natural law against positive law applied as easily to political authority under the republic as it had previously under the British crown. The new rulers in America soon found that open-ended ideas of liberty under natural law were hard to control, and they were alarmed by the exaggeration in entitlements that followed therefrom. A reallocation by the legal mind began in 1778 when Theophilus Parsons penned his criticisms of a proposed constitution for Massachusetts. The Essex Result, written by the man who would become Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, prefigured much that would happen in the Federal Convention, including its theory of checks and balances and the naming of “the house of representatives” and “the senate”.59 The Essex Result sought to curb domestic unrest, the by-product of Revolutionary zeal. Caught up in the rhetoric of the times, the people inflated their own role when they assumed “the voice of the people is said to be the voice of God.” “No man,” Parsons observed, “will be so hardy and presumptuous, as to affirm the truth of that proposition in its fullest extent.” A “false patriotism” had grown from enlarged conceptions of liberty, and the combination was preventing a proper legal balance from emerging in the new order. “The idea of liberty has been held up in so dazzling colours,” Parsons warned, “that some of us may not be willing to submit to that subordination necessary in the freest States.” Constitutions and the law were for the people but not by them. “We are to look further than to the bulk of the people,” Parsons wrote, “for the greatest wisdom, firmness, consistency, and perseverance.” Constraints had to regulate civil liberty.60 The authors of The Federalist agreed with Theophilus Parsons’s assumptions in The Essex Result and wrote in 1787 to implement them through the ratification of the Federal Constitution. Like Parsons, they roundly condemned “a zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened.”61 They feared the passions of the people, wanted those passions “controlled and regulated by the government” (49:331), deplored the loss of a “spirit of moderation” in public discourse (37:225), and
59 60 61
Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 423, 447. See, as well, Clark, The Language of Liberty, 100, 117–18. Theophilus Parsons, The Essex Result (1778), in Hyneman and Lutz, eds., American Political Writing During the Founding Era, 1:494, 510–11. Ibid., in ibid., 1:486, 490–91. Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 26,” The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 26:159, but also 10:55, 1:5. References to The Federalist in the text are first by the number of the Federalist paper and then by page number to this edition.
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sought a “requisite stability and energy in government” against “the inviolable attention due to liberty” (37:227). Like Parsons, they found their answers in the design of government: “the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws” (57:373; 1:5). The intellectual affinities between The Essex Result and The Federalist flowed from the legal temperament of the period. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay can be distinguished from each other, but they shared this temperament to an extraordinary degree in The Federalist. They agreed that a stronger legal union would be necessary to “repress domestic faction and insurrection” (9:51); also that their knowledge had prepared them to design “the more perfect structure” or “proper structure” so definitely needed (9:48; 10:62). Particulars were important. Abstractions like virtue, reason, and natural law were enthusiasms not to be trusted in forming “a more perfect union” (10:53–8; 49:329; 51:340). The Revolution had been a success but mistakes had been made in the aftermath. “Is it not time,” Hamilton sneered, “to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?” (6:33). Madison made it equally clear that anyone who trusted to “reverence for the laws” and “the voice of enlightened reason” as constraints was dreaming of “a nation of philosophers”; only a government “framed with singular ingenuity and precision” could hope to hold the passions of the people in place (49:329, 332). “If men were angels,” cautioned the ever-practical Publius, or “if angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” But there were no angels in human affairs. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” meticulous controls had to supplant “the defect of better motives” (51:337). The legal temperament behind The Federalist espoused such views with an assurance born of the secular Enlightenment. Despite the unprecedented prospect of a continental republic, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay saw themselves equal to the task (85:570). Their intellectual self-assurance is easy to miss because, as men of affairs, they appeared impatient of theoretical assertion and moral abstraction. The combination, an impatience based upon practical certitude, meant that Publius was quick to dismiss his primary intellectual competitors, the clergy. All three authors of The Federalist paid lip service to the “Almighty hand” that guided them, but they were adamant in linking religious zeal to faction and in discounting religious arguments as a source of political definition (37:231; 10:55, 58; 1:5; 2:9). Publius was just as quick to propose the legal mind as the appropriate guide of republican destinies. “The Federalist No. 35”, ostensibly on taxation, gave several pages to “the man of the learned
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profession” as the best arbiter and most objective leader in a political dispute (35:214–15). The Federalist did more than cap the Revolution: it confirmed the dominance of legal over religious explanation in civic discourse. Learned contrivance, practical artifice, and institutional planning were the keys to a mental adventure where those engaged knew they were neither angels nor under the control of angels. “But what is government itself,” Publius asked, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” (51:337). By insisting that “the greatest of all reflections” belonged to the study of institutions, Publius carried Americans toward a new foundation in the conception of liberty. Henceforth, liberty would appear more in the guise of governmental proscription and enactment and less forcibly as an assertion of abstract, inalienable right.
iv The priorities of The Federalist bring the inquiry back to the original question of this essay. If Hamilton, Madison, and Jay supplied the nation’s most influential exposition of constitutional protections, they also created a touchstone in placing liberty under the constraints of government. What then, if anything, has been lost—or gained—in the conception of modern liberty? The gains are too obvious to list. Prosperity and the legal emphasis on individual rights have granted the majority of American citizens the freest opportunity in history to pursue their happiness, and these advantages must be kept in mind to protect the inquiry about loss from misrepresentation. The idea of loss, in turn, should be approached with caution. The primary question—“What then, if anything, has been lost?”—has nothing to do with nostalgic impulses. Meaningful responses must concentrate instead on the historical construction of liberty as an idea and its relation to ongoing American understandings. The farthest-reaching legal definition of liberty in eighteenth-century America came from an English source. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England declared that “liberty, rightly understood, consists in the power of doing whatever the law permits.” These words implied that legal enactment defined the scope of liberty, and the writer of them was notoriously quick to reconfigure personal rights as civil obligations.62 Still, Blackstone necessarily thought in eighteenthcentury terms. He automatically assumed a fundamental law prior to all human intervention, accepting what critics now call “a preinterpretive concept of law.”63 As he put the matter himself, “the principal aim of society is to protect 62 63
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:6, 119. Anthony J. Sebok, Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 246–51.
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individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature . . . . Hence it follows, that the first and primary end of human laws is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals.”64 Blackstone agreed with John Locke in presenting “the natural liberty of mankind,” and, like Locke, he had little difficulty in finding liberty “posterior to the formation of states and societies.” “This natural liberty,” Blackstone wrote, “consists in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, unless by the law of nature: being a right inherent in us by birth, and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation, when he endued him with the faculty of free will.”65 Eighteenth-century participants, whether governors or governed, made these assumptions facts by applying reason to the law of nature. In Lockean terms, “Reason, the common Rule and Measure, God hath given to Mankind” unlocked the secrets of a natural order that defined acceptable human behavior and formed discernible law (“it is certain there is such a Law, and that too, as intelligible and plain to a rational Creature, and a Studier of that Law, as the positive Laws of Common-wealths, nay possibly plainer”).66 As long as such premises on natural law remained in place, liberty as a basic conception was inalienable. To use Blackstone’s language, liberty belonged to “absolute rights . . . which every man is entitled to enjoy whether out of society or in it.”67 But what if Nature turned out not to be mediate? What if human reason failed to discern a liberty prior to formal institutions? What if law rested entirely on its own language, and protest against it had to be through its own enactments? When these revocations become accepted truth, then Blackstone’s definition—liberty consists in the power of doing whatever the law permits—takes on some negative connotations, and the user of it comes perilously close to the predicament that John Dickinson faced in Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. You cannot defy a legal regime if you accept its values as your restrictive gauge of meaning. You must be able to stand outside to rebel against. You need a preinterpretive concept of law to challenge legal interpretation.68 American law has reached the positions raised in the interrogatives of the last paragraph. Few observers today regard Nature as mindful of (or patterned for) specific human needs. Neither philosophers nor lawyers celebrate common
64 65 66 67 68
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:119–20. Ibid., 1:120–21. John Locke, “Of the State of Nature,” The Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 275 (ch. 2, sects. 11–12). Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:119. Sebok, Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence, 251.
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reason now. In the words of a frequently cited contemporary legal source, “reason alone can’t tell you anything; it can only connect premises to conclusions.”69 Even less modern credence has been given to a concept of liberty based on a prior state of nature. Contemporary theorists generally discount natural law as the undergirding force in legal thought. In an age of rampant legal positivism, legal systems today accept an exclusive hegemony of their own devising. Legal positivism resists other criteria: “at the very heart of its case, [it] affirms the reality of legal obligation, based on nothing more than the actual law in effect.”70 Does one need an external gauge to safeguard fundamental rights? Legal positivism vigorously protects rights through the stipulations of its own system, and most rights welcome the specificity of statute and case law. As long as one accepts the proposition that positive law coincides with a just social order— a proposition that most Americans have been willing to acknowledge through their history—the problem of safeguarding fundamental rights remains internally consistent and manageable. From the other side of the coin, natural law as a preinterpretive concept of law hardly represents a panacea in any discussion of rights. Natural law comes into play as a legal remedy only in a crisis. Lawyers have always had reasons for not trusting to its loose constructions and potential excesses. But none of these considerations quite reaches the interactive complexity of law and religion over the idea of liberty, and there remains the question of how origins now lost or diminished must figure into the equation. Within American law, liberty is a very different kind of fundamental right than others. Less tangible and hardly ever a legal remedy on its own, liberty functions rather as a reminder of all other legal remedies. When legal interpreters talk about liberty, they instinctively employ a language beyond the specificity of legal determination. When Justice Brandeis describes a right of privacy as intrinsic to liberty in Olmstead v. United States, he discusses “conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness” and “the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect.”71 Brandeis’s colleague Justice McReynolds admits
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Ely, Democracy and Distrust, 56. Lloyd W. Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 125. My definition of legal positivism derives from Weinreb and Lon L. Fuller, The Law in Quest of Itself (Chicago: Foundation Press, 1940), 4–5, 16. See, as well, Heinrich A. Rommen, “The Victory of Positivism” (1947), in The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy, trans. Thomas R. Hanley (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 109–13. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1927). (Justice Louis Brandeis is dissenting in this opinion.)
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that law cannot really “define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed,” but he knows that “it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges of happiness by free men.”72 The striking fact about such comments comes in their dependence on a spiritual level of explanation. Courtroom formulations of liberty need a terminology—happiness, conscience, spirituality—that they would otherwise reject as insufficiently analytical or too vague. They assume the individual worth and search for well-being that religion supplies. The value of natural law in eighteenth-century discussions of liberty resided largely in its integrative evaluative function on this ethical plane of explanation. It was ethical in its assurance of the harmonies that correct human behavior could be expected to reach. It was integrative in that it supplied a standard against which the legal system of that day could be tested. The cultural power of that standard should not be underestimated. Revolutionary Americans regarded small intrusions as absolute challenges to liberty through their immersion in natural law norms. They were not prepared to obey a law of the state contrary to reason or against the ordained consent of the governed.73 How would contemporary Americans respond to a similar intrusion today? Surely not with the rubrics of natural law. The quiescent response of public opinion and political opposition to the Federal Government’s anti-terrorist policies in 2002—“sweeping claims of unbridled executive authority to hold secret deportation hearings, label and incarcerate ‘enemy combatants’ without access to lawyers or judges”—offers a case in point. What might have formerly led to general protest against the invasion of the fundamental right of habeas corpus has been fought out instead on the highly technical level of a federal judiciary that asks the government to show the courts what it is doing.74 The nature of protest has changed to match a larger shift in the understanding of what law has become. The problem raised in the loss of natural law as a viable resource for objection to positive law has been stated quite simply: “no intrinsic quality of law ensures its morality in the manner of natural law.”75 The loss is significant because acts of resistance demand a moral imperative. To resist the overwhelming authority 72 73 74 75
Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923). See Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, 1:3; 2:14; 6:36. Linda Greenhouse, “The Imperial Presidency vs. the Imperial Judiciary”, New York Times, September 8, 2002. Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice, 103.
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of the state requires special cognizance on the part of an actor who undergoes an unknown level of risk. “Why am I willing to hazard this much?” a resisting person must ask in order to achieve the inner coherence to perform against a far more visible establishment. That coherence requires an element of inner spirit. Significantly, the major patterns of resistance against state imposition in American history have tended to pit religious morality against established law. The abolitionist movements of the antebellum period, the right-to-vote protests after the Civil War, the prohibition movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, the anti-war and civil rights movement of the 1960s, and the anti-abortion protests of contemporary times have all relied heavily on religious impulses to make their cases. Are the alternative explanations that religion has always given to the concept of liberty still available? Yes, they are. As the remarks of Justices Brandeis and McReynolds have shown, the language of religion remains a resource. Even so, the dialectic of liberty is not the same. Legal positivism has become profoundly secular in its impulses and trajectory, and there are severe limits to what it will allow itself to receive from outside its frame of reference. On its assigned terms, positive law cannot go beyond the experience of freedom within its domain, and it rejects ethical challenge to its reasoned internal coherence.76 The basis if not the dimensions of this intransigence began almost in the same moment that Publius wrote The Federalist. Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues sought to strengthen the normative footing of positive law in their own time. Their orientation required them to present the Federal Constitution in an attractive enough stance to secure moral sanction through the consent of the people. This meant preserving while curbing individual liberty in order to increase the ability of the state to make law. Since then, the power of the state to make and enforce law has increased a hundredfold while acceptance of liberty as a rhetorical guide to action has dwindled. Liberty today is often an abstraction taken for granted in American discourse. Success has not bred contempt, but it has discouraged articulation in the face of change. Liberty is the lightly tongued given, like the air we breathe. Vigilance in protecting it is no longer a communal calling card. After all, the problem of preserving liberty while guarding the authority of the state can seem hopelessly abstract as long as the state is understood to be just. But what if the state grows unjust, or wrong, or misinformed? To what extent would the legacy of Revolutionary leaders who spoke a familiar but different language 200 years ago suffice in response? Somewhere in the dialectic of liberty, a republic defined by
76
Ibid., 125. See also Fuller, The Law In Quest of Itself, 110.
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the right of revolution has been replaced by a modern nation-state where the test of membership has become loyalty.77 The members of that nation-state should think more about what this institutional metamorphosis means in practice, and the intricate eighteenth-century root system in the liberty tree is a good place to begin. The suggestion here is not of return but of useful realization. Liberty, always a vexed value, is best protected by knowledgeable debate over its many meanings and applications.78
77 78
See George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 135, 184, 187, 191. A version of this essay will appear in Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 55–80. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000076 Printed in the United Kingdom
of savagery and civil society: pierre clastres and the transformation of french political thought* samuel moyn Department of History, Columbia University
This essay examines the thought of the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1938– 1977). It situates his once-famous depiction of savage politics as a premonitory rejection of the state at the crossroads of several traditions, long- and short-term. First, Clastres’s thought resonates with the primitivistic appeal by French “moralists” since the early modern period to the lifestyle of prehistoric societies; second, it casts light on the history of French anthropology in the crisis years of structuralism; and third, it reflects the revival of Friedrich Nietzsche in French thought of the era. Above all, however, the essay explains Clastres’s thought as an attempt to resist and to overcome the well-known communist allegiances of postwar French intellectuals. Early in rejecting communism, Clastres owed his prominence to the 1970s popularization of the critique of “totalitarianism.” The so-called “passing of an illusion” of communism, one version of which Clastres pioneered, is often interpreted as the replacement of confusion with truth. It is more interesting, the essay suggests, to situate it in its time, as a complex achievement as defective as it was creative, if Clastres’s thought is taken as an example. In closing, the essay suggests some legacies, often unintentional, Clastres left behind in French political thought of the years since his death. Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better in his travels. “I should think not,” he said. “He took himself along with him.” Michel de Montaigne1
Born in 1934, the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres died in a car accident in July 1977. He was at the height of his influence in France, even, for some, a new * 1
I am grateful to Peter Hubbard for research assistance, and to Robert Hamrick for advice. Montaigne is cited in P. Clastres, “Copernic et les Sauvages,” Critique 270 (1969), 1000–15, ´ rptd as Clastres, La Soci´et´e contre l’Etat: Recherches d’anthropologie politique (Paris, 1974), chap. 1, and in English as Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. R. Hurley and A. Stein (New York, 1987), 7.
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guru. Neglected by intellectual historians, Clastres stood at the intersection of a number of developments in postwar French thought: the disciplinary history of ethnography in the crisis years of structuralism; the longer tradition of the literary essayist and moralist, in which primitive “others” often served as a privileged means for thinking about French modernity; the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in the years in which postmodernism came into fashion; the creative ferment, among intellectuals, of the years following the 1968 events. But Clastres’s chief significance is political: he reflected, and furthered, the decomposition of Marxism among French intellectuals and the search for alternatives to it, and showed what creative and consequential forms the “passing of an illusion” could take. This intellectual and political nonconformist, who wrote moving elegies to disappearing societies with no state, and rhetorically searing criticisms of expanding societies that displaced them, played a memorable role in the transformation of French political thought in the period, helping it to transcend, once and apparently for all, the intellectual framework that had dominated it for so long. His influence lies beyond the scope of this essay. But the fact that Clastres inadvertently contributed not simply to a new kind of left-wing political theory influential to this day but also to the foundations of neo-liberalism in French thought makes a foray into his worldview—a reconstruction of its details—even more interesting and worthwhile. That quite despite his intentions Clastres could have helped secure some of the conditions for the unexpected victory in French political theory of the very modernity that he despised is no doubt the greatest irony about his endeavor, and the chief reason for studying it.
*** G. W. F. Hegel famously claimed that “the State is the precise object of world history in general.” He acknowledged that “[a] people may have lived a long life without having arrived at their destination by becoming a state,” but consigned this “long life” to the status of “prehistory” which lies “entirely outside of [the] concern” of the philosophy of history “no matter whether a genuine history comes after it, or the people involved never arrived at the formation of a state.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his attractive but misguided idealization of the noble savage, had badly erred in rooting freedom in the primitive state of humankind. “One can certainly point to the existence of savage conditions,” Hegel observed, “but these are shown to be linked to the passions, to barbarism, and acts of violence.” Freedom finding no purchase in savagery, except as “implicit destiny . . . to be fulfilled,” social discipline, perfected by the state, is required for history to begin.2 Few commentators would now take seriously the notion that 2
G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. L. Rauch (Indianapolis, 1988), 42, 63, 43.
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Hegel—who also made a decisive contribution to the theory of civil society— laid the groundwork for the totalitarian state, inventing a dialectic of history that, perfected by Marxism, communism, and Stalinism, left no destination but the gulag. It was several French intellectuals, bitterly disappointed by their youthful political engagement, whose brief influence nonetheless played on and further purveyed this assumption. Only Clastres, however, popularized the notion logically following from this line of thought, that the primitive world that Hegel had forgotten might provide the sole possible alternative to the perilous epitome of history. Eventually a furious critic of all theories of progress, Clastres began as a communist; faced with the crisis of 1956, however, he searched for an alternative point of view. Initially a student of philosophy, steeped in the texts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, which were to be a permanent influence on him, Clastres became an anthropologist. The chance for literary achievement that ethnological reportage offered, on the model of Claude L´evi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, also pushed Clastres into the career he would make for himself. But like several others in the aftermath of 1956, structuralism had a mainly political allure. Structuralist anthropology provided many, in the later 1950s, with the sequel to communism, with the Soviet tragedy often (fairly or unfairly) understood to be rooted not in the contingencies of history but rather in the constitutive defects not simply of Marxism but of progressivist modernity as a whole. Structuralist anthropology discovered “cold” societies before the existence of the hot and historical ones that had given rise to communist horror; in a certain sense, then, it provided a point of view external to the dialectic. “They aspired to find something more profound than exoticism,” Franc¸ois Dosse comments in his History of Structuralism of Clastres and other converts to L´evi-Strauss’s anthropology; “for them, it was a matter of locating societies that had been sheltered from the unitary map of Hegelian Marxist thinking, societies that were not classified in Stalinist handbooks.”3 Having, in a sense, found the end of history in the Stalinist dictatorship, Clastres and his fellow ex-communists transmuted their earlier idealism by seeking an alternative to Stalinism before universal history’s beginning. The following will argue that Clastres—like those affected by his thought— proved to be so haunted by the “Hegelianism” he hoped to leave behind that it
3
F. Dosse, History of Structuralism, trans. D. Glassman, vol. 1, The Rising Sign, 1945–1966 (Minneapolis, 1997), 162. Dosse, who reports Clastres’s love and admiration for Tristes Tropiques in particular, is referring to Clastres and several others close to him—Alfred Adler, Michel Cartry, and Lucien Sebag—who became anthropologists as a result of the 1956 events. A decade later, of course, some like Louis Althusser explored the compatibility of Marxism and structuralism, a possibility which some original converts extended to anthropology. See, for example, Sebag, Marxisme et structuralisme (Paris, 1964).
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followed him wherever he went. If so, it would make of Clastres an exemplification of an old story: hoping to find an extra-European point of view on European society, he made up at home those whom he claimed to discover someplace else. And yet Claude Lefort, Clastres’s associate, claimed instead that his friend “bore within himself the figure of the other. . . . It would be futile to suspect that he either could or would see only what fit his expectations. When one is reading him, one marvels, on the contrary, at an encounter with the other that was prefigured in himself.” Similarly, one of Clastres’s companions in the move from communism to structuralism went so far at a memorial for his old friend as to suggest that, though this youthful transition counted as the secret and barely suppressed drama of his career, it enabled him to discover an enduring truth not simply about primitive society but about his own as well: “Pierre Clastres’s voice fell silent too brusquely on the genealogy of a project born in the context of an age in which the ‘adventures of the dialectic’ had led to the impasses and insanities that are well-known,” he suggested. “No one will explain as he could have the origins of a quest intended to find in the faraway what, right at home, the dialectic had totally forgotten . . . ”4
*** In fact, Clastres wrote his first, and possibly most important, analysis of South American Indians before ever visiting them. Having trained under L´evi-Strauss, himself a specialist in the Nambikwara and other South American tribes, having read voraciously in early travel literature, and having absorbed the ethnography of the US State Department-sponsored Handbook of South American Indians, Clastres presented his major insight into the political significance of Indian chieftainship in his first published article in 1962.5 No doubt experience on the scene of the Indian chiefs who interested him added to and provided depth and extension to his original argument—and indeed, it allowed him to reject armchair critics who had experienced no similar immersion in another society— but the simple fact that he offered his hypothesis before and independent of its 4
5
C. Lefort, “Pierre Clastres,” Libre 4 (1978), 51; M. Cartry, “Pierre Clastres,” Annuaire de la ´ ´ Ve Section de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes 85 (1978), rptd in ibid., 39–40. Lefort repeated his judgment in “L’œuvre de Clastres,” in M. Abensour, ed., L’esprit des lois sauvages: Pierre Clastres ou une nouvelle anthropologie politique (Paris, 1987), rptd as “Dialogue avec Pierre ´ Clastres,” in Lefort, Ecrire: A` l’´epreuve du politique (Paris, 1992), and in English in Lefort, Writing: The Political Test, trans. D. A. Curtis (Durham, NC, 2000), 208. ´ Clastres, “Echange et pouvoir: philosophie de la chefferie indienne,” L’Homme 2/1 (1962), ´ 51–65, rptd as Clastres, La Soci´et´e contre l’Etat, chap. 2, in English in Clastres, Society against the State, in J. H. Steward, ed., Handbook of South American Indians, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1946–59).
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experiential confirmation is of obvious significance. As he later acknowledged with pride in an interview, he did not waver from theory to theory as others change their clothes.6 He offered a single argument, and stuck to it until his death. Clastres began his analysis with some curious and refractory ethnographic data about the nature of chieftancy in primitive society, especially American Indian society (and, more specifically, among the tropical forest cultures of South America that had escaped the orbit of the Incan imperial experience). The facts, he put it, were well known; his essay intended to explain their meaning. Put simply, Indian chieftains had no power, and indeed were elevated only on condition of disempowerment. According to Clastres, the chief stood for peace and reconciliation within the tribe. Moreover, he acted with faultless generosity: he owed what Clastres often called an “infinite debt” to his society. Except in the case of war, he could command only by means of what a later philosopher would call the “unforced force” of speech; great oratorical skills were normally the major qualification for the office. In addition, in South America, the chief very often enjoyed exclusive right to multiple wives. For Clastres, this constellation of attributes took on new significance when one realized that the role of speech, the transfer of goods, and the rules of kinship amounted to the major domains of the constitution of society itself. “It is extraordinary to discover,” he wrote, that this trinity of predicates—oratorical talent, generosity, and polygyny—attached to the person of the leader, concerns the same elements whose exchange and circulation constitute society as such and sanctions the transition from nature to culture. . . . Hence, power relates here . . . to the three essential structural levels of society; that is, it is at the very heart of the communicative universe.7
Somehow the shape of power bore a necessary relationship to the fundamental constitution of society. The key to the understanding of each domain, Clastres continued, is that in each the chief enjoys a one-way relationship with his own society. While he appeared to trade goods and words for wives, he actually gave and received each independently, each a bargain without consideration. Assuming that society is constituted by exchange, then the office of power is placed outside of the social realm. “This triple movement [of women, gifts, and oratory] manifests a common negative dimension which assigns these three types of ‘signs’ an identical fate: they no longer appear as exchange values, reciprocity ceases to regulate their circulation,” Clastres wrote. 6
7
In his original argument, Clastres remarked, “je n’ai pas grand’chose a` y changer. On ne peut pas m’accuser de changer d’id´ees comme des chemises!” “Entretien avec Pierre Clastres,” L’Anti-mythes 9 (1975), 21. ´ Clastres, “Echange et pouvoir,” 37–8.
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Hence a new relationship between the domain of power and the essence of the group comes to light: power enjoys a privileged relationship toward those elements whose reciprocal movement founds the very structure of society. But this relationship, by denying these elements an exchange value at the group level, institutes the political sphere not only as external to the structure of the group, but further still, as negating that structure: power is contrary to the group, and the rejection of reciprocity, as the ontological dimension of society, is the rejection of society itself.8
Put differently, the role primitive societies scripted for the chief bespoke a philosophy of the place and function of power. They constituted power as external to society—indeed, as what society by definition excluded even in constituting it. In Clastres’s slogan, primitive societies were societies against the state. This effect, which Clastres believed explained the oddity of empowered yet powerless chieftancy in primitive society, he regarded as no accident or aberration. There is, he maintained, “a certain necessity inherent in the process itself,” which only came into view at the level of “sociological intentionality.” As he put it, “[P]ower is exactly what these societies intended it to be.”9 So far from giving us the lackluster image of an inability to resolve the question of political power, these societies astonish us by the subtlety with which they have posed and settled the question. They had a very early premonition that power’s transcendence conceals a mortal risk for the group, that the principle of an authority which is external and the creator of its own legality is a challenge to culture itself. It is the intuition of this threat that determines the depth of their political philosophy . . . They chose themselves to be the founders of . . . authority, but in such a manner as to let power appear only as a negativity that is immediately subdued, [and] strip[ped] of any real might. Thus, the advent of power, such as it is, presents itself to these societies as the very means for nullifying that power.10
They possessed a sense of the dialectic’s catastrophic ending, and, out of their “sense of democracy and taste for equality,” took steps, intentional if perhaps unconscious, to avoid its beginning.11 In this sense, they were not just without a state, but societies against it—and a monitory signal from the primitive world that moderns could recover in their own state of suffering.
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Ibid., 41–2. For a related analysis of the chieftain’s oratory, see Clastres, “Le devoir de ´ parole,” Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse 8 (1973), 83–5, rptd as La Soci´et´e contre L’Etat, chap. 7. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 44–5. Ibid., 28.
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*** Inspired by the prospect of further study of societies that achieved modes of power that ruled a Stalinist conclusion out in advance—and apparently by premonitory design—Clastres spent much of the 1960s either working at L´evi-Strauss’s Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale or in South America doing “fieldwork.” His first mission, an eight-month trip in 1963 to the Paraguayan tribe of the Guayaki, previously among the most isolated and least researched remaining forest cultures, gave rise to Clastres’s thesis and, later, to his remarkable Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians.12 Clastres chose the Guayaki (or Ach´e) because they had been so mysterious, until some members of the tribe were located and restricted to a territorial reservation and a pacifying campaign between 1959 and 1962. Much like Tristes Tropiques, Clastres’s ethnographic masterpiece won many admirers for its literary qualities; among those enchanted by it, the future novelist Paul Auster, then an American in Paris living from hand to mouth on translation work, found it so moving that he produced an Englishlanguage version. “Clastres’s prose,” Auster recalled, “seemed to combine a poet’s temperament with a philosopher’s depth of mind . . . It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book.”13 Clastres studied his subjects on a ranch-cum-reservation where they had fallen under the government-approved supervision of a “friendly” Paraguayan farmer; on this point Clastres ruefully cited Alfred M´etraux, the French anthropologist who had helped arrange his sojourn: “For us to be able to study a primitive society, it must already be starting to disintegrate.”14 In 1965, Clastres returned to Paraguay, initially intending to “fulfill the secret desire of every Americanist anthropologist: to be the first to encounter savage Indians.” But in spite of trying, he failed to locate the last Guayaki who had eluded the Paraguayan government’s pacification campaign.15 They did not remain undiscovered for long; indeed, Clastres’s Chronicle almost 12
13
14 15
Clastres and Sebag, “Cannibalisme et mort chez les Guayaki,” Revista do Museu Paulista 14 (1963), 174–81; Clastres, “Compte-rendu de mission chez les indiens Guayaki (Paraguay),” L’Homme 4/2 (1964), 122–5; Clastres, La Vie sociale d’une tribu nomade: les indiens Guayaki du Paraguay (th`ese du 3e cycle; Paris, 1965); Clastres, “Ethnologie des indiens Guayaki: La vie sociale de la tribu,” L’Homme 7/4 (1967), 101–8; Clastres, “Ethnographie des indiens Guayaki,” Journal de la soci´et´e des am´ericanistes 57 (1968), 9–61; Clastres, “The Guayaki,” in M. G. Bicchieri, ed., Hunters and Gatherers Today: A Socioeconomic Study of Eleven Such Cultures in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1972); Clastres, Chronique des indiens Guayaki: Ce que savent les Ach´e, chasseurs nomades du Paraguay (Paris, 1972). Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, trans. P. Auster (New York, 2000), 7–8. As Auster recounts in his foreword, while he produced the translation in the 1970s, it only recently appeared after the publisher balked and the sole manuscript disappeared. Ibid., 96. Clastres, “Mission au Paraguay et au Br´esil,” L’Homme 7/4 (1967), 101–8, at 101.
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immediately became the Guayaki’s obituary: massacres by Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguayan government in the early 1970s decimated them.16 In the later 1960s and very briefly in the early 1970s, Clastres spent time among the Guarani, also in Paraguay, and recorded examples of their eloquent paeans to their gods, later the basis of his study The Great Speech: Myths and Sacred Chants of the Guarani Indians of 1974.17 Clastres’s last major research experiences in South America occurred in 1966 and 1968, when he visited the Chulupi Indians in Paraguay, eventually intending to base studies of mythology and warfare on the information he gathered.18 Aside from a period among the Yanomani Indians of Brazil, with his friend Jacques Lizot, Clastres spent most of the 1970s in Paris, teaching at the ´ ´ Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Ve section), until his untimely death. Clastres’s initial essay, before these on-site investigations, exhibited a vestigial structuralism, notably in his analysis of the exchange involved between the society and the chief. His argument, reminiscent of his mentor’s thinking, relied on a rejection of the diachronic (for example, the fact that in exchange for multiple wives the chief returned his daughters to the next generation). It also avoided “superficial” aspects of the synchronic, for example the notion that the chief reciprocally exchanged pacifying words for multiple women, on the grounds that only through separation and comparison of elements in the exchange could their relation to the deep structure of society come into view. On his return from South America, in the series of essays that were collected in his signature work Society against the State (1974), Clastres dropped any allegiance to structuralism. His esteem for L´evi-Strauss remained high, as his contribution to his teacher’s Festschrift shows, and he continued to insist on the viability of
16
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See M. M¨unzel, The Ach´e Indians: Genocide in Paraguay (Copenhagen, 1973), R. Arens, ed., Genocide in Paraguay (Philadelphia, 1976), and E. Wiesel, “Accomplices,” in A Jew Today, trans. M. Wiesel (New York, 1978); but cf. D. Maybury-Lewis and J. Howe, The Indian Peoples of Paraguay: Their Plight and Their Prospects (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 35–50, for a more skeptical view on reports of genocide. Clastres, Le Grand Parler: Mythes et chants sacr´es des indiens Guarani (Paris, 1974). Clastres owed his introduction to the Guarani and help in translating his ethnographic material to L´eon Cadogan, a Paraguayan anthropologist and activist, who had earlier assisted him with the Guayaki. Cf. Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, 76–7, and Clastres, “L´eon Cadogan,” L’Homme 14/2 (1974), 135–6. On war, see Clastres, “L’arch´eologie de la violence: la guerre dans les soci´et´es primitives,” Libre 1 (1977), 137–73, and Clastres, “Malheur du guerrier sauvage,” Libre 2 (1977), 69– 109, both rptd in Clastres, Recherches d’anthropologie politique (Paris, 1980), chaps. 11–12, in English in Clastres, The Archeology of Violence, trans. J. Herman (New York, 1994). More recently, this first essay has been republished on its own as Clastres, L’arch´eologie de la violence: la guerre dans les soci´et´es primitives (Paris, 1998). On mythology, see the posthumous Clastres, Mythologie des Indiens Chulupi, ed. M. Cartry and H. Clastres (Louvain, 1993).
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structural analysis on L´evi-Strauss’s chosen terrain of myth.19 But in his mature works, he moved on to become the foremost scholar in the emergence of the new subdiscipline of “political anthropology.”20 As structuralism entered its crisis phase in the later 1960s and Marxist anthropology became a disciplinary alternative to structuralism—or, as in Maurice Godelier’s conciliatory proposal, came to its rescue—Clastres presented his own “political anthropology” as the more plausible sequel or complement to structuralist analysis. It was true, Clastres acknowledged, structuralism had never overcome a constitutional debility, the avoidance of the topic of the political constitution of primitive society. L´eviStrauss had achieved heroic victories in the understanding of kinship and myth, yet his analyses had somehow stopped short of the object of social study: society itself. The limit of the structuralist analysis of kinship, Clastres noted, is that it leaves analysis “at the threshold. The primitive social body cannot be reduced to its blood ties and alliances; it is not only a machine for fabricating kinship relations.” As for L´evi-Strauss’s procedure of understanding myth, it “is only operative on the condition of cutting the myths from society, of seizing them, ethereal, floating a good distance from the space of origin.” For this reason, anthropologists were correct to search for a remedy to structuralism’s “absence: this elegant discourse, often very rich, does not speak about the society. It is . . . like a godless theology: it is a sociology without society.”21 But this fact did not make Marxist anthropology inevitable, as others began to urge.22 It actually cleared the way, Clastres thought, for his own political anthropology.
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According to Clifford Geertz, L´evi-Strauss considered Clastres his successor. Geertz, “Deep Hanging Out” (review of Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians), New York Review of Books, October 22, 1998. But in the mid-1970s their relations became strained. Clastres, “Entre le silence et le dialogue,” L’Arc (1968), 76–8, rptd in R. Bellour and C. Cl´ement, Claude L´evi-Strauss: Textes de et sur Claude L´evi-Strauss (Paris, 1979). On the lineages of “political anthropology” before it became closely identified with Clastres’s work, see G. Balandier, Anthropologie politique (Paris, 1967, 1969), esp. chap. 1, in English as Political Anthropology, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith (New York, 1970). In particular, British Africanists had advanced the field just after World War II, not excluding the perception of a unique, “stateless” politics. See, for example, J. Middleton, ed., Tribes Without Rulers: Studies in African Segmentary Systems (London, 1958). Clastres, “Les Marxistes et leur anthropologie,” Libre 3 (1978), 135–49, rptd in Recherches d’anthropologie politique, chap. 10, in English in Clastres, The Archeology of Violence, 128–30. For a general portrait of the crisis of structuralism in French anthropology and the incursion of Marxism as a respectable position in the discipline, see Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, The Sign Sets, 1967–Present (Minneapolis, 1997), chaps. 8, 16, and 36. Many of those who had initially defected to anthropology as an ideological replacement for their earlier Marxism, like Clastres and Alfred Adler, were among the most hostile critics of the incursion of Marxism into anthropology itself a decade later.
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According to one of Clastres’s most remarkable essays, dating from 1969, political anthropology required a “Copernican revolution” in the discipline. Reviewing a work of a rival political anthropologist who had begun with Max Weber’s definition of power as the state-based monopoly on legitimate violence, from which it followed that primitive societies were societies without power, Clastres responded that anthropology had to test, rather than assume, this result: “the point is that it is necessary to ascertain and verify on the terrain involved— that of archaic societies—whether, when there is neither coercion nor violence, it is impossible to speak of power.”23 Clastres, of course, had already done so. He knew of “a vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would be called power are actually without power.”24 Clastres insisted now, in a new specification of his original theory, that the major distinction between primitive and modern societies consisted not in whether they had power but in whether this power took coercive form. Nevertheless, Clastres always defined savagery on the basis of what it would not become. Clastres believed that his discovery changed the way power had to be understood, not just in its archaic but also in its state-based forms. Failing to find a state, many political anthropologists, Clastres charged, had located power everywhere and nowhere, in the webs of coercive norms of Emile Durkheim’s conscience collective. This assumption, Clastres argued, forced a “gradual dissolution of the political.”25 Anthropologists insisted on the alternative that power permeated everything—and hence became nothing—unless it were made state-based because they could not part with their Western prejudices. “[T]he model to which political power is referred and the unit by which it is measured,” Clastres argued, “are constituted in advance by the idea Western civilization has shaped and developed. From its beginnings our culture has conceived of political power in terms of hierarchized and authoritarian relations of command and obedience.”26 To see the originality and distinction of the savage definition of power, Western anthropologists would have to make a reversal of assumptions equivalent to the replacement of geo- by heliocentrism: “A Copernican revolution is at stake,” Clastres wrote, in the sense that in some respects, ethnology until now has let primitive cultures revolve around Western civilization in a centripetal motion, so to speak. Political anthropology 23
24 25 26
Clastres, “Copernic et les sauvages,” 11. The article is a review of J.-W. Lapierre, Essai sur le fondement du pouvoir politique (Gap, 1968). Lapierre carried on a running debate with Clastres throughout the next decade. See Lapierre, “Soci´et´es sauvages, soci´et´es contre ´ ´ l’Etat,” Esprit 44/5 (1976), 983–1001, and Lapierre, Vivre sans Etat?: Essai sur le pouvoir politique et l’innovation sociale (Paris, 1977). Clastres, “Copernic et les sauvages,” 11. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 16.
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appears to have made it abundantly clear that a complete reversal of perspectives is necessary . . . Political anthropology encounters a limit that is not so much a property of primitive societies as it is something carried within anthropology itself, the limitation of the West itself, whose seal is still engraved upon it. In order to escape the attraction of its native earth and attain real freedom of thought, in order to pull itself away from the facts of natural history in which it continues to flounder, reflection on power must effect a “heliocentric” conversion: it will then perhaps succeed in better understanding the world of others, and consequently our own.
Much of Clastres’s rhetoric, notably in this essay, betrayed the power of Nietzsche’s vision in France at this time. Nietzsche, after all, had condemned the “new idol” of the state, “the coldest of all monsters.” “This is the lie that calls from its mouth: I, the state, am the people.” And, though he refused his sister’s invitation to travel to Paraguay where she and her husband founded an Aryan colony, Nietzsche often understood himself as a seafarer who had—philosophically at least—visited the Antipodes and lived under the light of different climes. “[T]he almighty force of our tasks,” Nietzsche explained, “drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and . . . our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us.”27 It must have been in allusion to Nietzsche’s own Copernican practices that Clastres likewise concluded: “It is time to change suns.”28
*** The timing for Clastres’s primitivist reversal of thinking about power and rejection of the state was extraordinarily propitious, and only an unexpected convergence of trends explains his brief moment of popularity and prominence in the 1970s. The effect of May 1968 on French intellectual life, still in the process of analysis by historians, pointed overwhelmingly in the direction of a post-centralized, non-hierarchical, pluralistic, and above all participatory vision of politics—one in many respects never successful in discovering institutional mechanisms for its own realization. This vision both followed from and further promoted the ongoing rejection of Hegelian Marxism, above all its ne plus ultra in what Clastres called in his Copernicus essay “its ultimate form: the centralized
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The Nietzsche citations are from Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I, chap. 11, and The Gay Science, § 282. On Nietzsche and the sea, the best treatment is K. Harries, “Nietzsche at Sea,” in M. A. Gillespie and T. B. Strong, eds., Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics (Chicago, 1988); and on his solar rhetoric, see B. Pautrat, Versions du soleil: figures et syst`eme de Nietzsche (Paris, 1971). On “Neuva Germania,” the Aryan colony founded by Nietzsche’s sister and her husband, Bernhard F¨orster, see B. Macintyre, Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche (New York, 1992). Clastres, “Copernic et les sauvages,” 25–6.
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state.”29 Whether or not the South American forest people from time immemorial ´ were contre l’Etat, Parisian intellectuals in the 1970s were: to the point that a whole generation, beginning on the left, and through drift and appropriation on the center and right, came to believe that the new point of departure for democratic political thought had to be the rejection of “the totalitarian state,” and sometimes “the state” tout court.30 Of course, historically France pioneered not just state centralization but also the fear of it—as Alexis de Tocqueville’s thought suggests—but only the political trends of 1968 explain why the fear became so great in the 1970s and why it became so appealing on the left. Not surprisingly, thinkers who had long since rejected communism as the institutionalization of freedom and insisted on the necessity of a pluralized and vibrant society outside the state, like Clastres, ascended to stardom. Clastres’s œuvre in the years of his apotheosis consisted essentially of rich, eloquent essays. One could say, generalizing about them, that Clastres pursued and elaborated on his early thesis about power by delineating the stark contrast between the two worlds—primitive and modern—in which the political took such different forms. Troublingly, the series added up to an apparently primitivistic worldview that, as in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, lamented the hell of modernity into which the observer’s own culture had fallen. In this vein, Clastres presented as some of his most important evidence the savage adoration for the power of language and their refusal of the endless production of desire (and endless work) he considered to be characteristic of the modern economy. The first of these themes reflected Clastres’s involvement with Heidegger’s philosophy as a young man,31 while the second found greatest expression in Clastres’s championing of the work of the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.32 But in burnishing the egalitarian, non-hierarchical credentials 29 30
31
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Ibid., 25. For a positive reading of this development, see D. Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York, 2002), Part I; for a negative one, see M. S. Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York, 2004); in between, see A. Jainchill and S. Moyn, “French Democracy between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 76/1 (2004), 107–54. See esp. Clastres, “L’arc et le panier,” L’Homme 6/2 (1966), 13–31, rptd in Soci´et´e contre ´ chap. 5, and in English in Society against the State; cf. “Entretien avec Pierre Clastres,” l’Etat, 20–21. M. Sahlins, “La premi`ere soci´et´e d’abondance,” Les Temps modernes 268 (1968), 641–80; ˆ de pierre, aˆ ge d’abondance: Sahlins, Stone-Age Economics (New York, 1972); Sahlins, Age l’´economie des soci´et´es primitives, pref. Clastres, trans. T. Jolas (Paris, 1976). Clastres’s ´ preface is rptd as “L’Economie primitive,” in Recherches d’anthropologie politique, chap. 8, and in English in The Archeology of Violence.
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of savage men, Clastres eventually had to confront the apparently prominent role of violence in their worlds. He adopted a surprisingly powerful strategy: to reinterpret the violence in primitive society as internal and essential to its selfimmunization against the rise of the state, and to compare it favorably to the grandiose horrors of the statist, modern world. In this regard, there is no more provocative essay in Clastres’s corpus than his discussion of primitive torture.33 Beginning with Franz Kafka, whose “In the Penal Colony” had understood that the body is an apt place for social law to be inscribed, as an indelible medium for and inescapable reminder of society’s power, Clastres immediately moved to the then recently published testimony of Anatolii Marchenko. This Soviet prisoner’s experience of living with penal tattoos like “Khrushchev’s Slaves,” Clastres suggested, illustrated the power of “the triple alliance, intuited by Kafka, between the law, writing and the body.” Nevertheless, “there is something in the reality of the camps of the U.S.S.R. that surpasses even the fiction of the penal colony.”34 Primitive societies apparently undertake, typically as part of rites of passage, and thus as a universal rather than a penal event, the same inscription on the flesh which Clastres did not hesitate to call “torture,” and, indeed, his Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians contains a gripping narrative of one such episode.35 As Clastres insisted, many societies preferred inflicting this ritual branding with the most painful possible methods, as a test of courage (as well as a frequent test of the anthropological observers whose morality it offended). And yet, Clastres continued, the ritual violence inflicted had a critical political function in these societies without a state: The law they come to know in pain is the law of primitive society, which says to everyone: You are worth no more than anyone else; you are worth no less than anyone else. The law, inscribed on bodies, expresses primitive society’s refusal to run the risk of division, the risk of a power separate from society itself, a power that would escape its control. Primitive law, cruelly taught, is a prohibition of inequality that each person will remember.36
The analogy of primitive and statist cruelty is, for this reason, false. Appealing to Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari’s “brilliant” distinction in their Anti-Oedipus 33 34
35 36
Clastres, “De la torture dans les soci´et´es primitives,” L’Homme 13/3 (1973), 114–20, rptd as ´ La Soci´et´e contre l’Etat, chap. 10, and in English in Society against the State. Clastres, “De la torture dans les soci´et´es primitives,” 179, citing A. Marchenko, Mon t´emoignage, trans. Franc¸ois Oliver (Paris, 1971). This book had appeared two years earlier in the United States as My Testimony (New York, 1969); cf. Clastres, “Martchenko,” Textures 10–11 (1975), 45–6. Clastres, Chronique des indiens Guayaki, chap. 4. Clastres, “De la torture dans les soci´et´es primitives,” 186.
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(published the year before this essay) between marking and writing, Clastres suggested that in fact primitive “marking” prevented the rise of the state, and a fortiori the possibility of modern “writing” that Anatolii Marchenko had suffered in totalitarian circumstances.37 “It is proof of their admirable depth of mind,” Clastres wrote, “that the Savages knew all that ahead of time, and took care, at the cost of a terrible cruelty, to prevent the advent of a more terrifying cruelty.”38 As in the celebrated opening sections of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which appeared two years later, entitled “Of Torture,” the violent infliction of pain is understood as a relative, rather than an absolute, wrong, to which the proper moral and political question is: compared to what alternative? Cruelty is not necessarily the worst evil society can inflict.39 But where Foucault located the transition from physical cruelty to panoptic control around the collapse of the old regime, Clastres inserted it quite simply in the space of difference between the primitive and the modern. Whether Clastres’s argument is rooted in ethnographic observation or whether—again like Foucault’s view—it is more fundamentally grounded in Nietzsche’s contrast in The Genealogy of Morals between the cruel (but free) primitive and the humanitarian (but enslaved) modern, is an open question. Not surprisingly, Clastres saw no need to choose between these two alternatives: “If I had not reflected a bit on The Genealogy of Morals, I would have had more difficulty in writing [on torture],” Clastres explained in an interview. “Nietzsche, who probably knew nothing of and couldn’t have cared less about the anthropology of his time (and rightly so), understood the problems of . . . marking with infinitely more clarity than his contemporaries.”40 Fieldwork, therefore, eventually confirmed Nietzsche’s prescient reversal of the 37
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40
See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe: capitalisme et schizophr´enie (Paris, 1972), chap. 3. Of the treatment of savages in this book, Clastres testified in a group interview in the debates around its publication that “Deleuze and Guattari write about Savages and Barbarians what until now ethnologists have not written. . . . It seems to me that ethnologists should feel at home in Anti-Oedipus.” Praising their theory of the Urstaat, Clastres argued that they showed that “the state exists in primitive societies, even in the tiniest band of nomad-hunters . . . , but it is constantly being warded off.” He also praised their discussion of torture. Interview in La Quinzaine litt´eraire 143 (June 16, 1972), in English in Guattari, Chaosophy, ed. S. Lotringer (New York, 1995), 111, 112, 113. Clastres, “De la torture dans les soci´et´es primitives,” 188. For criticism that Clastres illegitimately compared primitive ritual to modern torture, see A. Margarido and M. Panoff, “De l’ethnologie comme torture des faits?,” L’Homme 14/2 (1974), 139–42. The prevention of cruelty has most famously been made the moral foundation and first principle of liberal modernity by Judith Shklar and, following her, Richard Rorty. See Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA, 1984), chap. 1, Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in N. L. Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA, 1989), and Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989). “Entretien avec Pierre Clastres,” 21.
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progressivist fictions of his time, his praise of cruel primitive feasts and his hatred of his own modernity. In his less developed work on primitive warfare (which he apparently planned at the time of his death to make his next book-length project), Clastres argued similarly. As in the case of torture, Clastres had vividly illustrated the bellicosity of the Guayaki in his chronicle.41 War presented another apparent difficulty for his overall thesis: not just because, like torture, it might undermine his idealization of the primitive but for the more fundamental reason that, by his own acknowledgment, chieftains took genuine power in the exceptional periods of wartime.42 He insisted on the distinction, and the normativity of peace, against popular and even ethnographic fantasies about the permanence of war in the paleolithic. Reviewing the report of a Brazilian woman captured by the Yanomama Indians of Brazil and kept as a wife for two decades, Clastres remarked: Since war is almost constantly present in the text . . ., it leads us to ask: what impressions will the reader, even the slightly forewarned reader, have afterwards? There is reason to fear that these impressions will be unfavorable. What to think, indeed, of people who ceaselessly kill each other with relentless intensity, who do not hesitate to riddle with arrows today those who only yesterday were their best friends? And from then on, the illusions of the Noble Savage’s peaceful habits collapse, since we only see war of literally everyone against everyone, the presocial state of man according to Hobbes. We should be clear: Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes does not correspond to an historic moment in human evolution any more than Rousseau’s state of nature does . . . [L]et us not forget, without trying to reduce the sociological importance of war in these cultures, that the arrival of whites everywhere in America—North as well as South—led almost automatically to a doubling of hostility and war between tribes.43
Whether or not persuasive, this argument, of course, did not address the problem that even sporadic and intermittent warfare posed to Clastres’s thesis. Towards what turned out to be the end of his life, Clastres confronted the challenge of occasional and temporary battle by claiming that war, for all its spilled blood 41 42
43
Clastres, Chronique des indiens Guayaki, esp. chap. 6. In his initial article, Clastres touched briefly on the fact that American natives either had separate war and civilian chiefs or, in cases in which the roles coincided, restricted the chief’s power at the conclusion of hostilities: “The model of coercive power is adopted, therefore, only in exceptional circumstances when the group faces an external threat.” ´ Clastres, “Echange et pouvoir,” 30. His thought later shifted on this point; see below, n. 70. Clastres, “Une ethnographie sauvage,” L’Homme 9/1 (1969), 58–65, rptd in Recherches d’anthropologie politique, chap. 2, in English in The Archeology of Violence, 35–6. The essay is a review of H. Valero and E. Biocca, Yano`ama: The Narrative of a White Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, trans. D. Rhodes (New York, 1969), a book that appeared in France in 1968.
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and necessary commanders, nevertheless played a homeopathic function: a little violence and leadership keep more away. Rejecting the theses that war is natural (Hobbes’s thesis, supposedly confirmed by accounts of savages) and economic arguments that war arises over scarce resources or because of a breakdown of exchange, Clastres proposed the need for a political interpretation that did justice to the integrality of war to primitive life without making them simply equivalent.44 Noting that the warfare as a rule occurred between separated groups, and not as indiscriminate mayhem, Clastres proposed this solution to the problem: [I]f there is indeed a profound relationship between the multiplicity of sociopolitical entities and violence, one can only understand this link by reversing the habitual order of their presentation: it is not war that is the effect of segmentation, it is segmentation that is the effect of war. It is not only the effect, but the goal: war is at once the cause of and the means to a sought-after effect and end, the segmentation of primitive society. In its being, primitive society wants dispersion.45
And for this primitive will to sociological dispersion, Clastres already possessed an explanation. It was only on condition of membership in bounded entities that primitive men could preserve their peculiar institution of power, their rejection of hierarchy, and their self-immunization against statehood. “Primitive society is a community that assures control of its territory in the name of the Law guaranteeing its non-division,” Clastres maintained. “The territorial dimension already includes the political in that it excludes the other.”46 Given the assumption of their inevitable encounter, individual units will necessarily enter battle, because each is structurally constituted to exclude all of the others. “The unification of partial We’s into a meta-We, the elimination of the difference unique to each autonomous community would abolish the distinction between the We and the Other, and primitive society itself would disappear,” Clastres explained.47 Clastres’s view of savage politics is thus strikingly, albeit unintentionally, like that of Carl Schmitt: founded on a root distinction between friend and foe, as the essence of the political. But—I suppose Clastres would say—primitive
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Clastres surveys alternative prior interpretations of war, including that of L´evi-Strauss, in “L’arch´eologie de la violence,” 143–52. Hobbes argued: “It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America . . . have no government at all and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.” T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), 88. Clastres, “L’arch´eologie de la violence,” 153. On the requirement of sharp boundaries and limited size, cf. “Entretien avec Pierre Clastres,” 23. Clastres, “L’arch´eologie de la violence,” 156. Ibid., 157–8.
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friends are all equal, they have a pact to refuse the statist division of society into rulers and ruled, where Schmitt revives the logic of friend and foe within that state-based logic, where hatred of foes is not weighed in the balance against the absence of hierarchy. In his acknowledgment of war as a structural necessity, Clastres insisted that primitive men gain the compensation of a society without division.48 To avoid war, Hobbes chose the state. But, misunderstanding the role of violence in savage lands, he never considered the alternative choice. To avoid the state, savages chose war.
*** Especially in light of the torture and war it requires to avoid the dialectic, the primitive world’s implicit superiority becomes clear only in a survey of Clastres’s thought about the state-based alternative to it. Quite simply, Clastres assimilated rival visions of the state to its totalitarian climax and judged them in light of it. In what counts as his major persisting allegiance to Hegel and his Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist followers, it is as if any state is embittered by the foretaste of its epitome, by its failure to wither away over time and, even under conditions of revolution, to always become yet stronger. In this way, Clastres’s search exterior and prior to the dialectic reflects a continuing allegiance to Hegel’s script: a tacit agreement that, once it begins, there lies nothing outside of it, that it will rush towards its conclusion, and gather even what seems to oppose it—in Hegel’s version of theodicy—to its purpose. Occasionally, Clastres suggested more nuance. His fundamental distinction between societies with and without a state, he once wrote, does not mean, of course, that all societies with a state are identical to one another: we could not reduce to a single type the diverse historical configurations of the state, and
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In a related essay, Clastres addressed the separate problem of a relatively permanent and stable warrior class and ethos in some primitive societies. Though the warrior class and ethos are necessary because of the structural requirement of war in primitive society, they also threaten to be a self-defeating solution: the imperative of war might introduce social class and (permanent) leadership. Clastres argued, however, that the primitive society compensates for this danger: the warrior ethos implants what amounts to a death-wish in those who are animated by it. In his words: “There is an exchange between society and the warrior: prestige for exploit. But in this confrontation, it is society, mistress of the rules of the game, that has the last word: for the ultimate exchange is that of eternal glory for the eternity of death. Ahead of time, the warrior is condemned to death by society: no joy for the savage warrior, only the certainty of sorrow. But why? Because the warrior could cause the sorrow of the society by introducing the germ of division . . . [The exchange is] the undivided social body’s life for the warrior’s death.” Clastres, “Malheur ´ du guerrier sauvage,” 193. He forecast this result in Clastres, “La Soci´et´e contre l’Etat,” the last (previously unpublished) essay in the book of the same name; English edn, 209–10.
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nothing allows us to confuse the archaic despotic state, or the liberal bourgeois state, or the totalitarian fascist or communist states. Being careful, then, to avoid this confusion which would prevent, in particular, an understanding of the radical novelty and specificity of the totalitarian state, we shall note that a common property makes societies with a state as a whole different from primitive societies.49
This willing distinction between forms of the state, however, is evidently compatible with a dialectical view of their interrelationship as successive “stages” of history. Whether or not he held this exact view, Clastres spoke often of the pathology of all forms of the state; and there is no way to understand the pathos of his search for an alternative except on the assumption that he believed that the totalitarian state merely epitomized the more general object of his condemnation. Nothing else than the fixation on totalitarianism can explain the recommendation that Clastres offered in an interview: “Don’t be fooled by appearances . . . The machine of the state, in all Western societies, is becoming more and more statist, which is to say that it will become more authoritarian . . . with the deep support of the majority.” He added: “The statist machine is heading towards a kind of fascism, not the fascism of a party, but an interior fascism.” Everyone sought the authority to command, even those who promised to use the state in the name of freedom.50 The varieties of modern politics were simply variations on the same evil theme. The grounds for Clastres’s exaggerated, and monomaniacal, hatred of the state are partly biographical. Many ex-communists have felt it. But Clastres took the fanatical suspicion of the state, familiar among some ex-communists, to an altogether new level of theoretical sophistication. And then there is the circumstance of the 1970s in which he wrote, the years of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and the widespread conviction in France that the rejection of totalitarianism counted as the beginning of political wisdom. For most, the mood that made his theory possible and popular has disappeared (though not without leaving behind a legacy). But it is worth considering more seriously one of his reasons for this grim and fatalistic perception of the total control of the world that the state’s unstoppable administrative extension would eventually cause. Some of Clastres’s most powerful writing dealt with the extinction of the very tribes he had once studied, and others like them. Clastres’s essays suggest that
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Clastres, “La question du pouvoir dans les soci´et´es primitives,” Interrogations 7 (1976), 3–8, rptd in Clastres, Recherches d’anthropologie politique, chap. 6, and in English in Clastres, The Archeology of Violence, 88; cf. Clastres, “De quoi rient les Indiens?,” Les Temps modernes ´ 253 (1967), 2179–98, rptd in Clastres, La Soci´et´e contre l’Etat, chap. 6, in English in Clastres, Society against the State, 152. “Entretien avec Pierre Clastres,” 24–5.
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he felt himself to be one of the last witnesses to the only alternative humanity had once enjoyed to the state and to the punishing force the victorious dialectic imposed on its rival as it neared its acme. When Clastres returned from one of his initial missions, in 1967, he noted to the French anthropological community his “impression that the final decline [of the Indians] is occurring now. The cries of alarm of thirty years ago were perhaps premature, but now they risk being too late.” Observing that in the prior decade more tribes had disappeared than during the previous four, he concluded wistfully: “Soon, there will be no more Indians.”51 In the years after Clastres’s return came reports of genocide, providing a macabre confirmation of his prediction. “Throughout these past years,” Clastres wrote then, “the massacres of Indians have been denounced in Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay. Always in vain.”52 The few survivors of genocide, Clastres noted in an anti-Hegelian spirit in the conclusion of his ethnographic masterpiece, were like “unclaimed objects; hopelessly forced to leave their prehistory, they had been thrown into a history that had nothing to do with them but to destroy them.”53 Even when they were not physically killed, Clastres suggested in his most reflective piece on the subject of tribal annihilation, they were the subject of “ethnocide” (then a recent coinage).54 Clastres suggested that ethnocide reflected a certain optimism in the confrontation with difference; unlike genocide, which is committed to difference’s eradication, ethnocide treated it as reversible rather than unsalvageable. But rather than locating the causes in Western ethnocentrism, Clastres insisted that the explanation for it had to lie elsewhere; after all, all cultures are ethnocentric—even the Guayaki, whose name for members of their own tribe is “Ach´e” or “persons.”55 It followed that ethnocide, a local phenomenon, required more than ethnocentrism, a universal one. Its explanation demanded inclusion of the only variable absent among the savages but present among the civilized: the state. “Ethnocide,” Clastres averred, “results in the dissolution of the multiple into one. Now what about the state? It is, in essence, a putting into play of centripetal force, which, when circumstances demand it, tends toward crushing the opposite centrifugal forces.”56 He appealed to the French example 51 52
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Clastres, “Mission au Paraguay et au Br´esil,” 108. Clastres, “De l’ethnocide,” Encyclopedia universalis (Paris, 1974), 2826–9, rptd in Clastres, Recherches d’anthropologie politique, chap. 4, in English in Clastres, Archeology of Violence, 44. Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, 345. Cf. R. Jaulin, La paix blanche: introduction a` l’ethnocide (Paris, 1970), Jaulin, ed., Le Livre blanc de l’ethnocide en Am´erique (Paris, 1972), and Jaulin, ed., La D´ecivilisation: politique et pratique de l’ethnocide (Brussels, 1974). Clastres, “De l’ethnocide,” 46. Ibid., 47–8.
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of state centralization, notably in the era of the French Revolution and the nineteenth century when differences were eliminated in the service of state-based identity. Did anything remain in France of village life? Only “folkloric spectacle destined for the consumption of tourists,” Clastres argued.57 Ethnocide became spectacular when externalized abroad, but it began at home. It was thus the state, and no other factor, that Clastres could single out as the ultimate culprit for ethnocidal practices. Clastres appealed to economic factors, for once, to explain what differentiated some states from others in the intensity of their imperialism. The modern industrial system, east and west, in the Soviet bloc or the free world, is “the most terrifying machine of destruction,” Clastres wrote. “Races, societies, individuals: space, nature, seas, forests, subsoils: everything is useful, everything must be used, everything must be productive, with productivity pushed to its maximum rate of intensity. This is why no respite could be given to societies that left the world to its original, tranquil unproductivity.”58 Though his allegiance to Marx ended unceremoniously, and though his affection for Heidegger waned, Clastres’s vociferous hatred of capitalism and instrumentalism never wavered. Did he hit, nevertheless, on the cause of the bloodshed? The reason why the last alternative to the dialectic appeared to have been crushed in his own lifetime? For on this point, nobody should mistake or minimize the source of his outrage. Stateless societies could not resist the state; and there was blood on the slaughterbench. “Presently, in all South America, the last free Indians are succumbing,” Clastres concluded. “The change will be carried out to the end; it will be carried out until there is nothing left to change.”59
*** In leaving Hegel’s teleology behind, did Clastres then regress to Rousseau’s primitivism? In spite of his repeated denials over the years, there is good reason to believe it. Aside from the many other parallels with Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality—the freedom, equality, and happiness of the savage not least—there is Clastres’s recognition in Society against the State of the need for a story of how the disaster occurred and, with the dialectic’s beginning, how the statist order took root. His answer, like that of Rousseau, is that there must have occurred “various chance happenings” or even a single “fatal chance occurrence that, for the common good, ought never to have happened.”60 More mournfully even than Rousseau, Clastres obsessed about the reasons that the history of 57 58 59 60
Ibid., 49. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 51. J.-J. Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. D. Cress, intro. P. Gay (Indianapolis, 1987), 59, 65.
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civilization might have begun. But in this inquiry he claimed to walk not in the footsteps of Rousseau but of a different early modern Frenchman, one who had ´ made the rise of the state the focal problem of his thought: Etienne de la Bo´etie. Michel de Montaigne’s close associate, the subject of his essay “Of Friendship,” La Bo´etie played an interesting but unremarked role in the political discourse of France in the 1970s—perhaps not surprisingly, in a decade living in the aftermath of a failed hope for utopian freedom and awakening to the reality of continued servitude. At this important moment, Lefort’s and Clastres’s followers Miguel Abensour and Marcel Gauchet published a new edition of La Bo´etie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, appending to it commentaries by their mentors.61 What is interesting is the fixation of Clastres’s reading on the problem of the origins of statist domination, which made a contrast with other possible readings— including those offered by others at the time. La Bo´etie’s heroism, for Clastres, is not surprisingly a precursor to his own. It is the ability, from within history, to resist its totalistic claims, to see the existence of a lost alternative before it. “If I can be surprised that voluntary servitude is a constant in all societies,” Clastres remarked, in a sense illustrating his identification with his predecessor, it is, of course, because I imagine the logical possibility of a society that would not know voluntary servitude. La Bo´etie’s heroism and freedom: precisely this smooth transition from History to logic, precisely this gap in what is most naturally obvious, precisely this breach of the general conviction that we cannot think of society without its division between the dominating and the dominated. The young La Bo´etie transcends all known history to say: something else is possible.62
Asking the question is what mattered: “[W]hat misfortune so denatured man,” La Bo´etie had wondered, “only born in truth to live freely, to make him lose the memory of his first existence and the desire to retrieve it?” A question Clastres read as a revitalizing affirmation: “What he discovers, by slipping out of History, is precisely that the society in which people want to serve the tyrant is historical, that it is not eternal and has not always existed, that it had a date of birth and something must have happened, necessarily, for men to fall from freedom into servitude.” La Bo´etie first made the thrilling discovery that the “birth of History, this fatal rupture,” is an explanatory problem. It is also a normative puzzle. For it “never should have happened.”63 61
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E. de la Bo´etie, Le Discours de la servitude volontaire, ed. M. Abensour, intro. Abensour and M. Gauchet (Paris, 1976). Abensour later edited the proceedings of a conference in Clastres’s memory: see above, n. 4. Clastres, “Libert´e, malencontre, innomable,” in ibid., rptd in Clastres, Recherches d’anthropologie politique, chap. 7, in English in Clastres, The Archeology of Violence, 94. Clastres, “Libert´e, malencontre, innomable.”
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Revealingly, Clastres also praised La Bo´etie—in effect if not in intent for anticipating him—for placing such a singular emphasis on the great fall from equality, for such a wise refusal to make fine distinctions between the series of post-lapsarian authorities. “The result of this split between free society and slave society,” Clastres summarizes, is that all divided societies are slave societies. That is to say, La Bo´etie does not make distinctions within the ensemble constituted by divided societies: there is no good prince with whom to contrast the evil tyrant. La Bo´etie is scarcely concerned with studies in character. What does it really matter whether the prince is kind or cruel: whatever the case, is it not the prince whom the people serve?64
In this way, La Bo´etie saw in advance the genuine authority for the radical assimilation of all statist societies to one another. He saw that “all relationships of power are oppressive, that all divided societies are inhabited by absolute evil,” and uncovered the “pure logical opposition” that brings into view the “evil that gangrenes the entire divided social body.”65 La Bo´etie’s insight allowed Clastres to throw his occasional caution to the wind and indulge his secret belief that the seed of totalitarianism is in some ways equivalent to its fulfillment: “[O]nce the freedom that naturally governed the relations between equals has been lost, absolute evil is capable of anything; there is a hierarchy of the worst, and the totalitarian state in its various contemporary configurations is there to remind us that however profound the loss of freedom, it is never lost enough, we never stop losing it.”66 Clastres’s appropriation of La Bo´etie, finally, also excused a glaring lapsus in his own project. He had no good answer to the problem of how the state arose. Referring to it only as “misfortune,” La Bo´etie, Clastres wrote, had “no idea” of how to solve this problem either.67 And, like Clastres, La Bo´etie (on Clastres’s reading) excused himself from providing any solution to voluntary servitude, restricting himself to mourning that it had arisen. “[T]here is a point of no return,” Clastres interpreted La Bo´etie as saying, and “such a passage can only take place one way: from the non-state to the state.”68 Actually, the reality is slightly more complex. Clastres entertained many hypotheses through his life about what factors might have given rise to the state. He did so, he noted at one point, because “perhaps the light cast upon the state’s moment of birth will also illuminate the conditions of the possibility (realizable or not) of its
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Ibid., 95. Ibid. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 99.
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death.”69 Of course, given the fear and loathing of the state at this moment in French political thought, Clastres did not pose the question of its origins alone. Initially, he considered the hypothesis that the chief’s empowerment in war might somehow escalate into political leadership. But by the end of his career, he denied that war required any kind of leadership.70 Nevertheless, notes he left at the time of his death suggest that he planned to return to the problem of the war chief.71 He also flirted with a demographic explanation for the rise of the state: if primitive communities had to remain small and bounded, as a condition of avoiding the state, then it seemed possible for the failure of self-regulating growth to allow the fateful break to occur.72 Elsewhere, he appeared to briefly admit the possibility that the “confusion” of the state could arise for economic reasons, if “the activity of production is diverted from its initial goal, when, instead of producing only for himself, primitive man also produces for others.”73 Even then, however, he insisted that this event could occur only after the state arose, with economic following upon political inequality. “[T]he emergence of the State determines the advent of classes.”74 For this reason, the class struggle does not occur before the beginning of history. Accordingly, Clastres fulminated early and late in his career against Marxists, from Friedrich Engels to the new wave of Marxist anthropologists, who explained the origins of the state as dependent on the more fundamental factor of economic class.75 Finally, Clastres considered whether the state could somehow have been brought about by the activity of religious prophecy.76 Generally speaking, however, Clastres felt free to refer to the
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Clastres, “La question du pouvoir dans les soci´et´es primitives,” 92. Clastres, “Malheur du guerrier sauvage,” 170: “[C]ontrary to an opinion that is as false as it is widespread (that the chief has no power, except in times of war), the warrior leader is at no moment of the expedition (preparation, battle, retreat) in a position—should such be his intention—to impose his will . . . [F]reedom is not canceled by the will for victory, even at the price of operational efficiency.” In a note by Libre’s editors, appended to ibid., 200. See Clastres, “Ind´ependance et exogamie: structure et dynamique des soci´et´es indiennes ´ de la forˆet tropicale,” L’Homme 3/3 (1964), 67–87, rptd in Clastres, La Soci´et´e contre l’Etat, chap. 3, in English in Society against the State. ´ Clastres, “La Soci´et´e contre l’Etat,” 198. Ibid. ´ See Clastres, “L’Economie primitive,” and esp. “Les Marxistes et leur anthropologie.” The locus classicus of the Marxist account of the origins of the state is in Engels’s work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). For the Marxist counter-attack on Clastres, see J.-L. Amselle, ed., Le Sauvage a` la mode (Paris, 1979). Clastres’s wife made this the subject of her own book-length study in the period. See H. Clastres, La Terre sans mal: le proph´etisme tupi-guarani (Paris, 1975), in English The Land-Without-Evil: Tup´ı-Guaran´ı Prophetism, trans. J. G. Brovender (Urbana, IL, 1995).
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emergence of the state as the “mystery (perhaps a temporary one) of the origin.”77 La Bo´etie’s proto-Rousseauian picture of “mischance” confirmed the mystery. But there is little doubt that it may have mattered most for Clastres that La Bo´etie anticipated Nietzsche, who referred to the origins of the state as “not a gradual or voluntary” event but rather “a break, a leap, a compulsion, an ineluctable disaster that precluded all struggle.”78 From this inexplicable catastrophe, what recovery?
*** Clastres’s romanticized vision of society against the state not only failed to fulfill the primary need of his (but not only his) time—a theory of democratization in which society and state are complementary—but imposed an obstacle to its fulfillment. For this reason, it played both a role in and is illustrative of the origins of three problematic paths out of the 1970s which many have pursued. First, the most evident political implication of Clastres’s arguments—though at the time and since they have proved attractive to anarchists—is a kind of paralyzed mourning. It intended to break fundamentally with Marxism, but Clastres’s work nevertheless shared the implication of Marxist theory that the institutionalization of freedom is to be found anywhere but through reform of the lineaments of freedom in what already exists. It ruled out Marxist utopianism as excessively continuous with the present statist order, only to replace it with primitivist nostalgia or exoticist longing. The past and the other replaced the future. Encouraging the mind to wander to other places and other times, Clastres’s work did not encourage a nuanced appraisal of the prospects of reform in the here and now. In this way, Clastres’s anti- but not yet genuinely post-Marxist perception that the state in all its forms is corrupted by a “neo-theology of history with its fanatic continuism” prevented him from presenting a viable stance for those who are unable to escape the circumstances of Western modernity—which is to say, in a globalized world, everyone.79 But—second and third—for those dissatisfied with his resignation, Clastres’s work further helped to create a poor but fateful alternative just beyond the 77 78
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´ Clastres, “La Soci´et´e contre l’Etat,” 205. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, § 17. Clastres’s engagement with La Bo´etie prompted an important reply by Pierre Birnbaum, multiplying the discussions of La Bo´etie in the 1970s: P. Birnbaum, “Sur les origines de la domination politique: A` propos ´ d’Etienne de la Bo´etie et de Pierre Clastres,” Revue fran¸caise de science politique 27/1 (1977), 5–21, with a response from Clastres, “Le retour des Lumi`eres,” ibid., 22–8, rptd in Clastres, Recherches d’anthropologie politique, chap. 9, in English in Clastres, The Archeology of Violence. Birnbaum’s essay is rptd in Birnbaum, Dimensions du pouvoir (Paris, 1984). Clastres, “La question du pouvoir dans les soci´et´es primitives,” 91.
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limits of his own position. Either it provided a stepping-stone to the neo-liberal position—which as a matter of fact, in the form of Marcel Gauchet’s work, developed in part out of Clastres’s philosophy.80 Clastres’s poisoned view of the state left a legacy in the view that the danger of totalitarianism lurking everywhere in the modern world makes the security of freedoms against the state the only realistic achievement in a politics without illusions. Or, when it did not devolve in this manner into a complacent neo-liberalism, Clastres’s theory helped give rise to the one-sided belief on the left that democracy is primarily a matter of civil society rather than also the imagination of a reformed state; put differently, it prompted the illusion of the programmatic separability between society and the state, ignoring the necessary role of the state in the development and promotion of a free and vibrant civil society outside it. No more, after Clastres and his post-Marxist moment, would most indulge the disastrous illusion that the road to freedom runs through the violent seizure of the apparatus of the state. With the historical moment in French political thought through which he lived, that he shaped as it shaped him, Clastres helped to fundamentally change prevalent beliefs about the likely forms in which freedom is to be institutionalized. In this way, Clastres’s work played an important role in the rise in contemporary theory of the importance of civil society. Marginal to traditional political argumentation—except that of Tocqueville, unsurprisingly revived at precisely this moment—it became central to liberal understandings of the nature of a free society as well as the favorite place to look for hope of those reforming leftists choosing to make the journey, as the title of a book by Andrew Arato had it, “from neo-Marxism to democratic theory.”81 But Clastres’s œuvre, and the rebirth of civil society of its moment, were often too strongly marked by the opposition to totalitarianism which animated them negatively like a paranoid obsession. They not only helped prepare the way for the emphasis on civil society, but conditioned the way in which its importance in the overall political realm came to be understood: in recklessly assimilating the state in its different possible forms to the singular evil of the totalitarian state, Clastres’s work not only forced an excessive burden onto civil society alone as the locus of freedom; it also neutralized a theory of the state, condemned and feared in all its forms, that could complement and come to the aid of civil society.
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See S. Moyn, “Savage and Modern Liberty: Marcel Gauchet and the Origins of New French Thought” (forthcoming), for a full bibliography of Gauchet’s revealing homages to and commentaries on Clastres’s work. A. Arato, “Civil Society against the State: Poland, 1980–81,” Telos 47 (1981), 23–47, rptd in From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies (Armonk, 1993); or J. Keane, ed., Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-East Europe (Armonk, 1985).
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And yet, the incandescence of his mind and the brilliance of his rhetoric may not permit so easy and comfortable a negative verdict on his position, for to read the ensemble of his writings is to confront the uncompromising position— tragic but possibly true—that the disaster has already occurred, the dialectic is ongoing, and the state has won and, far from creating the conditions for a free and equal society, has decisively ruled that society out. A remnant of the Guayaki now have their own web presence, where they—or, more accurately, a Californian venture operating in their name—advertise their own Yerba Mat´e tea, “a powerful rejuvenating beverage grown in its native rainforest environment for premium quality and flavor,” thus demonstrating the possibilities of “market-driven conservation” that, powered by “conscious consumers,” promotes “harmony with indigenous cultures and their environment.” Thirty-four families, living on 2,500 acres, are able to farm using their traditional methods, and practice their traditional ceremonies. Individuals from the community have the option to participate in the growth, harvesting and production of yerba mat´e to earn additional personal income if they desire. Together with local Paraguayans, they produce Guayak´ı Yerba Mat´e which generates income to provide upgrades to housing facilities, medicines for the health clinic, and supplies for the school . . .82
Never mind that the Guayaki were just a few decades ago a nomadic, huntergatherer rather than a stationary, agricultural tribe: they are on the way to the state and the market, thanks to the imposition of both. “A thousand years of wars, a thousand years of celebrations!” So Clastres wrote at one point, expressing what he hoped the remnant of savagery fighting for survival against an ever-advancing civilization might still enjoy. Is this pious? I’m afraid so. They are the last of the besieged. A mortal shadow is being cast on all sides . . . And afterwards? Perhaps we will feel better once the final frontier of this ultimate freedom has been broken. Perhaps we will sleep without waking a single time . . . Someday, then, oil derricks around the chabunos, diamond mines in the hillsides, police on the paths, boutiques on the riverbanks . . . Harmony everywhere.83
Clastres did not live long enough to observe, to those still troubled in the dark night of the dialectic’s fulfillment, that a cup of Guayaki tea will not help them drift into sleep. It is a stimulant.
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See http://www.guayaki.com. Clastres, “Le dernier cercle,” Les Temps modernes 298 (1971), 1917–40, rptd in Recherches d’anthropologie politique, chap. 1, and in English in The Archeology of Violence, 27.
C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 81–95. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000064 Printed in the United Kingdom
intellectual history and philosophy lloyd kramer Department of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Donald R. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (Aldershot, England/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002) Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, England/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) The subdiscipline of historical studies that we now call “intellectual history” claims a distinctive place in contemporary historiography, but its precise characteristics and boundaries are not easily defined. Most intellectual historians embrace an interdisciplinary identity and draw on research methods that push historical studies toward other academic traditions. Indeed, some historians argue that the preoccupation with literature, language, philosophy, religion, and art carries intellectual historians away from the real historical forces that constitute the proper subjects for professional historians. Intellectual historians seek to explain how people have interpreted their cultures, beliefs, and actions, but real historians want to explain what people actually did in their daily lives, political institutions, wars, and social conflicts. As their most skeptical professional colleagues perceive it, the work of intellectual historians therefore comes closer to the ethereal labors of philosophers and literary critics than to the archival research and themes of traditional historical studies. Historians who want to place intellectual history outside of real history, however, might redraw their disciplinary borders if they were to compare the recent books of Donald R. Kelley and Mark Bevir. Although both authors describe the distinctive attributes of the history of ideas, they approach their subject with strikingly different disciplinary perspectives and methodologies. Kelley uses the methods and “discourse” of an intellectual historian, whereas Bevir uses the methods and “discourse” of a philosopher. More specifically, Kelley traces the historical emergence and evolution of a scholarly discipline that seeks to bring ideas “down” from the realm of timeless, transcendent truths into the complex historical realities of social experience, collective or personal identities, human institutions, and the struggle for power. Intellectual historians, as Kelley 81
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describes them, pursue this “contextualizing” historical project with the help of every intellectual tradition that can help them understand individual creativity, shared beliefs, and cultural conflicts. Bevir’s “logic of the history of ideas,” by contrast, systematically examines the processes of human reasoning that give philosophical legitimacy to the historical study of human thought. His philosophical method ignores the changing social, cultural, and institutional contexts in which historians of ideas have always worked because he wants to establish a philosophical logic that will support the historian’s claim for a reliable knowledge of past thinkers and beliefs. Bevir therefore refers to past thinkers in order to show how they contribute or (more often) fail to contribute to the correct logic of the history of ideas, but Kelley discusses past thinkers and scholars in order to show how they represented specific philosophical, linguistic, or scholarly phases in the evolving study of intellectual history. These differences point to an important divergence in the ways that most intellectual historians and philosophers define the characteristics of an academic discipline. Kelley describes disciplines as intellectual traditions that gain coherence through a shared language, a recurring explanatory framework (for example, the emphasis on contexts in intellectual history), and an evolving community of scholars. Bevir describes disciplines as distinctive systems of logic that gain coherence through carefully constructed “forms of reasoning” rather than from historical traditions or institutional contexts. The contrasting approaches to academic disciplines and the different analytical methods in these two carefully written, well-informed books thus show why and how intellectual history lies on the historical side of the academic boundaries that define the categories of modern knowledge and the careers of modern scholars. Kelley’s “history of intellectual history” summarizes insights that have come from his long, impressive immersion in the field. In addition to serving for almost two decades as editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Kelley has written numerous books and articles on influential thinkers, intellectual movements, and diverse approaches to cultural and intellectual history.1 His editorship of the 1
Kelley has written or edited more than 15 books and published more than 80 articles. Almost all of his writing falls under the broad rubric of intellectual history, but the following books give particular emphasis to the development of historical thought and knowledge: Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970); The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge, 1981); Historians and the Law in Postrevolutionary France (Princeton, NJ, 1984); Renaissance Humanism (New York, 1991); Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT, 1998); and Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven, CT, 2003). Kelley has been a Professor of History at the University of Rochester and (since 1991) at Rutgers University.
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journal connected him to a “school” of intellectual history (represented by the first editor, Arthur Lovejoy) that tends to stress the continuity and internal coherence of ideas across time rather than dramatic cultural or intellectual ruptures. Despite his affiliation with this “internalist” tradition, however, Kelley recognizes the value of other methods that emphasize the decisive role of social contexts, the shaping influence of language, or the significance of biographical events, gender, and personal experiences. All of these approaches help explain the “descent” of ideas—especially (we might add) if they can build their arguments on the kind of careful research and erudition that Kelley brings to his own books and articles. This exceptional erudition appears often in The Descent of Ideas as Kelley narrates the development of historical writing about ideas from late antiquity down to the philosophically informed historiography of the last two centuries. His particular expertise on early modern Europe enables him to place recent approaches to intellectual history within rhetorical and philosophical traditions that go back to the Renaissance; and he reminds his readers that the so-called “linguistic turn” in contemporary intellectual history actually marks a partial “return” to linguistic perspectives that were already shaping intellectual work in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Kelley argues that the historical approach to ideas evolved from early histories of philosophy into a much broader interest in all the “creations of human thought.” The distinctiveness of intellectual history (as compared to philosophy) thus emerged in its eclectic willingness to draw upon almost every philosophical “school” for examples of truth and in its historical insistence on the links between ideas and the cultural or social contexts in which they develop. Unlike the metaphysical philosophers, intellectual historians strongly doubted that transcendent ideas could somehow exist outside of time, history, or human cultures. They were instead concerned with what Kelley calls the “descent of ideas” from an imagined transcendent sphere into the historical spheres of language, cultural debates, and human lives. Meanwhile, intellectual history became distinctive (as compared to classical historiography) in its emphasis on the historical power of ideas. Unlike the military or political historians, intellectual historians never doubted that ideas and languages strongly influenced the “real world” of human societies. They thus sought to understand how ideas shaped human lives at the same time that they were studying how life experiences influenced ideas. All of these themes in intellectual history—its eclecticism, its interdisciplinarity, its contextualism, its emphasis on the interaction between ideas and human experience—provoked criticism from philosophers who placed ideas on a “higher” level outside of history and from materialist historians who questioned the influence of abstractions in human struggles for political or military power. Yet it was precisely this dual emphasis on the historicity of all ideas and creative works as well as the
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theoretical, intellectual components of all human actions that gave intellectual history its scholarly identity and enduring cultural significance. Kelley finds the modern starting point for intellectual history in the “eclecticism” of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792– 1867). Teaching in Paris after 1815, Cousin argued that both “sensualist” and “spiritualist” ideas expressed important truths and deserved equal philosophical attention. His “eclectic” approach to human thought thus brought together diverse aspects of Christianity, Platonism, Descartes, Kant, Scottish Common Sense philosophers, and the historical theories of Vico, Herder, and Hegel. This exceptional appreciation for different philosophers and historical eras would become typical of most later intellectual historians, who refused to identify with a single philosophical “master” or philosophical tradition. Although Cousin claimed that his eclecticism was both original and uniquely French, Kelley shows that numerous European predecessors had in fact promoted “eclectic” philosophical themes since late antiquity. Eclectic arguments could already be found, for example, in the early third-century (CE) work of Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, which summarized the ideas of ancient philosophers, provided stories about their lives, described the contexts in which they had worked, developed a chronology of philosophical masters, and categorized their key ideas in different “schools” and traditions. Kelley portrays Diogenes as the first important eclectic historian of philosophy, but he also notes that few other writers were willing to follow his eclectic methods over the next 1,000 years. Early Renaissance writers such as Petrarch and the members of a new “Republic of Letters” became natural eclectics, however, by drawing freely on divergent strands of Platonic, Aristotelian, or Stoic thought to define their own ideas. Petrarch was an especially notable example of what Kelley calls “an unashamed eclectic” (p. 67), but most other Renaissance scholars collected their ideas from similarly eclectic readings of classical philosophers, poets, and historians. The rising historical tide seemed to flow toward scholars such as Ermolao Barbaro and his “underlying premise that attention should be given above all to the language of earlier authors as preserved in the sources, and that eloquence, [and] mastery of language is essential to modern philosophizing” (p. 126). Philosophy, in short, was becoming an object for historical and philological studies. The Renaissance therefore laid the foundation for a new history of ideas, but Cousin’s most notable eclectic predecessor was the eighteenth-century German historian of philosophy J. J. Brucker, whose Critical History of Philosophy (1741–3) helped to establish what Kelley describes as “the new discipline of philosophical history and the associated eclectic method” (p. 164). This method summarized the main ideas of important philosophers and suggested that valuable truths appeared in widely divergent philosophical traditions. Brucker’s history of ideas
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also went beyond the explanation of specific concepts and theories, however, by examining the “external factors” that could have influenced the development of each thinker’s ideas. He referred, for example, to the influences of a philosopher’s “country, his family, his education, his natural temper, his habits of life, his patrons, friends, or enemies” (Brucker, cited on p. 165), thereby pointing toward the kind of contextualism that later intellectual historians would use to explain how specific thinkers responded to the social and cultural milieux in which they lived. Both the eclectic respect for widely divergent philosophies and the intellectual interest in the influence of historical contexts were therefore well established in European scholarship by the time Victor Cousin began his lectures in Paris, but these methods gained much wider acceptance over the next two centuries (the term “intellectual history” was not used before the twentieth century). New forms of intellectual history emerged in the hermeneutic methods of Germans such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey and in the new literary history of French critics such as Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. There was also a “new history” of culture in the work of Americans such as James Harvey Robinson and a new historicism in the writings of Italians such as Benedetto Croce—who “carried on the old eclectic method . . . and took what was best in all schools” (p. 274). Intellectual historians thus extended an eclectic tradition that never gained much respect from philosophers or from the rigorous defenders of any specific “school” of philosophy, theology, or science. “Even today,” Kelley notes, “the word ‘eclecticism’ does not have a pleasant ring, suggesting as it does indecision, confusion, lack of definition, and neglect of logical consistency” (p. 39). Yet this eclectic desire to understand, contextualize, and take seriously the truth claims of every philosophical or cultural tradition has given intellectual historians their distinctive disciplinary identity. Where others see confusion and indecision, the advocates of intellectual history see a commendable willingness to enter into historical dialogue with the widest possible range of ideas, cultures, and interpretations of human experience. The eclectic tendencies that first appeared in the study of rival philosophies constantly reappeared as intellectual historians turned their attention to diverse, often conflicting, forms of literary theory, linguistics, psychology, cultural anthropology, art history, and the history of science. Kelley explains how all of these academic disciplines entered the work of intellectual historians and expanded the history of ideas into wider spheres of social and cultural life. The historical attempt to understand how people have defined their knowledge, institutions, social worlds, and personal lives has always required an exceptional openness to interdisciplinary methods and insights because, as Kelley stresses, neither philosophy nor “any of the human sciences have the power to assimilate the whole process of human history—or indeed to make sense of every human
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creation” (p. 243). The inevitable limits of all specific philosophies and human sciences suggest why intellectual historians are forever crossing the boundaries of academic disciplines and trying to connect opposing “schools” of philosophy, literary theory, or psychology. Although Kelley stresses that intellectual history draws on widely diverse scholarly traditions, he also notes that the new hermeneutic criticism in nineteenth-century Germany had an especially significant influence on the historical study of ideas. Hermeneutic critics—Friedrich Schleiermacher, J. G. Droysen, and Wilhelm Dilthey, for example—argued that “no human being, not even a philosopher” could escape “the limitations of human horizons and points of view,” which meant that the hermeneutic understanding of an author’s ideas must include analysis of how the author was embedded in a specific cultural context and language (p. 137). The historian, in other words, should study the “spirit” and patterns of a culture (because they limit how a person thinks), much as a scientist studies the structures and patterns of nature (because they limit how objects or living things exist in the world). Of course, the later interpreters of past cultures are also limited by their own positions within specific cultures and languages, but the hermeneutic historian can nevertheless learn enough about other cultures and historical eras to understand how past thinkers assimilated, challenged, or interacted with the cultures in which they lived. Beginning with the assumption that everyone is situated within cultural and linguistic systems, hermeneutic critics sought to explain how imaginative writers and intellectuals used or transformed these systems to interpret their world and promote their ideas. “This was the mission of intellectual and cultural history,” Kelley explains, “a system of scholarly inquiry which joined forces with hermeneutics in the reading of the great book of culture—following the ‘descent of ideas’ into a context accessible to intellectual and cultural historians” (p. 140). This systematic study of the “‘descent of ideas’ into a context” becomes for Kelley the most distinctive feature of intellectual history. In contrast to other important intellectual traditions and aspirations in philosophy, theology, the arts, and the sciences, intellectual historians insist that ideas always represent some kind of interaction or exchange with the language and cultural world in which they are expressed. It is therefore impossible to establish a purely “internal” essence or reality for ideas because “external” cultural systems and interpreters always mediate the meanings that ideas convey. Kelley concedes without apology that this insistence on the shaping historical context of all human thought has never pleased philosophers—who from Plato to Descartes to Heidegger have attempted to locate philosophical truths beyond the reach of history or culture. As Kelley notes in a discussion of Descartes, the philosophers believed that “ideas were placed above the vagaries of opinion and the forces of history. In effect, ‘ideas’
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were taken off the agenda of criticism, out of the world of discourse and textual analysis, and beyond the reach of history. Like the world of ‘spirit’ of which they were a part, they were not subject to the mutability of the sublunar world” (p. 115). Philosophers worried that the historical emphasis on contexts would reduce ideas to the level of mere opinion, and so they resisted historical methods that moved from the internal logic of ideas into the external world of cultural traditions, social forces, and individual lives. They sought instead to define and defend clear boundaries between the “inside” and the “outside” of ideas because they assumed that ideas “were born without any significant social, political, cultural, or gender attributes” (p. 116). And few philosophers welcomed the early modern scholarship (beginning in the Renaissance) that approached philosophical language as simply a specific cultural form of literature, argumentation, and rhetorical conventions. A similar desire to place essential ideas beyond history or language has also appeared in theological views of a radically transcendent God, in aesthetic descriptions of great art as an expression of a transcendent, ideal beauty, and in “internalist” conceptions of the pure scientific knowledge that scientific geniuses discover in moments of inspired insight. Despite the obvious differences in these cultural traditions, they all have transcendent themes or aspirations that strive to place their greatest insights beyond the realm of history and cultural contexts. Yet the typical intellectual historian, as Kelley reminds us, sees the aspiration for transcendent ideas as an impossible dream. Given the impossibility of placing ideas securely in a transcendent realm, intellectual historians situate even the most abstract or transcendent beliefs within the historical play of human experience and culture. “Historians, if not philosophers, cannot help being atheists,” Kelley explains (p. 313)—by which he suggests that they cannot understand or describe the meaning of human ideas and beliefs without an explanatory “descent” into the complex world of human languages, conflicts, interests, and history. To be sure, most intellectual historians emphasize that our knowledge of historical contexts depends on surviving texts and on a process of linguistic reconstruction; and they would deny that contexts have a single foundation or essence. But Kelley argues that all intellectual historians (even “internalists” such as Arthur Lovejoy) accept the “historicist” assumption that ideas ultimately express the concerns and debates of a specific historical era (pp. 280–81). The intellectual historian’s emphasis on “the historical character of human knowledge” has therefore “continued to challenge philosophy for hegemony” in an ongoing disciplinary debate about the nature of human thought and truths (pp. 287–8). This debate can be placed in a more explicit philosophical framework by noting simply that intellectual history remains firmly anti-Platonic, even when it examines Plato, Neoplatonic theorists, or any other philosophical tradition in the history of human cultures.
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Kelley’s exceptional knowledge of the Western intellectual tradition offers important, comparative insights into unexpected connections between recent approaches to intellectual history and numerous cultural precedents in Renaissance literary studies, early modern rhetorical theories, and nineteenthcentury eclecticism. His account of the recent past, however, yields fewer historical surprises or original insights, perhaps because the contemporary intellectual context is our own cultural milieu. We often hear about the influence of cultural anthropology, post-modern literary theory, and the “linguistic turn” in intellectual history, for example, but we are less likely (in the current context) to hear about the cultural legacy of Diogenes Laertius, J. J. Brucker, or Victor Cousin. The most notable historical “absence” in Kelley’s “history of intellectual history” comes from his lack of critical interest in the specific social and institutional context that has influenced the development of intellectual history over the last several decades. He has more to say about the early modern “republic of letters” than about the institutional system of rewards, hierarchies, and academic careers that currently shapes the field of intellectual history. His “descent of ideas,” in short, does not descend far enough into the modern institutional and cultural system that produces and sustains intellectual historians (but also provides few jobs for would-be specialists in this subdiscipline). No single book, however, can analyze every contextual or cultural aspect of an intellectual discipline. In fact, Kelley’s erudite survey of how eclecticism, hermeneutics, historicism, and the modern human sciences shaped the distinctive field of intellectual history offers as much information and insight as one can reasonably expect from one historian; and his articulate defense of the contextualist themes in intellectual history becomes all the more persuasive when it is compared with Mark Bevir’s philosophical method in The Logic of the History of Ideas. Bevir teaches political theory, but he has written numerous articles on modern debates about the philosophy of history.2 His book extends the themes of these
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Bevir’s earlier publications on the history of ideas include “The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism,” History and Theory 31 (1992), 276–98; “Objectivity in History,” History and Theory 33 (1994), 328–44; “Ideology as Distorted Belief,” Journal of Political Ideologies 1 (1996), 107–22; and “Mind and Method in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 36 (1997), 167–89. He is also the co-editor (with Frank Trentmann) of a recent book, Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America: Transatlantic Exchanges, 1800 to the Present Day (New York, 2002). Bevir’s own essay in this edited collection (“British Socialism and American Romanticism,” pp. 73–97) moves away from the philosophical method in The Logic of the History of Ideas and comes closer to the methods and style of a contextualizing intellectual history. Bevir has been a Reader in Political Theory at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and is now a professor in the Political Science department at the University of California, Berkeley.
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earlier publications into a more detailed analysis of how the history of ideas relies on a specific logic to produce reliable knowledge. This epistemological problem, however, does not lead Bevir into social contexts or the long history of historians that interests Kelley. On the contrary, he dislikes “contextualism” because he believes that it produces a misguided understanding of ideas and reduces the autonomy of individual thinkers. His own approach to the history of ideas therefore examines the disciplinary logic and internal reasoning that give coherence to the discipline and support its truth claims. “The logic of an academic discipline,” Bevir writes, “consists of an analysis of the forms of reasoning appropriate to it” (p. 7), and the study of this logic can ignore the institutional or social contexts in which historians of ideas actually work. Indeed, he explains, “when we investigate the logic of the history of ideas our concern must be with the way historians of ideas reason about historical data, not with historical data itself ” (p. 8). Bevir situates his own project in the intellectual tradition of analytic philosophy, suggesting that he wants to build upon the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and other modern philosophers who have examined epistemological problems with far more logical precision than historians typically bring to this task. “When philosophers analyse the logic of any discipline, they outline the conceptual form and content of an ideal type of reasoning. They do not describe the historical, social, or psychological processes involved in an actual type of reasoning.” In contrast to the philosophers, historians who write about historical thinking (he specifically mentions R. G. Collingwood and Hayden White) often “muddle phenomenological and metahistorical issues with logical ones” (p. 9), which means that their works lack the logical rigor of a strong philosophical argument. Bevir therefore follows the philosophical method of exploring “the grammar of our concepts” in order to establish the logical reasoning that should inform a rigorous history of ideas. Few cultural or intellectual historians share Bevir’s preoccupation with the internal “logic” of historical explanation or his interest in a philosophical method that makes no reference to the lives and historical experiences of specific persons and social groups. If they are willing to follow Bevir into his highly abstract argument for the logic of the history of ideas, however, they will find that earlier philosophical discussion of these issues has repeatedly generated opposing “schools” of thought. Each group seems to defend only one side of remarkably precise philosophical dichotomies, but, as Bevir describes them, the arguments of both sides are logically flawed. Bevir thus addresses a specific epistemological issue in each chapter of his book (e.g. meaning, objectivity, belief, synchronic explanations), summarizes the opposing philosophical views of the issue, and then defines his own (and the correct) position somewhere between these alternative views.
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Some historians of ideas, for example, assume that authors were able to express their own personal intentions with complete clarity when they wrote about their ideas, so the historian’s task is simply to uncover and explain this “strong intentionality.” Other historians, however, assume that authors have never been able to express unique personal intentions because they were inevitably forced to think and write within the linguistic and cultural constraints that shape all texts. From this contextual perspective, “intentionality” expresses a cultural system, discourse, or ideology rather than an individual’s own ideas, and the historian’s task is to show how the works of past thinkers exemplified the discourse of a pervasive cultural system. Bevir analyzes these radically opposing views and then stakes out a middle position—“weak intentionality”—which argues that intentions can change as someone actually speaks, writes, or responds to a specific situation, but that ultimately the intentions of an individual writer can be recognized as a distinctive utterance. The method of a good, logical history of ideas, in short, finds the middle position between the extremes of a “strong,” individual intentionalism and a culturally determined intentionalism, thereby accounting for both the autonomy of individuals and the often unexpected outcomes of their arguments. Similar dichotomies and philosophical resolutions reappear in every section of Bevir’s book, so it is impossible to describe all of the contending dichotomies and logical middle positions in a concise summary. Suffice it to say that each dichotomy returns in some way to the opposing views of what he calls “atomistic individualism” and “radical structuralism” (this dichotomy appears implicitly, for example, in the analysis of intentionality). Bevir’s logical middle position in all of the debates between “individualists” and “structuralists” calls for a more balanced “procedural individualism,” which recognizes the shaping influence of traditions and “webs of belief,” but also insists that individuals can move beyond these traditions and develop new ideas. The philosophical logic that Bevir brings to issues such as authorial intentions or the intellectual processes of “procedural individualism” provides some useful insights for intellectual historians who are willing to make their way through his abstract epistemological arguments. Intellectual historians could in fact resort to their penchant for “eclecticism” and use Bevir’s work as a philosophical justification for much of what they are already inclined to do. The “middle” philosophical position between, say, radical individualism and radical structuralism is a sensible, logical position that most historians would support—if they were asked to locate themselves among the various philosophical alternatives that Bevir describes. Kelley’s account of past intellectual historians and their cultural contexts, for example, never claims that the shaping influence of these contexts destroyed all individual agency or intentionality; like most intellectual historians Kelley sees a dialectical interaction between individuals
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and cultural structures that might well resemble what Bevir calls “procedural individualism.” Even if historians wander away from Bevir’s rigorous logic and analytical categories, they will therefore probably agree with his claim that specific individuals (rather than cultural structures or social categories) must express and act upon ideas. No idea can have meaning or historical significance unless someone promotes or defends it. More generally, Bevir reminds historians that the systematic study of past ideas requires self-conscious thought about our own assumptions and a rigorous engagement with what people in the past actually said or intended to say when they expressed their ideas. Bevir’s systematic analysis of historical epistemology clearly differs, however, from both the eclecticism and the contextualism that Kelley finds in the disciplinary traditions of intellectual history. Rejecting the contextual, historical emphasis on overlapping cultural mentalit´es, Bevir organizes ideas and “schools” of thought into clear and distinct categories that often intersect or merge in specific historical cultures and social institutions. The eclecticism of intellectual historians puts them on the lookout for the places where competing ideas and intellectuals interact or connect, and intellectual historians themselves tend to merge their categories or methods in eclectic fusions that Bevir would not accept. He argues, for example, that “understanding” a text is different from “explaining” a text, and he criticizes historians who fail to recognize this important dichotomy. “Questions of understanding ask what a work means or what beliefs an individual expressed in a work,” he notes in a summary of this methodological distinction. “Questions of explanation ask why a work has the meaning it does or why an individual believed what he did” (p. 174). Unfortunately, as Bevir sees it, contextualists, hermeneutic critics, and others try to understand what texts mean by linking them to a general context or an “episteme” rather than explaining why a text has meaning within a specific author’s “web of beliefs.” In actual practice, however, most intellectual historians want to understand and explain the meaning of past texts as they examine the possible connections between the internal themes of texts and various overlapping contexts. They assume that the meanings of a specific work are always shaped or mediated by the contexts in which it is written and interpreted, so they cannot really separate “what” a text means from “why” it has this meaning. There seems to be little reason to insist on a strict distinction between understanding and explaining because the two forms of analysis usually merge in good intellectual history. Many of the other sharply defined distinctions in Bevir’s book may also strike intellectual historians as insignificant for the actual practice of their research and writing. He draws another dichotomy, for example, between “pro-attitudes,” which are the unconsciously held assumptions that people draw from their cultures, and “beliefs,” which are the conscious ideas they espouse. Bevir argues that historians of ideas need to explain only the conscious beliefs (p. 141), but
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intellectual historians often want to understand and explain the unconscious cultural assumptions as well as the conscious beliefs of the authors and intellectuals they write about. Indeed, it is precisely the complex connection between widely accepted “pro-attitudes” and explicit personal “beliefs” that intellectual historians seek to analyze when they situate authors and texts in specific historical contexts. This kind of historical research usually uncovers important cultural “pro-attitudes” in even the most self-conscious written texts, thus making Bevir’s sharp distinctions highly problematic for intellectual historians. Bevir also wants to draw a clear (but historically questionable) distinction between “webs of beliefs” or traditions and broader historical contexts. He assumes that individuals hold a particular “web of beliefs,” whereas contexts are impersonal social structures or cultural systems that do not actually appear in specific persons. The dichotomy that separates an individual’s “web of beliefs” from the social and cultural context raises immediate questions for intellectual historians, however, because an individual’s “web of beliefs” is always embedded in cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts. Indeed, it is exceedingly difficult to sustain this distinction between personal “webs of belief ” and shared cultural systems—even on the most abstract levels of disciplinary logic. Where exactly does the personal “web” separate from the languages or paradigms of a wider cultural system? Historians find it difficult to draw such clear lines, even as they acknowledge that individuals retain some autonomy within their cultures. Bevir nevertheless insists on the importance of maintaining rather than blurring these dichotomies: Whereas contextualists argue that paradigms and epistemes enable historians to understand the meaning of utterances, we have argued that webs of belief and traditions enable historians to provide the beginnings of an explanation of beliefs . . . . Webs of belief and traditions help historians to explain beliefs. They are not part of the meaning of works. . . . [W]hen the critics equate our concept of a web of beliefs with the paradigms and epistemes of the contextualists, they ignore the reasoning behind our distinction between understanding utterances and explaining beliefs . . . . Thus, whereas we focus on webs of belief conceived as individual viewpoints, contextualists focus on paradigms conceived as social structures. (pp. 215–16)
Both the prose style in this passage and the insistence on sharp categorical demarcations suggest the contrasting disciplinary methods of intellectual historians and philosophers. Most intellectual historians stress the complex entanglement of ideas, individual lives, and social-cultural contexts, but their eclectic fusion of these categories usually bypasses careful philosophical distinctions between concepts such as “webs of belief ” and cultural paradigms.
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Philosophers thus have good philosophical reasons to view intellectual historians as imprecise, conjectural, and reductionist. The intellectual historians, for their part, have good historical reasons to believe that the philosophers’ distinctions and dichotomies regularly break down in the complex historical world of specific people, texts, and contexts. Bevir’s argument for a clear dichotomy between personal “webs of belief” and wider cultural contexts points to perhaps the key difference between the work of philosophers and intellectual historians. His philosophical method gives almost no attention to the lives, material worlds, or changing cultural contexts of the people who have developed the history of ideas as a scholarly tradition. Although intellectual historians are rightly suspicious of simplistic reductions that attribute a thinker’s ideas entirely to economic interests, personal neuroses, social status, gender, or race, they are usually unsatisfied with accounts that examine intellectual traditions or a thinker’s ideas without any reference to the wider contexts of lives and societies. Bevir seems to fear that the emphasis on contexts weakens the rigorous explanation of ideas and radically reduces or eliminates individual autonomy and creativity. The historical argument, however, stresses the diversity of overlapping contexts (personal, social, economic, political, cultural, etc.), each of which offers or denies various options for individual action and thought. People can challenge or change different components of the many contexts in which they live, but they can never simply leave them to exist outside a specific historical time and place. Intellectual historians thus look for both the cultural limits and the creative spaces that individuals encounter in the multiple contexts of their personal and intellectual lives. Philosophers, by contrast, tend to identify the valid claims or flaws in an author’s logic and to explain why a past thinker went wrong rather than to examine the historical contexts that would help us understand the origin and influence of a writer’s ideas. Bevir repeatedly shows this proclivity for passing philosophical judgments on the mistakes of earlier thinkers: “Hume’s argument fails because of its inadequate characterization of reason” (p. 293); the “Sartrean argument, in both its specific and general forms, actually rests on a confusion” (p. 271); Quentin Skinner “offers us his method as a logic of discovery,” but in fact “there cannot be a logic of discovery for the history of ideas” (pp. 82, 85); and both “the idealists and irrationalists are wrong” when they try to “explain webs of belief as the products of self-sufficient traditions” (p. 196). There is a strong philosophical confidence in such pronouncements, but the judgments differ from the (more modest?) approach of the intellectual historian who tries to understand or explain how and why Hume, Sartre, Skinner, or the “irrationalists” developed their ideas through various intellectual debates, political conflicts, and life experiences. Although intellectual historians often provide critical analysis and develop
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some kind of critical “dialogue” with past thinkers, the historian’s contextual and analytical methods rarely produce vehement philosophical judgments on a thinker’s blindness to the logic of ideas. Most of the significant differences between intellectual history and the philosophical history of ideas therefore emerge from a comparative reading of Kelley’s Descent of Ideas and Bevir’s Logic of the History of Ideas. Kelley traces the history of intellectual history with a method and prose style that commonly appear in the discipline he discusses, and he is sympathetic to both the philosophical eclecticism and historical contextualism that he finds in past historians. Bevir follows another disciplinary path in his quest to establish a philosophically rigorous logic for a history of ideas that rejects much of the “contextualism” that most intellectual historians use to analyze the ideas as well as the significance of influential thinkers and intellectual movements. They both examine the historical study of ideas, but their books provide excellent examples of how different intellectual traditions produce distinctive forms of knowledge and diverse academic identities. These books might also remind us, however, that the boundaries of academic identity need to be crossed regularly to ensure disciplinary change, creativity, and self-criticism. Disciplines (like nations) do not flourish by building high walls along their borders, and intellectual history’s eclecticism has always made this subdiscipline a valuable border crossing for other disciplinary traditions that have entered into modern historical studies. Intellectual historians have long shown strong interdisciplinary interest in the work of philosophers, literary theorists, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists, but, as Kelley shows with specific historical examples, they have always maintained their distinctive disciplinary emphasis on the complex connections between ideas, thinkers, and historical contexts. Skeptical of all allegiances to a single master thinker or intellectual tradition, they seek to understand how widely different historical eras, thinkers, and cultural groups have interpreted human experiences and truths. Equally important, intellectual historians analyze these diverse traditions and people without invoking transcendent truths of their own—except perhaps for the general claim that all ideas, individuals, and texts evolve and gain their meanings in specific historical contexts. Kelley’s account of intellectual history in The Descent of Ideas actually gives less attention to specific social and institutional contexts than one might find in most intellectual histories of particular thinkers or cultural groups, but he shows how modern intellectual history has grown out of long-developing cultural traditions and how the intellectual debates of our own historical context shape a continuing evolution of the field. In contrast to Bevir’s philosophical approach, Kelley stresses the constant historical exchange between the “inside” and the “outside” of texts, intellectual debates, and personal lives. The careful
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analysis of this complex interaction between texts and contexts gives intellectual history its distinctive, vital role in the development of modern cultural criticism and historical knowledge. Despite its sometimes ambiguous identity and its perennial, eclectic interest in other disciplines, intellectual history clearly remains within the sphere of modern historiography and a valuable source of creative intellectual exchange for all the subdisciplines of contemporary historical scholarship.
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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 97–109. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000027 Printed in the United Kingdom
the fifty years’ rift: intellectual history and international relations david armitage Department of History, Columbia University
Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002) Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Any assessment of modern intellectual history would surely include the renaissance in the history of political thought among its most enduring achievements. The origins of that revival can be traced back to the contextualist revolution in the history of political thought which is associated particularly with the Cambridge historians Peter Laslett, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and John Dunn. In retrospect, it appears that a crucial impetus for the revolution soon to come was Laslett’s notorious verdict, delivered in 1956, that “[f]or the moment, anyway, political theory is dead”.1 That this judgement offered both a premature epitaph and a salutary provocation became eminently clear in the generation that followed. Those years, marked at one end by Isaiah Berlin’s inaugural lecture, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), and at the other by the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), heralded an unparalleled efflorescence of political theory which continues to this day. Likewise, almost the same period, running from Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) to Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), witnessed the beginnings of a persistently fertile vein of inquiry into the history of political theory. The contextualist historians of political thought understandably concentrated their attention on the history of the theory of the state in its domestic or municipal capacities. This fact reflected the central concerns of political theory itself during 1
Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics, and Society, 1st ser. (Oxford, 1956), vii.
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the period in which they wrote and helped to facilitate an ongoing dialogue between historians and political theorists. However, concentration on the internal capacities of the state seemingly encouraged neglect of the external relations of states, as the revival of the history of political thought was not accompanied by a parallel resurgence of interest in what might be called the history of international thought.2 In part this may have been because students of international relations themselves were so discouraging about the prospects that such a history might be undertaken.3 Only three years after Laslett delivered his epitaph for political theory, Martin Wight, one of the founders of the so-called “English School” of International Relations, pronounced an equally notorious judgement on the historical tradition of international theory “as marked not only by paucity but also by intellectual and moral poverty”.4 Wight’s provocation, unlike Laslett’s, did not immediately inspire any attempts to historicise International Relations theory because, at the time, the concerns of political theory were inhospitable to the central questions of International Relations. For much of the past half-century, history and International Relations have been two fields divided by a common language. As diplomatic history—in the strict sense of history written from diplomatic archives—gradually moved from the centre to the margins of historical concerns, so International Relations became both more theoretical (in its elaboration of ideal-typical models of state behaviour) and more positivistic (in its ambition to stand alongside the other social sciences). The methods and aspirations of the two disciplines grew ever further apart, with seemingly more damaging results for International Relations than for history. International Relations scholars remained consumers of history even when they did not follow contemporary trends in historiography. However, the number of historians who engaged with International Relations became vanishingly small.5
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The term “international thought” has not enjoyed a currency comparable to that of “political thought”. It had some prominence in the internationalist, League of Nations, moment of the 1920s, as in John Galsworthy, International Thought (Cambridge, 1923) and F. Melian Stawell, The Growth of International Thought (London, 1929), but has only recently reappeared as a term of art: e.g. Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge, 1998). Throughout, I distinguish between the academic subject (“International Relations”) and its object of inquiry (“international relations”). Martin Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” (1959), in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, eds., Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London, 1966), 20. The most distinguished example is Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994); Schroeder, “History and International Relations Theory: Not Use or Abuse, but Fit or Misfit”, International Security 22 (1997), 64–74.
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It was not ever thus. From Thucydides to Ranke (and beyond), the central concerns of historical writing were the topics that would also come to define the study of international relations: war and peace; diplomacy and law; sovereignty and the state. It is therefore not surprising that historians were so prominent in the disciplinary genealogies of International Relations. One story would see Thucydides as at once the father of history and the initiator of a timeless “realist” approach to the interactions of states.6 A more contingent account traces analysis of the “states-system” to the early nineteenth-century counter-revolutionary historians of the G¨ottingen school who coined the term.7 That account, in turn, underlies the later history of the “English School” of International Relations, among whose most prominent members were two of the century’s greatest anglophone historians, Herbert Butterfield and E. H. Carr.8 Butterfield and Carr are, of course, best known to historians as the authors of two of the foundational works of modern historiography, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and What Is History? (1961); students of International Relations know them equally well as, respectively, the author of a fundamental text for their discipline, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (1939), and as the driving force behind the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics (the matrix of the “English School”). That Butterfield and Carr should have such distinct reputations in different fields indicates that history and International Relations have drifted apart. Yet the fact that the two fields could have been engaged on a common enterprise until barely 50 years ago is also a sign that the parting of the ways has been relatively recent. The neglect of International Relations by adjacent disciplines like history has led two of its leading practitioners to proclaim that “International Relations has failed as an intellectual project”. A prime cause in their diagnosis of that failure was “the prevalence of a-historical, even sometimes anti-historical, attitudes in formulating the concept of an international system”; only a return to history could begin to rescue International Relations from interdisciplinary irrelevance.9 The internal anxieties of the discipline may be of little obvious interest to intellectual historians, but the intimation of a historicist turn in International Relations 6 7
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For example, Laurie M. Johnson, Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Interpretation of Realism (DeKalb, IL, 1993). James F. Marino, “Empire and Commerce: A History of the Modern States-System” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1998), 260–65; Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge, 2002), 15–22. Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (Basingstoke, 1998), chs. 2, 4. Barry Buzan and Richard Little, “Why International Relations has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to do About it”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30 (2001), 19, 24.
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should be. That turn derives from a more general “post-positivist” orientation in contemporary International Relations.10 This orientation has manifested itself in various ways: in a return to grand historical theorising about international relations;11 in the rise of “constructivism”, or the study of the mutual selfconstitution of international actors through rules, norms and representations;12 in the study of the history of International Relations as a discipline, whether as a means of explaining present discontents or as a source of renewal for a failing intellectual project;13 and in a heightened interest in the language of international politics as International Relations undertakes its own linguistic turn.14 The somewhat belated impact on International Relations of the various linguistic turns associated with Wittgenstein, Austin, Gadamer and Foucault has drawn international theorists’ attention back to the history of international thought. This development has coincided with a redefinition of political theory itself to incorporate international, transnational and global concerns. This, in turn, has created more favourable conditions for the history of political thought to encompass the history of the relations between states;15 it has also laid the groundwork for a rapprochement between International Relations and intellectual history. The allegedly infertile field of international thought that Martin Wight described in 1959 as being only of marginal relevance to the grand tradition of political theory included an honourable series of thinkers, among them Erasmus, Machiavelli, Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Hume, Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Ranke and Treitschke. Wight used fragments from the
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Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski, eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge, 1996). For example, Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York, 2002). Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge, 1989), Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia, SC, 1989) and Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, 1999) are usually taken as the key texts in this movement. Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany, NY, 1998); Dunne, Inventing International Society. Duncan S. A. Bell, “Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique”, Alternatives 27 (2002), 327–50; Bell, “International Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical Turn?”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3 (2001), 115–26. See esp. Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ, 1999); Howard Williams, International Relations in Political Theory (Basingstoke, 1990); R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, 1993); Brian C. Schmidt, “Together Again: Reuniting Political Theory and International Relations Theory”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 4 (2002), 115–40.
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history of international thought to construct three traditions which have proved enduringly influential among theorists of International Relations. None of those traditions was elaborated in depth or at length by any one historical thinker, but Wight identified each of them with a key historical figure: the realist, or Hobbesian, tradition of international anarchy; the rationalist, or Grotian, theory of international intercourse; and the revolutionist, or Kantian, theory of international society.16 Other international theorists have supplemented these three traditions: thus, Michael Doyle has offered a trichotomy of Realism, Liberalism and Socialism and David Boucher has suggested instead Empirical Realism, Universal Moral Order and Historical Reason.17 However, they have not entirely supplanted Wight’s schema, with lasting consequences for the theoretical reputations of Grotius, Hobbes and Kant as figures in the history of international thought. The hold of such traditions on theories of International Relations has been so tenacious that each of the three books under review can be seen as an attempt either to loosen their grip or to extend their reach. Jonathan Haslam’s No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (2002) aims “to reassert the value of the realist approach but to do so in a way that sensitises our awareness of the context in which realist concepts emerged” (p. 1). Edward Keene’s Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (2002) takes as its target the selective reading of Grotius by international theorists to propose an alternative model (also drawn from Grotius) of the roles played by sovereignty and property in the making of the modern world order within, but especially beyond, the European states-system. Georg Cavallar tackles some of the same problems as a political philosopher in his The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (2002), which provides a detailed philosophical genealogy of defining elements in Kant’s conception of international relations. Haslam’s No Virtue Like Necessity is the most traditional reassessment of tradition among these books. In a series of explications du texte, covering materials from the early sixteenth century to the late twentieth century, Haslam treats five concepts that, taken together, comprise his conception of the “realist approach” to international relations: reasons of state; the balance of power; the balance of trade; realpolitik; and realism in post-war American political science. Haslam
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Martin Wight, “An Anatomy of International Thought”, Review of International Studies 13 (1987), 221–7; Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester, 1991). Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York, 1997); David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford, 1998).
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defines realism against universalism by its focus “on the behaviour of the state, its security and interests” (p. 12); he also defines it against moralism by “its claim that the conduct of international relations itself should be unconstrained by moral values” (p. 11). His argument is thus recognisably modernist in orientation.18 It betrays little scepticism about language’s capacity to reflect rather than to shape the world, and assumes throughout both that sovereign states are the only actors in international affairs and that “power is itself not merely a tool for higher uses, but has its own determining quality” (p. 246). Haslam endorses Friedrich Meinecke’s identification of Machiavelli as the originator of an allegedly amoral approach to international affairs.19 He also reaffirms the opposition of illusionless realism to impractical utopianism found in the work of E. H. Carr (the subject of his last book).20 Yet No Virtue Like Necessity is more than Meinecke’s Die Idee der Staatsr¨ason (1925) or Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis updated for the post-Cold War era. It covers a broader range of concepts than Meinecke and deals more explicitly with theory than did Carr. Haslam criticises those International Relations theorists who believe that the realist tradition is a product of the twentieth century, with no antecedents; he also faults historians of political thought for failing to concern themselves with the central concepts of international relations in the past. It would be impossible to gainsay his resulting rallying call: “It is time those who teach the history of political thought interested themselves in international relations and vice versa” (p. 6). Intellectual historians will recognise No Virtue Like Necessity as a Lovejovian history of ideas and a teleological history. Haslam “serves notice on all who pretend to timeless concepts claimed for universal validity regardless of provenance” (p. 11) but cannot avoid some such pretence as he reconstructs the elements of a realist tradition defined retrospectively by the concerns of postwar American political science.21 This is not to deny that political languages like reason of state or the balance of power can be isolated and examined historically: they have been, but not usually to provide the unit-ideas to comprise a separate “realist” tradition.22 The strength of Haslam’s book is its reliance on primary
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For an early deconstruction of these oppositions, see Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (Helsinki, 1989). Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’´etat and Its Place in Modern History (1925), trans. Douglas Scott, introd. Werner Stark (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998). Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982 (London, 1999). For an alternative genealogy, see Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge, LA, 1986). For example, Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1992); Michael Sheehan, The Balance of Power: History and Theory (London, 1996).
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sources, all of which are liberally quoted and translated by the author himself;23 however, by a self-denying ordinance, Haslam generally fails to engage with secondary works, leaving him often enslaved to defunct histories of political thought. He does appeal to the promise of contextualism but his conception of context is neither that of a Skinnerian speech–act situation nor that of a Pocockian convergence of languages; instead, it is a crude historical determinism that flattens the features of particular thinkers: for example, “Hobbes wanted order restored . . . just as had Machiavelli and Bodin, and in almost identical circumstances” (p. 55). Almost every early modern political thinker—among them Thomas More, Francisco Su´arez, Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto and Juan de Molina—joins Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes in the realist camp; none among Pufendorf, Locke, Bolingbroke and Rousseau “lay far beyond the realist circle” (p. 59); even radical utopians of the eighteenth century, by virtue of their debts to Bolingbroke, can be classified, “in matters of international relations, as realist” (p. 78). As these examples show, blunt methodological instruments can hardly be relied upon to produce subtle discriminations. Haslam’s conception of intellectual history is one in which theory necessarily arises out of practice and in response to external circumstance. “Reasons of state emerged to legitimise a new social formation, the state” (p. 17) in the fifteenth century, not as far back as, say, Cicero (who elaborated an influential conception of state necessity) or as late as the nineteenth century, when the longheralded nation-state was finally born out of the matrix of the post-French Revolutionary ´etat-nation. Haslam takes for granted that the sovereign state emerged in the early sixteenth century, that Machiavelli was immediately well placed to anatomise the conditions of its existence, and that such later concepts as the balance of trade, “otherwise labelled mercantilism; later, protectionism” (p. 130), geopolitics and realpolitik were only changing analytical approaches to this identifiable but fundamentally unchanging object. This serves well as an aetiology of the realist tradition in twentieth-century American International Relations (treated at illuminating length in the book’s final chapter, “From Realpolitik to Neorealism”) but is less convincing as a contextual history of conceptions of international relations before Carr tendentiously named the statist tradition “realist”. In the end, No Virtue Like Necessity confirms the self-image of one wing of American political science, but only at the cost of partiality (for instance, by ignoring the whole “English School” of International Relations), linearity (by selecting only those conceptions of reasons of state that fit the later 23
Though not always correctly: Hans Morgenthau’s first book on the international judicial function, Die internationale Rechtspflege, ihr Wesen und ihre Grenzen (1929), becomes Die internationale Rechtsfluge . . . , “The International Law of the Air—its Essence and its Limitations” (Haslam, p. 191, n. 36)!
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realist tradition) and teleology (by projecting back a conception of the sovereign state and its ineluctable interests from modernity onto early modernity). If Haslam’s method is to use history to refound the realist tradition of International Relations theory, Edward Keene’s is to use history to tear up the foundations of the “Grotian”, rationalist tradition. Keene’s immediate target in Beyond the Anarchical Society is Hedley Bull, one of the towering figures of the “English School” and author of The Anarchical Society (1977), to which Keene’s title alludes. Bull portrayed the international order as a system of sovereign territorial states engaged neither in “Hobbesian” gladiatorial combat nor in “Kantian” progress towards perpetual peace.24 He proposed instead a “Grotian” conception of the states-system as an international society which respected the sovereignty of its members and assumed their interaction on terms of mutually recognised equality. Keene questions every element of this formulation. He argues that Bull’s reading of Grotius was selective and that it was the cause of selectivity in others; that Grotius was not the theorist of indivisible sovereignty Bull took him to be; that the idea of a states-system arose long after Grotius wrote; that this original conception of a states-system was reactionary because counter-revolutionary; that similar assumptions underlay the colonial and imperial systems Europe imposed on the wider world in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and that the reigning theory of international society, derived from Bull’s work, must exorcise those assumptions if it can begin to explain or even describe “the internally contradictory world order that we live in today” (Keene, p. 11). Keene demolishes two reigning origin-myths of International Relations. One, derived from legal history, identifies Grotius as the father of international law; the other, derived from counter-revolutionary historicism, locates the foundations of the modern states-system in the Peace of Westphalia (1648).25 The nearcoincidence in time of Grotius’s masterwork, the De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), with the Westphalian settlement little more than 20 years later encouraged the adoption of Grotius as the theorist of a new world order of sovereign states bound into a common civilisation by a network of treaties and other positive agreements. Keene argues that this interpretation of Grotius overlooked his espousal of divided sovereignty and also slighted the colonial and imperial contexts within which Grotius formulated his political and legal theory.26 As Keene shows, until well into 24
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Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London, 1977); Bull, “The Importance of Grotius in the Study of International Relations”, in Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts, eds., Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford, 1990), 65–93. Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London, 2003) offers a complementary materialist demolition of this myth. On which see Peter Borschberg, Hugo Grotius, “Commentarius in Theses XI”: An Early Treatise on Sovereignty, the Just War, and the Legitimacy of the Dutch Revolt (Berne, 1994);
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the nineteenth century, even the legal scholars who identified Grotius as the father of their field agreed with Sir Henry Maine, writing in 1864, that “[s]overeignty has always been regarded as divisible” (cited in Keene, p. 77). They acted on that knowledge by providing the theoretical justification for the European imperial practice of indirect rule (for example, by the Dutch in South-East Asia) and for the dispossession of non-European peoples (for example, by the United States in its process of westward expansion).27 Keene’s reading encompasses a far wider range of Grotius’s works than is customary among students of International Relations, who usually confine their remarks to the “Prolegomena” of De Jure Belli ac Pacis and little more.28 He is especially acute on the selective and tendentious misreadings of Grotius propagated by Wight, Bull and others. His case would have been strengthened if he could have shown that Grotius’s early conceptions of divided sovereignty were ever invoked to justify indirect rule in the nineteenth century or the mandates system in the twentieth, but here the theoretical illumination afforded by his own interpretation of Grotius greatly outruns the available evidence for the transmission of Grotius’s ideas. Similarly, a wider range of examples from European colonial history might have tempered his sweeping conclusion that “[t]he political structures of modern colonial and imperial systems were founded on that supposedly ‘medieval’ notion: divisible sovereignty” (p. 93). That notion hardly describes the pattern of European imperial activity in Latin America, Australia or much of Africa, for example, but then the supposed Bodinian or Hobbesian conception of unitary sovereignty hardly describes that pattern either. In the end, though, Keene’s admirably economical and eclectically learned book should be of as much interest to historians of political thought and imperialism as to theorists of International Relations. He provides no comforting just-so stories for contemporary theorists and effectively questions the timeless realist assumption that state sovereignty is (and always has been) the only legal tender in the international community. It would be hard therefore to disagree with his post-modernist conclusion derived from early modern intellectual history: “The pattern of order that is challenging the idea of state sovereignty today is as old as the society of states itself, and
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Martine van Ittersum, “Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595–1615” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2002). Compare Paul Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society (Cambridge, 2003). Compare the selections from Grotius in International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War, ed. Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger (Cambridge, 2002), 325–34.
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there is nothing new about the notion that the sovereignty of states should be compromised by a higher structure of international organisation that facilitates the promotion of economic progress, good government and individuals’ rights” (p. 148). One might call Keene’s conclusion Kantian if that term did not conjure up yet another selectively constructed tradition in International Relations theory. The “Kantian”, or revolutionist, strain of international thought is not the explicit target of Georg Cavallar’s argument in The Rights of Strangers, but it would be hard for international theorists to cling to their conception of Kant after reading his account of the philosophical antecedents of Kant’s third definitive article of perpetual peace: “Cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality”. In that article, Kant derived a right of universal resort from an assumption of original community from which a residual universal right for individuals to enter into peaceful relations with one another remains. Travel and commerce, though not the European conquests in the Americas, Africa, South-East Asia and India, gave evidence of progress towards perpetual peace: “The peoples of the earth have . . . entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.”29 Cavallar breaks down Kant’s idea into three constituent parts: political justice, global community and international hospitality. “The question that binds hospitality, global commonwealth and political justice together can be formulated as: can we find normative principles that bind us all alike and together even if we do not agree on a substantive highest good?” (Cavallar, p. 14). This is primarily a philosophical, rather than a historical, question, as Cavallar admits. His avowed object of study is belief rather than argument, and his history of ideas is diachronic rather than synchronic. He also propounds a methodological holism that assumes the internal coherence of any single author’s body of writings and seeks to uncover the project behind that coherence (pp. 27–45). Accordingly, his book consists of generous and acute analyses of, among other thinkers, Vitoria, Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Wolff, Hume, Rousseau and Vattel, and concludes with an account of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” as an exemplification of his conception of “thin” justice. Cavallar’s treatments of his subjects’ arguments are too philosophically scrupulous and too well informed historically to provide any easy solutions for present problems. For example, he does not fail to show that Grotius
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Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1991), 105–8; compare Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 186–200.
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favoured broader criteria for intervention than would now be generally acceptable to the international community, nor that Pufendorf ’s “theory of ius gentium tends to become deeply positivistic, conservative and pragmatic, sanctioning the endorsement of reasons of state in the name of public welfare” (p. 199). Similarly, though he expresses a postmodernist scepticism about grand narratives, his argument does depend on broad conceptual shifts (like that from naturalism to positivism in international law) and identifiable turning points (such as Hobbes’s separation of the foreign from the domestic). However, like Keene, he does reject the modernist (meaning largely nineteenth-century) interpretation of international law, defined by “the replacement of the individual by sovereign states as the main and principal subjects of international law, by substituting the community of humankind for the community of sovereign states, and by the monopolization of military power, diplomatic activity and the right to make treaties in the hands of the state” (pp. 165–6). His philosophical history is therefore consciously post-positivist and finds much common ground (but also telling incommensurabilities) between early modern and post-modern norms for the relations between peoples. Kant is for Cavallar the culmination and transformation of a series of early modern narratives rather than the beginning of any modern project: “If Kant marks the climax of natural law philosophy, it is also the end of an era” (p. 368). Kant propounded his idea of cosmopolitan right at almost precisely the moment when a positivist conception of international law began its 150-year reign. Soon thereafter, the counter-revolutionary historians and political theorists began to promote the supremacy of a “states-system” grounded on a conception of European “civilisation” that would characterise international law in its positivist phase and inflect International Relations from its origins.30 This conception facilitated, if it did not actually encourage, European imperialism by affirming the separation of spheres between the realm of the jus publicum Europaeum and the rest of the world. The dissolution of that jurisprudential barrier in the twentieth century may have been a cause of anxiety to a legal theorist like Carl Schmitt,31 but it was only one of the factors that have made thinkable the recent rise to theoretical prominence of Kant’s international thought. In recent years, Kant has become variously the theorist of democratic peace, the avatar of institutional
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Gerrit Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford, 1984); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2002). Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950), trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York, 2003).
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internationalism and the grandfather of globalisation.32 Cavallar’s book, if read carefully (as it demands), should prevent the overenthusiastic adoption of Kant as a standard-bearer for any position in contemporary international affairs, whether regarding the sociology of international politics, global governance or the world economy. Haslam was surely right when he wrote that “[t]he study of thought in international relations stands somewhere close to that of political thought in the English-speaking world in the 1960s” (p. 8). As the contextualist historians of political thought protested then, the study of political thought was unhistorical, plagued by outdated mythologies, procrustean in its schemas and insensitive to the rhetorical subtlety of its subjects. Much of International Relations theory has been open to the same charges, though intellectual historians have understandably been as incurious as other historians in uncovering the state of conceptual disarray in the field. Yet Haslam’s assessment may have been obsolete even as he made it. One major historical study of the international dimensions of political thought, Richard Tuck’s The Rights of War and Peace, had already appeared in 1999.33 Though Tuck did not engage directly with International Relations theory, his account of the humanist and scholastic traditions in political thought assimilated Grotius and Hobbes to a common natural jurisprudential project and then placed Kant as their ambivalent heir, thereby effectively rendering redundant the unhistorical trichotomy of “Grotian”, “Hobbesian” and “Kantian” traditions.34 Taken together, these books are harbingers of a renaissance in the history of international thought. Haslam’s may be the most insistent that the methods of the history of political thought should be applied to theories of international relations, but it is also the least sceptical of the modernist assumptions of International Relations as a discipline, particularly as practised in the United States. Keene’s is the boldest and most methodologically ruthless of the three, using the scalpel of history to anatomise and then excise the vestigial remains of that modernism. Cavallar’s, in contrast, brings the history of political thought 32
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See, for example, Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983), 205–35, 323–53; James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York, 2003). For an earlier critique, see Georg Cavallar, Kant and the Theory and Practice of International Right (Cardiff, 1999). Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999). Compare Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations”, in Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 432–56, with Howard H. Williams, Kant’s Critique of Hobbes: Sovereignty and Cosmopolitanism (Cardiff, 2003).
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and philosophy to bear fruitfully on the concerns of contemporary political theory. Future studies of international thought that combine Haslam’s range of evidence with Cavallar’s philosophical subtlety in the spirit of Keene’s assault on disciplinary mythologies could help to bridge the 50 years’ rift between International Relations and history. They might also mark the maturity of the history of international thought as a subfield of intellectual history. They could then open new conversations between historians, political theorists, International Relations scholars and international lawyers which would be continuous with those before the modern contest of the faculties drove them so forcefully, though not irreversibly, apart.
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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 111–121. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000088 Printed in the United Kingdom
theorizing america daniel t. rodgers Department of History, Princeton University
James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) “In the United States there is hardly any talk of the beauty of virtue,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840. In high society and low, he had heard only an incessant conversation about self-interest. And yet “I have often seen Americans make really great sacrifices for the common good, and I have noticed a hundred cases in which, when help was needed, they hardly ever failed to give each other trusty support.”1 It was a move typical of Tocqueville: generalization and countergeneralization, hypothesis and exception, cascading restlessly onward in an imaginative flow he himself barely held in control. He gave his readers American democracy as a series of conundrums. Of all Tocqueville’s riddles, this one—the relationship of the sovereign self to the common, social good—vexes modern American intellectuals with a special intensity. The wide-ranging debate a decade ago over the rival claims of “republicanism” and “liberalism” as the formative language of American politics was one of its manifestations. The current spate of projects focused on the history and political valences of “civil society” form another. Political debate in the contemporary United States repeats, in another key, the same contentions. Conservative America seethes with rights talk and resentments against intrusive government, even as it disparages other rights and yearns for the nation to march in patriotic common step. The contradictions of the American left are just as palpable, torn between its commitment to the great political community and its libertarian views of cultural and personal authenticity. Little wonder that, viewed from outside, Americans have so often seemed to be the most individualistic and simultaneously the least individualistic of peoples. It is a context that attracts the conundrum breakers. 1
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 525, 512.
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James Block’s big, ambitious A Nation of Agents leaves no doubt about its aspirations in the contest to solve the Gordian knot of the relationship between the one and the many in American social thought. The very frame of American history, he writes, is a narrative in crisis, riddled with misunderstandings: “We have misunderstood the [American] Revolution, and therefore the republic on which it stands” (p. 234). We have misread Hobbes, Locke, and Dewey, misestimated the place of revivalistic Protestantism in the formation of mind and character, and misperceived laissez-faire economic doctrine. We have got it all wrong, most fundamentally, in placing an ideal of autonomous, individual freedom at the center of the American narrative. That place, Block claims, belongs instead to “agency.” By “agency” Block does not mean to invoke the social historians’ project of finding historical efficacy in the actions of those on the short end of the distribution of wealth and authority: the subalterns, the “powerless,” le menu peuple. That project, as Walter Johnson has recently observed, involved a string of uncritical assumptions, not least of which was that historians could “give back” agency to persons in the past, as if it were theirs to offer and restore.2 Nonetheless, for all its sometimes naive assumptions about the relationship between power and scholarship, the pursuit of agency by the social historians enormously widened the range and identities of actors, voices, ideas, and aspirations to which scholars had to attend. It democratized the historical cast that political historians (with their great men) and intellectual historians (with their great books) had conspired to winnow down to the few. Agency, in this project, meant the power of persons and groups to shape their historical circumstances, to build within them cultural and social worlds of their own making: to turn historical events to collective and moral purposes, not merely to respond to them. It meant escape from mere victim status, inclusion in the roster of historical actors. To have agency, in this discourse, was to act as an agent of one’s own social destiny in a world of radically unequal power. The meaning of agency that Block holds as key to the American narrative is not this but its opposite: agency not as action for oneself but as action on behalf of another. Both meanings are old in Anglo-American usage, but the agent who acted to further the projects of another was certainly the more common understanding of the term. An agent was not a vassal or a liegeman yoked by bonds of fidelity and honor; nor a servant or slave from whom submission, diligence, patience, and self-abnegation were due. An agent was a person whose free, moral will was enlisted in a larger cause than the agent’s own. Agency was characterized by a double movement, in which freedom was claimed and, in the very same act, reinvested in a greater entity and purpose. The agent, Block 2
Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (Fall 2003), 105–16.
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writes, was “active, self-reliant, and initiatory yet wholly under orders” (p. 74). Agency freedom consisted in voluntary action, not autonomy; in engagement in a cause, not a co-determinative hand in shaping it. In Anglo-American Protestant rhetoric, agents were the sorts of persons God wanted. And for centuries, Block argues, agents were the sort of individuals Americans wanted to be. Part of the heft of A Nation of Agents derives from Block’s insistence on putting Protestantism and its political categories back into the core of the American historical narrative. “Free agency” becomes not simply a linguistic marker in theological debates over moral action and free will; not simply a preacher’s come-on to conversion and religious discipline. It stands, in Block’s view, for a form of social character that wished for the voluntarily chosen yoke of inner transformation and worldly responsibility. The role of a moral “free agent” was as distant from passivity as it was from autonomy. In the language of nineteenthcentury Protestant psychology, it was the condition in which “the action of all our voluntary powers . . . every choice, every preference, and every volition . . . [is] in entire conformity to the will of God” (p. 406). This claim is congruent with the point Barry Shain made in The Myth of American Individualism a decade ago, that in Protestant social thought the individual self, standing outside “communal systems of the good,” was an object of deep suspicion.3 But Block’s emphases lie on the ontological foundations of those assumptions. In his reading of Protestant political theory, the individual for him/herself was an impossibility: a non-being. Only in relationship to a transcendent scheme and purpose was the self realized—was free action—truly possible. This is a rich vein to mine, and from the English Puritan insurgency through the Second Great Awakening, Block pursues it, always with a particular eye for those Protestant radicals who pushed the possibilities of human will and action hardest without ever doubting the ultimate boundedness of Christian liberty or the ultimate subordination of free human means to the ends of God. But the real audacity of Block’s argument lies not in his treatment of those who imagined themselves agents of the Lord, but in his insistence that their agency model of freedom saturated the culture around them, secular as well as religious. He takes their concept of bounded liberty and runs it hard, even relentlessly, through three centuries of American intellectual history. By the time he has reached the early twentieth century, the liberal canon has all but come undone. Block’s Hobbes is not the great antagonist of modern individualism but the writer who most clearly recognized voluntary submission as the formative political act in a world of agency principles. His Locke is not the contractualist philosopher of the Second Treatise but the psychologist of the Education, whose 3
Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
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entire project was to find a means whereby the moral authority of the parent could be so silently, voluntarily internalized in the child that it became the template of the child’s individual character. Even as God receded behind natural and social processes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the frame of argument endured. In a brilliant reading of the laissez-faire publicists of the late nineteenth century, Block shows how inextricably enjoined the call to energized free action and to system-upholding behavior remained. The market these writers celebrated was nothing if it was not an arena for self-assertive and self-interested action. It punished lethargy and imprudence with a ruthless hand. But it held no islands for autonomous action. Wishing the world of small-scale economic localism good riddance, the economic publicists heralded laissez-faire for its ability to transmute voluntary action into system and association, to enlist its myriad producers and exchangers as agents of a larger, natural order. It was not left only to the late nineteenth-century champions of “society,” who march through the pages of so many accounts of this period’s social thought, to introduce the language of socially and collectively bounded freedom.4 The concepts fell straight out of the Protestant understanding of agency, Block suggests, into the economists’ intellectual ordering of commercial life. The greatest of the agency philosophers, in Block’s reading, was John Dewey— heir to the legacy of Protestant moral agency, co-architect of pragmatism’s reconstruction of philosophy as active free inquiry, yet deeply committed to an idea of the larger, social whole. His simultaneous commitments to voluntary individual action and to adjustment to larger social ends, his fusion of obligation and freedom into “function,” his explicit substitution (on occasion) of “agent” for “individual”—all this recapitulated in secular terms the framework deep in what Block calls “agency culture.” Dewey’s individuals were never, despite his emphasis on creative intelligence and his pedagogical progressivism, persons in and for themselves. He offered, in modern, liberal terms, a “place where one’s autonomy could be subtly exchanged for an (unadmitted) agency, the chance to be a part, to be integrated” (p. 495). Dewey’s writings stand, in that sense, as “a summa theologica—the great summation and culmination of the agency age” (p. 538). The subtlety and acuity with which Block develops these themes through scores of thinkers and over 500 pages can scarcely be exaggerated. A Nation of Agents is a genuinely prodigious work of scholarship. And yet, it would be equally hard to exaggerate its simplification of the historical terrain, as if the very quest to resolve
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Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1994).
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the American conundrum overruled detour, contradiction, multiplicity. Block’s treatment of that other voice that Tocqueville overheard—the self-referential, interest-claiming, rights-bearing voice—is a striking example. He wades into the debates over the intellectual character of the American Revolution by dismissing both its “republican” and its “liberal” character. In the era’s pleas for a republic of virtue, Block can only see a frightened merchant elite, struggling to reestablish its political and institutional authority in the social upheaval around it. But if the advocates of republican virtue weren’t revolutionary, the revolutionary masses, in Block’s telling, weren’t liberals. Mobilized by aspirations for more democratic communities, new-made souls, and new liberties of conscience, the populace were partisans of “agency.” The Declaration of Independence burst into this culture war, Block maintains, as the great reconciling text—its language open enough to the aspirations of the populace to bring them aboard the elite’s national project—and, at the same time, the great national obfuscation. By placing a fiction at the Declaration’s head—not a story of political society being willed into being in an heroic fusion of free act and voluntary subordination, but political society as simply found in a retrieval of natural liberty—Jefferson’s Declaration cut “agency” society off from its past and left it with a myth of idyllic “freedom.” So unleashed, the “idyll” somehow swept everything before it, unhingeing institutions, shattering the connection between public rhetoric and the structures of religious character formation that constituted the nation’s cultural base. Agency fell silent. “The post-revolutionary society as a result was left to figure out its fate with neither a sense of its past nor any . . . guidance on the institutions, structures, or behaviors now required” (Block, p. 290). But psychically, the flight from agency understandings of the self was insupportable. Driven by tacit “psychosocial dynamics,” early nineteenth-century American society moved slowly, subterraneously, toward a profound “reversal.” Institutions returned; religion “resurfaced.” Forms of social cohesion were “invisibly” reborn as Americans sought “a way out of [the] disorientation” into which they had been lured (Block, p. 337). Slowly, agency culture revived—leaving only the political theorists of the future to be deceived, naively attached to the letter rather than the substance of the Revolution. But this is barely history, as if Block had himself been swept up in the very myths he devoted himself to tracking. It radically oversimplifies the Revolution and the thicket of meanings its partisans gave to “liberty.” It decontextualizes the Declaration, confounds the chronology of the revivals, and misses the unabashedly vocal ambitions of the early republic’s institution builders. Block’s categories of “idyll” and “reversal,” propelled by deep psychodynamics in the culture, offer psyche in the place of history; they wrap Block’s acute textual readings in the gauziest of metaphors.
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At its worst, this categorical overreach produces a form of historical/political theorizing in flight from the actual complexity of its subject. For in Block’s brilliantly illuminated agency culture legions of voices are lost. Except for walkon parts by Edgar Allan Poe and Peter Cartwright, barely a Southern figure, unconnected with the cultural legacy of Puritanism, speaks. Slavery does not exist—though outside of its constitutive relationship to slavery and servitude, as Orlando Patterson pointed out years ago, freedom cannot be articulated.5 Gender never breaks the forward march of Block’s narrative, as if the double agency of women in marriage, as servants to both their husbands and their Lord, were somehow outside the terms of his story. Agency culture progresses, swoons, reverses, and culminates. For a brief revolutionary moment it almost breaks apart. But outside of that context, dissent is almost never heard. It is a deeply curious reading of America, replicated not only in Block’s intellectual architecture but in his very prose—paragraphs sewn out of snippets of quotation, unidentified except in the endnotes, stitched and spliced and anonymously run together as if the task of the intellectual historian were to iron out discontinuities and contention, to make a seamless garment out of the whole. The social historians’ understanding of the recovery of “agency,” as radically multiplying the variety of contending voices and actors in the past, is turned on its head. To leave it at that would not do justice to Block’s accomplishment. A Nation of Agents’ overreach and exaggerated claims, its misunderstanding of history as psyche, its conflations and omissions, go together with its point of profound illumination. The rhetoric of politics in America and the rhetoric of (Protestant) religion do not occupy distant spheres but intimately connected ones. Their key terms—freedom, justice, right; self, commonweal, nation—spill into each other, draw their meanings back and forth, as it were, across the church house doors. The point takes modern American intellectuals continually by surprise, but it should not. In insisting that the language of bounded liberty and voluntary moral agency be recognized as a powerful structuring element in the discourse of individualism in America, this first book makes a major contribution. It goes a long way toward unraveling Tocqueville’s conundrum, how a people so prickly in their talk of individualism, so absent in the discourse of pubic deference and oblige that Tocqueville had anticipated, should find in their language of self the very terms of self-abnegation. That would be a great deal, and that would be enough. Where intellectual history and political theory meet, however, there has long been an ambition to do still more than this: to identify the true, ground pattern in the conversation, to name the authentic metalanguage of America and to restitch 5
Orlando Patterson, Freedom, vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
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all the pieces in the service of that design. That was Louis Hartz’s grand gesture, as it was J. G. A. Pocock’s, and simultaneously their grand failure. The liberalism– republicanism debate was fired by the same overheated ambition, as if there were one authentic language, one ideational stratum underlying the national whole. When that conceit turned fragile, the historians abandoned the debate. New subjects matter more to historians, ultimately, than new readings of familiar ones, and the market revolution was next in line. In the subdiscipline of historical political theory, however, the ambition to straighten out the contradictions of the past, to bring the cacophony in the historical record into variations on one key idea—rightly and complexly enough understood—endures. It frames debates, makes careers, sets the terms of dispute and the dimensions of intellectual ambitions. The weaknesses of A Nation of Agents reflect the weaknesses in the intellectual foundations of its genre. Political theory-making has not always been that way, as Sheldon Wolin’s learned and sinuously intelligent reading of Alexis de Tocqueville shows. Not that Tocqueville was without high ambitions as a theory builder. His longing for the “premier facts” and “general ideas” that would bring out the pattern in the mass of detail, for a position in which he could view panoramically the tendencies of the moment, shaped every piece of his writing. Equality of condition was, from the outset, the most important of these. “In America,” he would write with a certain pride in his own accomplishment, “all laws originate more or less from the same idea. The whole of society . . . is based on just one fact: everything follows from one underlying principle. . . . Once you have found the central point, you can see the whole plan at one glance.” By contrast, his imagination ran aground in England, where he fretted that he could find “not a single principle from which consequences follow quietly; there are some lines which crisscross, a labyrinth in which we are absolutely lost” (Wolin, p. 145). The genius of his Democracy in America, the characteristic that still sets it apart from the thousands of volumes of American reportage that have followed it, was Tocqueville’s gift for abstracting from small to large. That, in turn, has made Tocqueville’s writings irresistible to modern theorists, eager to extract the timeless, authentic Tocqueville from the all-too-visible messiness and multivocality of his pages. He has become an authority to claim, a figure to cite on every side of contemporary political debate. But Tocqueville himself was never a man of one idea—rightly or wrongly understood—not even equality. He shifted his thinking with his experience and his second thoughts, with the political events around him, and the tides in his own political fortune. He labored, often with deep anxiety, over his writing. He let Democracy sprawl over too many subjects, let himself be drawn into too many real and apparent contradictions, let his reflections unfold over too large a canvas to ever be simply pinned down. “Tocqueville does not merely invite a postmodern
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reading,” Wolin muses at one point. “He courts it” (p. 563). “Perhaps . . . this bundle of contradictions, poses, anachronisms, absurdities, and willfulness, this ‘Tocqueville,’ represented not a single authorial self but a named being, struggling over time to hold together an uncertain assemblage of wayward phenomena, of diverse impulses and frustrated ambitions” (p. 561). The Tocqueville that Wolin gives us is not, in fact, a fractured, postmodern one but something harder to achieve: a writer thinking in time. From his early break with his family to support the constitutional monarchy that they detested, until his timid, fearful confrontation with the democratic revolution of 1848, through the thinking and rethinking of the first and second volumes of his Democracy, through his Souvenirs and Ancien R´egime, Wolin traces a mind in action, shifting its ground, doubling back on itself, impressed by its own fears that it was “incomplete,” “incoherent,” that its “several parts were badly joined” (Wolin, p. 5). In contrast to the sharply reduced Tocqueville that figures in too many readings of American history, Wolin’s Tocqueville is a man thoroughly immersed in European intellectual life. Shifting back and forth between the roles of critic, historian, and philosopher, Wolin works to recapture Tocqueville’s own engagement and conversation with the texts and authorities around him: the other great readers of politics (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke), of the bourgeoisie (Bentham, Marx, Mill), of method (Descartes, Pascal), custom (Montesquieu), and history. Tocqueville Between Two Worlds is not a work of historical contextualization, narrowly understood, but rather an intricately and deeply intelligent engagement with a mind and ideas in motion. Wolin himself is a man of strong general ideas, and the themes of his own masterwork of 1960, Politics and Vision, are not disguised.6 Wolin writes with unstinted affection for Tocqueville’s discovery of participatory democracy in the local town meetings and civic associations of early nineteenth-century New England and his realization that democracy was not a formal scheme of allotting sovereignty (as the classical writers had had it) but a form of politics that penetrated deeply into the practices, customs, and moeurs of everyday life. Wolin worries with Tocqueville over the new, nameless forms of despotism rising to haunt the modern world. He is embarrassed for the Tocqueville who, in 1848, turned in dread from the democratic critics of property rights. At one key moment, as the regent and her family left the Chamber of Deputies which had refused to hear her speak on behalf of a continuation of the monarchy, Tocqueville was seized with the impulse to dash after her and protect her from the insults of the Paris crowd; but even that gesture, like so many of Tocqueville’s actions in the crisis, was unnoticed and ineffectual. Almost imperceptibly, Wolin’s Tocqueville 6
Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1960).
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diminishes over these pages, as his fears mounted, as his early epiphany about the possibilities of democratic political engagement receded into his past, as he let his liberal convictions finally trump his democratic ones. Claimants for Tocqueville’s authority will seize on these passages and worry over the reduction of Tocqueville to a proto-participatory democrat—though this capacious reading of Tocqueville, full of unexpected byways and excursions, is, indeed, anything but reductionistic. The much more striking characteristic of Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, in fact, lies in Wolin’s reflections on theory—reflections that work their way into the very fabric of the book. To Wolin, the looseness that has vexed so many readers of Tocqueville—his “fluidity” and “suppleness,” his “vivid imagery” and its “strategic” deployment—was not a flight from theory but theory’s realization (p. 100). Theory, Wolin suggests, begins as theoria, as journey, as a release of the imagination through encounter with strangeness. Theory for Wolin is a mode of “repicturization,” a making visible of possibilities and critical differences. Through it, the mind travels from here to there. What worries Wolin about modern theory, in contrast, is its power to normalize. Abstracting and dehistoricizing the particular, subordinating detail to rule, excising doubt, political theory (whether as high abstraction or as manipulable analytical elements) is “modernity’s way of constituting power” (Wolin, p. 20). It is knowledge in the service of control, “a form of knowledge that could freely construct its objects and their relations” (p. 21). Tocqueville’s method was not merely looser and disjointed: it was a way of holding in tension the relationship between the generals and particulars that, at its best, held at bay the “despotic tendency” in the act of generalization (p. 156). The issue “central in Tocqueville’s formulation of his ideas,” Wolin writes, was “whether theorists would assume the task of normalizing the appearance and presence of [modernity’s] huge powers, preserving their impressive and triumphal character while rendering them familiar and, above all, demonstrating their manageability, or whether the powers would be revealed to have certain unsettling and unnatural qualities that portended a continuous discontinuity in the human condition” (p. 133). In Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, Wolin offers theory in its second, nonsovereign form: theory as a journey, rich in images and intellectual suppleness. Like Tocqueville, he lets his analytical vocabulary shift and double back on itself, works up a multitude of categories and lets them go. He is profuse, almost recklessly so, with general ideas, even as he works to tether them to the singularities of Tocqueville’s life and intellectual surroundings. The discontinuities of Wolin’s short chapters deliberately mimic the famous form of Democracy itself, illuminating but not containing his subject. On a terrain that has been simplified so often, he gives us a sprawling, magnificently multivocal
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Tocqueville, a repicturization of theorizing as a form of thinking, and a powerful example of nonreductive intellectual history. How, then, do we hold these contributions to the history of ideas together: the one by the seer of one thing (Block) and the other by the seer of many (Wolin)? The mapper of a single idea across the centuries, and the nester of a multitude of powerful ideas in a single political moment and intellectual career? The young normalizer and the old disrupter? And how do we write the history of American political ideas and argument under the sign of either? Finding a point on which to stand was never a finished business for Tocqueville. But to one conceptualization of such a vantage point, the “tableau,” he continuously returned. He meant by it a place where the mass of details came into ensemble, and the “whole seizes the imagination” (Wolin, p. 146). He yearned for that unifying experience against his own sense of its temporariness and his own “incompleteness.” But a tableau has not only a central focal point, toward which all its lines and meaning rush. It also has edges. It is a setting, an image contained in a social frame. Tocqueville was, in fact, wrong to think that in all social settings in early nineteenth-century America the lines of force ran toward the equality that so caught his imagination. In other tableaux—slave auction, counting house, workshop, prayer meeting, birthing bed, cotton field, Euro-Amerindian border, and the rest—powers and principles were often radically differently arranged, as generations of social historians have long insisted. What is true of power is also true of language. Even the largest of general ideas, though they mask their limits, are scene- and purpose-specific. They take form as scripts for place-specific social theaters. The talk of equality that caught Tocqueville’s imagination on his American journey was one such script, swelling in the theaters of electoral politics, in the stump speeches, the state legislatures, and the nervous, reactive talk of the northeastern lawyer elite who bent Tocqueville’s ear. But it was not the only arena in which ideational production was going on full blast—nor the only language that nineteenth-century Americans knew and were capable of practicing, as they shifted from scene to scene of social action and moved between scripts and parts. The same, we should recognize, was true of talk of the self. “Agency” was one of the setting-specific ways in which a great many Americans imagined—and still imagine—the meaning of individual freedom. Like all protean vocabularies, this one could not be confined to the church houses in which it originated, or to the purposes of discipline, conversion, and moral incitement for which it was invented. It spilled over into other arenas to be deployed in other arguments, injected into other scripts and purposes—as Block so persuasively shows. But it would be foolish to suppose that it dominated them all, or that the scripts of social life were not filled with different versions of the self, just as thick with
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meaning and as passionately articulated within their action frames: the rightsholding self, inviolable and sovereign; the virtuous self invoked in those settings where “republican” rhetoric had work to perform; the pliable self, vibrating to another’s tune; the self invested with ownership of other selves; the self linked one-for-all-and-all-for-one with his comrades. Ideational life has, in short, not merely its contradictions and diremptions, not only, at times, its great overarching categories. It has its tableaux, its discontinuities, its scenes and places. To take those seriously means renegotiating the Faustian bargain which, Wolin suggests, lies deep in the modern, postTocqueville meaning of political theory. It means imagining a “nonsovereign” form of theorizing, and a reconnection, on new terms, of intellectual history with the social historians’ worlds of action and “agency.” Fewer conundrums will be slain, but the journeys will be all the richer.
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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 123–133. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000040 Printed in the United Kingdom
black hearts and monsters of the mind: race and identity in antebellum america george m. fredrickson Department of History, Stanford University
Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionism and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) Before these books appeared in 2002 the intellectual and cultural history of race in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America was, generally speaking, a segregated enterprise. The attitudes of those designated as white toward people defined as racially “other,” especially blacks, were explored over a period of more than four decades by several historians, including William Stanton, Winthrop Jordan, Reginald Horsman, Alexander Saxton, David Roediger, and myself. The black intellectual and cultural experience has been well covered in the work of Benjamin Quarles, Sterling Stuckey, Laurence Levine, William H. and Jane H. Pease, James E. and Lois Horton, and Mia Bay. In their different ways the three books under review, two of them especially, seek to obliterate the color line in the history of racial thought and attitudes by presenting blacks and whites, or at least some blacks and some whites, as engaged in a common, interactive discourse. They also suggest that intellectual history—studies of the kind of articulate, creative thought normally confined to elites—may be regaining some of the currency that it had before being overshadowed during the last two or three decades by the study of folk cultures and popular mentalities. Bruce Dain’s A Hideous Monster of the Mind is a very competent example of intellectual history as the description and analysis of complex ideas. It summarizes and analyzes the various scientific, cultural, and historical theories about race and race difference that were developed and promulgated in Europe and America 123
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in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries. Dain is a close, incisive reader of texts, and he provides fresh insights into the thinking of Buffon, Blumenbach, Herder, and other founders of European ethnology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Then, crossing the Atlantic, he revisits with new eyes and new insights the principal white Americans who articulated views of race—Jefferson, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Samuel G. Morton, and Josiah Nott, among others. But Dane’s most remarkable achievement is bringing into this debate those AfricanAmerican intellectuals who challenged racist arguments and made a strong case for black equality. Especially impressive among these champions of black claims to freedom and respect were Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Until very recently these creative black thinkers have been virtually unknown, certainly as compared to such conspicuous figures as Frederick Douglass and David Walker. Dain also discusses the thought of Walker and Douglass, but he seemingly finds their purely intellectual contributions (as opposed to their roles as publicists or activists) less profound or remarkable than those of Easton and Smith. If Dain has written superb intellectual history of a fairly conventional kind, focusing on the ideas more than the social and psychological context from which they arose, John Stauffer’s The Black Hearts of Men is concerned with what race meant in the life experiences of four “Radical Abolitionists”—two black and two white. By writing a comparative or composite biography of Gerrit Smith, James McCune Smith, John Brown, and Fredrick Douglass, Stauffer seeks to shed light on race as a protean, constructed identity. Race as theory or formal ideology seems to play a relatively small role in this process, which, as the title of the book suggests, was more a matter of the heart than the head. John Brown and Frederick Douglass are well known as major actors in the antislavery agitation that helped bring on the Civil War. Douglass was the most prominent of black abolitionists, and Brown of course created a sectional crisis by raiding Harper’s Ferry in an unsuccessful effort to trigger a slave insurrection. Gerrit Smith was an extremely wealthy upstate New Yorker who threw himself and his resources into various causes, especially antislavery, but he has not previously received the attention he deserves because he was generally at odds with what historians have viewed as the mainstream of the movement. His support for John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and the feverish effort he subsequently made to escape the consequences of his involvement have tarnished his reputation among some historians. James McCune Smith, who has already been mentioned and about whom we will have more to say later, was a New York-born but British-educated black physician and writer who had an extended and sometimes close relationship with Gerrit Smith. The third book under review, Patrick Rael’s Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, is less overtly interracial than the others, concentrating as it does on the leadership and ideology of the northern free black community. But the book’s central thesis is that the northern black protest movement in the era of slavery was squarely in the mainstream of American ideological and
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cultural developments and even contributed to them. Rael is thus at odds with those contemporary historians who, as he sees it, want to read the cultural nationalism and ethnic pluralism of a later time back into the antebellum period. Then, according to Rael, the physical color line did not correspond to a clear differentiation of culture and values. If I read him correctly, it was only the difference of opinion on race itself—the belief of most whites in congenital black inferiority and the belief of blacks in their fundamental equality—that created a serious divergence of ideologies and beliefs. If whites could simply have overcome their color-coded racism, as (according to Stauffer) individuals like John Brown and Gerrit Smith were able to do, they would have found blacks little different from themselves in culture and values. Besides affirming actual or potential interracialism, the three books exhibit a number of other features that are likely to influence the historiography of race in America. Rael in particular suggests that it was the experience of free African Americans in the North rather than that of slaves in the South that set the pattern for black identity formation in the post-Civil War period. He notes that the southern black community was fractured by status and color differences to a much greater extent than that of the North—most obviously the gulf between slave and free, but also, in the deep South at least, between black and mulatto. It was, he contends, in the northern states that a single and unified black identity was first constructed. In the 1970s and 1980s, most scholarship on antebellum Africans focused on “the slave community” or “slave culture” and the legacy they provided for subsequent black consciousness. Although they make no explicit claims for the priority of the North in the making of blackness, Dain and Stauffer both put northern African Americans at the center of the black discourse on race. (One reason of course was that the only blacks who could engage in public discussion were those in the North.) Another common feature of all the books is the considerable attention they give to a previously unheralded, almost unknown, figure—James McCune Smith, who now emerges as perhaps the most learned and versatile black intellectual before the rise of W. E. B. Du Bois at the turn of the century.1 As we have seen, he is one of Stauffer’s four protagonists, and he also has a prominent place in both of the other books. McCune Smith was born in New York City in 1813, the son of a slave woman who was in the process of being emancipated. We know little about his father, who was apparently a white merchant. Educated in the excellent African Free Schools that produced several of the most prominent black leaders of the time, he worked for a short time as a blacksmith and then 1
This interest in McCune Smith was anticipated almost 20 years ago in a little noticed article by David A. Blight, “In Search of Learning, Liberty, and Self-Definition: James McCune Smith and the Ordeal of the Antebellum Black Intellectual,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 9/2 (July 1985), 7–26.
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resolved to become a physician. After being refused admittance on racial grounds to American medical schools he traveled to the University of Glasgow, where he received his MD in 1837. Returning to New York as the only academically qualified black physician in the United States, he established a successful interracial practice and ran a profitable pharmacy. But he also found time to co-edit an African-American newspaper and write a substantial number of essays for black publications. In his writings, McCune Smith refuted the claims of scientific racists and criticized white abolitionists for their condescending attitudes toward blacks and their refusal to contemplate violence in the struggle against slavery. He was also a pioneer in the development of statistical social science and provided the definitive refutation of the proslavery propaganda that was based on the 1840 census. (It purported to show an extraordinarily high rate of insanity among free black people in the North as compared to the well-adjusted and “contented” slaves of the South.) His most memorable writing was perhaps the series of ten essays that he published in Fredrick Douglass’s Paper between 1852 and 1854 entitled “The Heads of the Colored People Done with a Whitewash Brush.” Satirizing the craniologically based racial typology of the “American School of Ethnology,” it described and contemplated the heads of a diverse series of black people as a basis for demonstrating their individuality and humanity. Nevertheless, McCune Smith remains a somewhat elusive figure, difficult to characterize or fully understand. His writings have apparently not been collected and republished, hence they remain for the most part in the original black periodicals; only one published lecture appears in Rael’s very extensive bibliography. Unlike Frederick Douglass, he produced no autobiographical writings, and virtually no personal papers, other than the letters he wrote to Gerrit Smith, have come to light. Stauffer confesses that he can provide little information on the more intimate side of McCune Smith’s life because of “the lack of records” (p. 224). He is clearly important enough to deserve a full biography, but writing one will be a formidable task. The most controversial aspect of the books taken together is the extent to which they depart from what has been the dominant paradigm in the history of race and the black experience in the United States. All of them unabashedly focus on elites or exceptional individuals and thereby eschew “history from the bottom up.” None of them would easily qualify as the kind of “social history” that deals with entire communities, or even as “cultural history,” if that term means, as it often has in the past two decades or so, the exploration of popular mentalities or “folk thought.” Of course intellectual history never really went away, and, as I have previously suggested, these books may be signs of its revival. Since Dain’s announced subject is “race theory,” he can scarcely be criticized for limiting himself to fairly elaborate and complex bodies of thought. His
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book can be regarded as a contribution to the history of science, a thriving enterprise that does not appear to have much of a “bottom-up” dimension. His analysis of individual theories and theorists is often quite original and even surprising. He puts Jefferson’s racial speculations in the context of an eighteenthcentury “natural history” that was already becoming outmoded. He thus calls into question the prevailing assumption that the Sage of Monticello anticipated the scientific racism of the nineteenth century. Early nineteenth-century versions of “polygenesis”—the theory that the races were separately created species—appear from Dain’s account to be less coherent and influential than previously thought. The nineteenth century’s most significant contribution to thought about race, which applied to opponents of slavery as well as its defenders, was its divorce of nature and morality. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Hosea Easton came down on the side of morality, whatever the natural facts might be. Proslavery racial theorists like Samuel G. Morton and Josiah Nott argued for suppressing feelings of empathy or sympathy for individual blacks when it was a matter of assigning the group to which they belonged to its proper position in society. For Morton and Nott, a “fixed hierarchy” of races” (Dain, p. 204) was dictated by the objective study of nature and therefore should be recognized in law and enforced by government. Focusing on elites when writing the history of theories that purport to be scientific is more obviously justifiable than doing the same thing in dealing with a group’s struggle against oppression. Patrick Rael’s Black Identity and Protest in the Antebellum North challenges what he calls “the community studies/culturalist paradigm.” His sources are the public utterances of black leaders rather than the expressive popular customs, behavior, and folklore that historians of AfricanAmerican culture and consciousness have often relied upon. “I concede without hesitation the elite biases of most of my sources,” Rael writes. But he proposes that “we reconsider the realm of public speech as a force in its own right rather than as a mere subordinate to the larger realm of cultural nationalism and culturally based identity politics” (p. 289). One of Rael’s prime targets is Sterling Stuckey, who has argued eloquently that pre-Civil War black thought manifested a cultural nationalism with African origins.2 Rael does not deny that a “slave culture” with African roots existed, only that it could find “little support in the public sphere,” where “Black resistance grew more from leaders’ pragmatic responses to their situation than from their assertion of a distinct cultural ‘genius’ of African-descended people” (pp. 48–9). The black protest thought of the antebellum era appealed primarily to the bourgeois values 2
See Stuckey’s Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987), and the introduction to his edited volume, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston, MA, 1972).
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of respectability, character, individual responsibility, and self-help. In other words, it was fully compatible with the main currents of social thought and ideology in northern society as a whole. “Respectability” in fact was a “master value” (p. 201) for those who spoke for the northern black community, just as it was for increasing numbers of white Americans at the time. By strongly embracing this emerging middle-class worldview, blacks actually helped it to triumph and thus, according to Rael, manifested an unexpected kind of historical agency. Does this mean that blacks lacked a sense of distinctive identity and nationhood, that their only ambition was to be assimilated into white America? Not at all, Rael answers, and it is here that his argument becomes most original and intriguing. The early to mid-nineteenth-century conception of nationalism, he argues, did not require a strong cultural basis. A sense of peoplehood from whatever source, even simply the experience of being mistreated as a group, could engender nationalist aspirations. A sense of cultural uniqueness could contribute to the construction of such a national identity but was not essential to it. To become self-determining and civilized one had to belong to a nation. If blacks could not be part of the American nation they would presumably have to have one of their own. On the question of whether such “nationalism” literally required the creation of an independent black state, and if so, where it should be, Rael gives the impression of uncertainty, ambiguity, or the suspension of judgment. Dain in Monsters of the Mind records a debate on this issue among African-American intellectuals in the 1820s, which led them to the general conclusion that Haiti could not serve this purpose. When Liberia became independent in 1847 another alternative was provided, but it was one unacceptable to most black leaders because of its association with white-sponsored colonization of freed blacks. The later pan-Africanist ideal of a continent liberated from colonialism was not yet readily conceivable. Rael, however, is not really concerned with the political and geographical implications of antebellum black nationalism. The group-centered ideology of the protest leaders he cites was, more than anything else, a defensive response to racism. Yet he also takes note of the rise of ethnically and racially based conceptions of nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century and the extent to which black discourse was affected by this creeping essentialism. By the end of the antebellum period, the debate between nationalists (such as Martin Delany) who had come to favor black emigration from the United States to West Africa and those who dreamed of blacks being incorporated into America was really, he concludes, a clash of two emerging examples of “romantic ethnic nationalism” (p. 238), one black and the other simply American. Rael makes a notable effort to avoid reading modern concepts of race and nation back into the antebellum period. To do so, he believes, would be ahistorical and anachronistic. He suggests that there was no clear distinction at the time
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between the two terms: they were used interchangeably (as in references to an English or French “race” or to a German “nation” before one really existed). The main difference—and this was why black leaders generally preferred thinking of themselves as a nation—was that “different races were characterized by inequality, but nations seemed to share a fundamental equality” (p. 254). Rael’s general approach is compatible with the postmodernist presumption that categories like nation, race, and ethnicity are “socially and culturally constructed,” but I believe that one can profitably use transhistorical, “ideal-type” constructions of such categories for purposes of comparative analysis. I agree with Rael that nationalism does not have to be based on what we could call “race” or “ethnicity.” In abstract principle, if not unfortunately in practice, the “civic nationalisms” that emerged from the American and French revolutions did not require particular cultural or genetic antecedents. According to the Declaration of Independence and of the Rights of Man one simply had to be a human being to belong to the nation. It is not until the nineteenth century that nationalism could be thought of as rooted in race or ethnicity. What Rael calls “romantic ethnic nationalism” developed first in Germany and then spread to much of the rest of Europe. It came to Britain and the United States principally in the form of “Anglo-Saxonism.” But to an extent that Rael fails to appreciate, ethnicity (even in the historically very specific form of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism) was a problematic basis for identity in a nation committed simultaneously to equal rights and the maintenance of slavery in a substantial proportion of its territory. Hence “racism”—the belief that innate characteristics relevant to social performance and citizenship are attributable to ancestry, as observable in such physical characteristics as skin color—became a more important source of American nationalism than ethnicity, which expresses itself primarily in what we would call culture—language, religion, moral values, art, traditional customs, etc.3 On the basis of this kind of approach, one could more readily understand Rael’s statement that black thinkers “evinced troubling concessions to the racialism of their day” (p. 284). The terrain on which they had to operate made this almost inevitable. But “racialism,” as K. Anthony Appiah has pointed out, is not necessarily “racism,”4 because it may affirm innate or essential identities without creating a hierarchy by placing one race above another. In my view, a more extensive use of such categories might have sharpened Rael’s analysis and placed his findings in a broader context. On empirical grounds the book can be criticized for exaggerating the hegemony that the middle-class black elite was able to exercise over the black 3 4
For uses of such a concept of racism for historical analysis, see George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, 2002). See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racisms,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis, 1990), 4–5.
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working class. Certainly Leslie Harris’s recent book on African Americans in New York before 1863 suggests that there was much more inter-class tension and working-class resistance to elite domination than is apparent in Rael’s account. The 1837 speech of one Peter Paul Simons, cited by Rael as an isolated and anomalous example of public protest against the elite’s cult of respectability and its non-violent moderation, is seen by Harris as an indication that “Many blacks, even some black reformers, were disillusioned with moral and intellectual improvement as the central method to achieve black freedom and equality.”5 Furthermore, the two major black protest leaders that John Stauffer features in The Black Hearts of Men moved decisively away from the ideology of liberation through the “moral and intellectual improvement” that Rael finds at the core of black protest. John Stauffer’s book is in many ways a very impressive achievement. Comparative biography is a difficult genre, and it has rarely been done so surehandedly. His method is to take some common events, experiences, or concerns and then see how each of his four subjects reacted to them and then to each other’s reactions. These include the Panic of 1837, the millennialist expectations of the early 1840s, the rise of women’s rights as an issue, and the increasingly intense and sometimes violent sectionalism of the late 1850s. (Of course, a degree of unevenness is inevitable here because the four men reacted with varying degrees of intensity to the common stimuli or differed in the extent to which their responses were recorded or have survived.) The main focus of the book is on the construction of identity in a racially divided society. Its point of departure is the recent literature on the construction of “whiteness.” An earlier generation of historians focused on the invention of blackness and took whiteness for granted. But in the work of historians like David Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson, it has become apparent that affirming whiteness was essential to European immigrant incorporation into American society and to the containment of class conflict in an industrializing society.6 Stauffer derives from such literature a sense that the central problem to be overcome if American society is to move beyond race is not merely improving the situation of blacks: it also entails the abolition of whiteness as a source of identity and privilege. To the extent that people think of themselves as white in some significant sense, they are complicit in a racial order that advantages them at the expense of blacks. Stauffer contends that his two “white” protagonists—Gerrit
5 6
Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago, 2003), 206 and passim. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race in the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1998).
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Smith and John Brown—had to overcome their constructed racial identities and make themselves existentially “black” in order to escape the condescending racial attitudes of most other abolitionists and gain the full trust of African Americans. Paradoxically, however, the two blacks in his quartet end up prescribing race mixture and “amalgamation” as the salvation of America. Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith, as is also apparent in Dain’s discussion of their thought, were not racialists or even black nationalists. What they represent for Stauffer is an anticipation of the modern (or postmodern) attitude that race has no objective reality or fixed meaning and is constantly in the process of being socially and culturally reconstructed. (He describes all four of his subjects as demonstrating “the protean nature of identity politics” [p. 152].) Were Douglass and McCune Smith therefore incipient champions of the “mixed race” identities that many of my students at Stanford are now espousing? Perhaps, but mixed race is still race, and Douglass and McCune Smith, who were conscious of their own mixed ancestry, seemed to entertain the hope that race could be overcome entirely and that America could become genuinely color-blind. The central character in The Black Hearts of Men is Gerrit Smith, who served to a considerable extent as the link between the others. Also, unlike the others, he left behind voluminous personal records. One suspects that at some point Stauffer might have been tempted to write a biography of Smith, and something close to a full biography, at least up to 1860, is embedded in this volume. Smith was a complex and somewhat unstable figure, who, it seems, could hold conflicting beliefs simultaneously—as when he supported colonization and abolitionism in the early 1830s after most abolitionists had repudiated the scheme of gradually ending slavery by exporting those emancipated to Africa. His endorsement of William Miller’s prophecy that Christ would return in 1843 might seem to consign him to a lunatic fringe, but Stauffer assures us that Millerite millennialism was compatible with humanitarian reform. Smith also supported temperance and women’s rights as well as abolitionism. In 1846, in one of the most notable acts of philanthropy in American history, he gave 120,000 acres of land in the Adirondacks to 3,000 black settlers, thereby establishing the North Elba colony where John Brown later settled. Nevertheless, Smith’s mental and ideological collapse after John Brown’s raid, as well as some earlier vagaries, reveal a degree of mental and moral instability that make him less than an entirely admirable figure. James McCune Smith receives the fullest treatment to date in The Black Hearts of Men, but, as suggested earlier, many aspects of his life remain obscure. Stauffer contributes relatively little to our factual knowledge of Frederick Douglass and John Brown, both of whom have received extensive biographical treatment in recent years. He is more sympathetic to Brown and his espousal of violence (some might even call it terrorism) than most previous historians. He notes
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that the attack on Harper’s Ferry inspired many slaves in the region to set their masters’ property on fire, which suggests that Brown’s belief that the slaves could be inspired to rebel was not entirely delusional. He also demonstrates that the common view that Frederick Douglass repudiated Brown’s tactics is misleading. Although he declined to participate personally in the raid for prudential reasons, Douglass justified it in retrospect and professed nothing but admiration for Brown himself. More tolerant of Brown than most historians have been, Stauffer seems somewhat less than fair to Frederick Douglass, or at least to Douglass’s career after 1863. He represents him as betraying the cause of Radical Abolitionism when he supported Lincoln and the Republican Party after the Emancipation Proclamation. But given the options available, much of his thought and behavior can be justified on pragmatic grounds. As he put it after Reconstruction when some black leaders proposed switching their support to the blatantly racist Democrats, “the Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea.” The principal contribution of the book to the historiography on the coming of the Civil War is its concept of “Radical Abolitionism”, the ideology shared by Smith, Douglass, McCune Smith, and Brown. Up to now, historians of abolitionism have focused on the non-violent, generally apolitical perfectionism of William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, and Wendell Phillips. (Phillips, however, might be a candidate for the pantheon of Radical Abolitionism, because he did endorse Brown’s raid after the fact.) The political abolitionism that first appeared in the Liberty Party of 1840 has often been viewed as a less radical challenge to slavery and racism than that associated with the Garrison advocates of “universal reform.” Also, political antislavery is generally seen as growing more conservative as it becomes devoted to the exclusion of slavery from the territories rather than abolition, first in the Free Soil Party of 1848 and then in the Republican Party of 1855–6. What Stauffer describes is a form of political abolitionism that becomes revolutionary in its willingness to use violence to overthrow slavery and at the same time embraces an antislavery interpretation of the same constitution that Garrison burned publicly as “a covenant with hell.” An important source for revolutionary political abolitionism was the theory of John Quincy Adams, first promulgated in 1836, that the federal government had the power to abolish slavery if the southern states became “the theatre of war, civil, servile, or foreign” (p. 26). For Radical Abolitionists, according to Stauffer, a massive slave insurrection should be encouraged precisely because it could lead to such federal intervention. (But as the response to John Brown’s raid clearly indicated, a more likely reaction would have been the use of federal troops to put down the uprising. It would take southern secession and a civil war to make Adams’s theory operative.) I wonder, however, how much of a role such strategic constitutional thinking really played in the culmination of the radical abolitionist project. Stauffer also
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makes it clear that the principal sanction for Brown’s raid was divine revelation, both as experienced by a righteous person and as manifested in the Bible. Brown himself certainly believed that he was acting under direct divine inspiration when he took up arms against slavery. If so, did it really matter very much what the Constitution said or did not say? It was what God said directly to John Brown that mattered. In contemplating Brown’s frame of mind one’s historical relativism is put to a severe test. It is possible to accept the justice of Brown’s cause and yet be repelled by his apocalyptic self-righteousness. Stauffer expresses some reservations about the ultimate utility of this sanctification of violence, but his main purpose is to portray Brown as an exemplar of the abolition of whiteness rather than as an apostle of holy war. But, troubling as it may be, Brown stood both for the overthrow of slavery and racism and for virtually unrestrained violence in the name of religious conviction. Whatever judgments one might wish to make about the raid, Stauffer’s depiction of Brown’s mindset is persuasive. It would also apply reasonably well to Gerrit Smith, at least at those moments in his life when he felt divinely inspired. But I am uncertain how well it describes the mentalities of Douglass and McCune Smith. From the evidence presented it would appear that their religiosity was less intense and was leavened by a strong dose of pragmatic rationality. (At several points in his life Douglass expressed skepticism about enthusiastic religion and biblical literalism; he eventually became a Unitarian.) Supporting the justice of slave rebellion was a way of extending to blacks the same right of revolution against tyranny that white Americans endorsed as central to their national heritage. After the fact, John Brown could serve, and can still serve, as the exemplar or symbol of this principle. But when he chose not to join Brown’s raid because he thought it had no chance of success, Douglass was in effect saying that being abstractly right is not everything. One must also calculate whether the means are appropriate to the ends being sought. If he had been asked to participate in Brown’s endeavor, I imagine that McCune Smith would have responded in much the same way. It is nevertheless striking and somewhat troubling that it took a prophetic mentality and sense of being under the direct guidance of God to induce a few antebellum white Americans to escape from their privileged racial identities and empathize fully and effectively with blacks. No stronger evidence could be provided of the depths of American racism. John Stauffer’s brilliantly provocative book has looked into the experiences and ideas of four individuals who were able to move across the boundary between white and black. In the process it has provided valuable new insights into the history of racism and anti-racism in the United States.
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C 2004 Cambridge University Press Modern Intellectual History, 1, 1 (2004), pp. 135–149. DOI: 10.1017/S1479244303000052 Printed in the United Kingdom
jesus matters in the usa david a. hollinger Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) D. G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003) Jesus of Nazareth divides the intellectual history of the United States from that of modern Europe in ways that are rarely articulated and explained. It is not simply that colonial-era Puritans and their descendants institutionalized a Protestant framework for doing philosophy, social theory, and political argumentation that survived, as altered by many accommodations with the Enlightenment and with Darwinism, through the end of the nineteenth century. That story is well understood. What remains insufficiently confronted is a condition that came into being after much of the nation’s intellectual leadership had been liberated from that Protestant framework while the general public resisted the secularizing trend seen in the publics of nearly all European nations. Twentieth-century American intellectuals, unlike their counterparts in most European nations, operated in a society the overwhelming majority of which declared Christianity to be much more than a nominal affiliation inherited from a distant past. This was true in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was true in the 1970s and 1980s. A credible survey of 1990 found that 86 percent of Americans identified themselves as Christians.1 The role of religion in public affairs is apparent to the most casual observer of the rhetoric and behavior of leading politicians. In 2000 about 90 percent of Americans polled declared their willingness to vote for a member of even the most stigmatized groups defined by race, ethnicity, or 1
Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York, 1993), 1–4.
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gender, while only 49 percent said they could vote for an atheist.2 Just why Christianity flourishes with greater intensity in the United States than elsewhere in the industrialized North Atlantic West deserves more investigation than it has received. It becomes a more compelling question the longer this anomaly persists and the more pronounced it becomes.3 But however we may account for this condition, we need also to attend to its consequences. How has this condition made the intellectual history of the United States in the last century different from that of comparable societies? In relation to some thinkers, including some whose contributions are the most highly visible abroad, not much. John Rawls? Edmund Wilson? Thomas Kuhn? Lionel Trilling? Richard Hofstadter? Some intellectuals have been touched by this condition only subtly, sometimes in its capacity as an irritant. For some, the United States is primarily a site for the pursuit of agendas established and sustained in a larger arena. Yet the United States, like Russia, France, Germany, and other producers of transnational intellectuals, is not simply a neutral site, but the culturally thick foundation for a national discourse. Most intellectuals participate simultaneously in national and transnational debates. How the local affects the global is not always apparent until one looks closely. Christianity has figured large in the national debates of the United States, especially down through the 1950s, when Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr functioned as something of a national sage. Substantial cadres of religiously committed intellectuals could be found even in the last third of the century, and flourish today. The gap between the bulk of the intelligentsia and the public is real, but any picture of American intellectual life that fails to include the religiously affirming intellectuals who believe they bridge this gap, even at the risk of losing the respect of their most adamantly secular co-workers, will make the United States look more like Europe than it really is.4 But there is more to it. The heavily Christian backdrop has affected the character of justifications for specific popular movements: the more Christian one’s potential constituency, the more a theorist has to work within, or work
2
3 4
Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Religion in the 2000 Election,” The Public Interest (Spring 2001), 25, summarizing a study carried out by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The point is not that this accurately predicted voter behavior, but that so many Americans still felt comfortable saying about atheists things that they did not feel comfortable saying about black people or other traditionally stigmatized categories of people. I have argued for the importance of this question in “Why is There So Much Christianity in the United States?”, Church History (December 2002). For a recent example of the vigorous assertion of the relevance of Christianity on the part of a prominent American writer, see James Carroll, “Why Religion Still Matters,” Daedalus 132 (Summer 2003), 9–13.
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to neutralize, the attendant doctrinal and emotional atmosphere.5 Beyond the demands of movement mobilization, this condition has influenced the allocation of theoretical resources to certain issues and not others. The relations of church to state, for example, and of religion to politics more generally, are debated much more extensively than in Europe—until recently, when new European Muslim populations have generated fresh engagements in this domain of theory. The “relations between science and religion,” too, continue to inspire the expenditure of enormous intellectual energies. Yet another consequence is the centrality of the process of “secularization.” The vast sanctuaries built by the Methodists and Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the center of almost all American cities and towns are rarely full, and many have been sold to other organizations. But the people who left those huge downtown churches did not just disappear. How are the post-Protestants affected by their Protestant past? Why did they leave, and others stay? If the vast majority of even college-educated Americans remain Christians, what accounts for those who do not, and in what specific theoretical terms do those on either side of the religious–secular line understand themselves? These features of American intellectual history are all the more dynamic on account of a suspicion of intellectual elitism that is, in itself, a distinguishing aspect of American culture. Aloofness from the cultural expectations of the public is difficult to defend, even for many professional academics, who ritualistically call for more “public intellectuals.” Yet such aloofness was promoted in the first half of the twentieth century by the accelerating professionalization and specialization of American intellectual life, making scholars more responsive to their peers and less obligated to deal with the tastes of the rest of the population. In the second half of the century a remarkable transformation in the ethnoreligious demography of the academic and literary intelligentsia, facilitated by the success of the professionalizing projects of earlier decades, sharpened this sense of distance. Jews were absorbed into the leadership of this intelligentsia after the collapse of Christian-inspired restrictions on Jewish faculty and students in leading colleges and universities. This meant that people who had no Christian background at all—not even the lapsed Protestantism of early twentieth-century secularists like John Dewey and Joseph Wood Krutch—were now helping to design undergraduate curricula and to define the terms on which philosophy, the novel, history, law, poetry, literary scholarship, sociology, political science, and other culturally sensitive callings were being practiced. Jews interacting with liberal Protestants and lapsed Protestants greatly advanced the integration of American intellectual life with that of the secularized elites of Europe, and in the 5
Consider the liberal law professors and their allies trying to muster support for a progressive tax policy in the state of Alabama: Adam Cohen, “What Would Jesus Do? Sock it to Alabama’s Corporate Landholders,” New York Times, June 10, 2003, A26.
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process they helped distinguish “the intellectuals” from everyone else. The less Christian the intelligentsia, the greater the gap between it and the public. These very dynamics may help account for the relative slowness of historians to articulate and explain the ways in which Jesus divides modern American from modern European intellectual history. Some appear reluctant to dwell on the ethno-religious context of the gap between the public and intellectuals for fear of giving indirect support to the anti-Jewish attitudes long sustained by Christian cultures. Others welcome the relative isolation of the predominantly secular intelligentsia as an excuse to concentrate on that intelligentsia’s transatlantic connections, and to treat the Christianity of the public and of the public’s learned fellow travelers as an irrelevant anachronism. Still others, more sympathetic to Christianity, appear reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which the learned men and women of Europe have left Christianity behind, because an emphasis on this historic development can imply a secularist teleology according to which Christians are on their way to a justified extinction. But it is to the professional culture of academic historians in general, beyond the narrower ranks of intellectual historians, that we must look to find the most formidable and salient inertia. Religion is simply not prominent on the agenda of the social, political, and cultural historians who study the broader American public in the early twenty-first century. Many of the historians who lead the Organization of American Historians and the Journal of American History find it hard to admit how vibrant Christianity remains in the United States.6 These scholars often associate recent American Christianity largely with right-wing political movements. Might treating Christianity more seriously as a historical reality serve to reinforce its hold on the society? Are there not dangers in emphasizing that the United States is, after all, a largely Christian society? These fears are ironically confirmed, up to a point, by a historiographical reality: a great many of the most accomplished students of American religious history are themselves avowedly Christian. Some others are non-believers, or are inconspicuous about their own religious orientation, but just as students of the history of feminism, of the civil rights movement, and of anti-imperialist initiatives often display sympathy toward their subjects, so, too, do students of Christianity. The overall result is that most historians who are not committed to Christianity say relatively little about its recent manifestations, and circle ambivalently around one of the most important and distinguishing features of
6
For a revealing indicator of the assumptions and dispositions of specialists in the history of the United States today, including some hints that the importance of religious history is coming to be more widely recognized, see the on-line conversation of nine historians moderated by the editors of the Journal of American History and published in that journal’s September 2003 issue.
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the United States. The culture of the profession in which intellectual historians are embedded does not encourage candid, probing explorations of how Jesus matters. That Jesus does matter is fully understood, although in varying terms, by four historians whose recent books are the occasion for this essay. Disparate as are the specific topics of these books, all instruct us about the Christian matrix of substantial portions of American intellectual life. All illuminate the tension between national and religious identity. And all lead us, by different routes, to the distinctly liberal Protestantism that built those empty-pew or sold-to-thePentecostals churches that still dominate the architecture of many American cities and towns. What we might make of that uniquely central strand of the history of Christianity in the United States is a question to which I shall turn at the end. Liberal Protestants and liberal Catholics are among the main actors in the story told by Eugene McCarraher’s Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought. McCarraher analyzes a sequence of episodes in which intellectuals wanting to provide a theoretical basis for social improvement have done so through theology. Paul Tillich, John Courtney Murray, Walter Rauschenbusch, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Reinhold Niebuhr are among McCarraher’s most well-known subjects, but he also devotes extensive attention to Niebuhr’s brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, and to Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, A. J. Muste, John A. Ryan, Daniel Berrigan, Jacques Maritain, Mary Daly, and Harvey Cox. McCarraher hopes “to establish the existence in twentieth century America of a critical, progressive lineage rooted firmly in Christian theology and to locate it in relation to the broader history of progressive intellectuals” (p. 3). He asserts that theology, in the hands of his subjects, “became neither a hoary liberal art nor a recondite conviction, but rather a mode of critical attention to political economy, social relations, cultural life, work, and technology” (pp. 1–2). These intellectuals, unlike their secular counterparts who have received more attention from historians sympathetic to the left, “believed that social and cultural revolution would come not from the dialectic of class struggle or the ingenuity of social engineers but from the therapeutic political practice of Christianity” (p. 2). McCarraher is most effective in a series of capsule accounts of just where his cast of characters resisted or accommodated with what he calls the “professional– managerial class,” the chief function of which he believes to be the facilitating of the triumph of an increasingly consumer-oriented capitalism. His sympathies are openly with the neo-orthodox H. Richard Niebuhr, the pacifist Muste, and the mystic Merton, and others who he credits with resisting this direction of modern society. He provides thoughtful and informative overviews of several rarely discussed figures, including the black theologian Howard Thurman. But much of the book is given over to explaining just where the most famous of his
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subjects, especially Reinhold Niebuhr, Tillich, the Jesuit Murray, and the social gospel Protestants accommodated with the prevailing order. Each figure is judged by McCarraher’s demanding standard for deploying the resources of Christianity in a sufficiently oppositional mode. Readers who are less sure than McCarraher of the right and wrong of things can still learn from his serial interrogations. McCarraher reveals, for example, how suspicious Murray was of popular, democratic politics, and how eager he was for “a corps of cultural professionals setting and patrolling the perimeters of public discussion” (p. 108). He offers a probing analysis of the dead ends and evasions of the Catholic Worker movement of the 1930s. At the center of Christian Critics is a lively and informative chapter on the personal and public life of Tillich, but his final judgment on the author of The Courage to Be is severe: Tillich was “an artifact of the consuming vision, an embryonic stage of the ‘commodity spirituality’ that denotes one of the purest therapeutic forms in the culture of late capitalism” (p. 146). The scope of McCarraher’s analysis is strangely limited in several respects. While he explores the relation between many of his subjects and the secular reformers of their milieu, pointing, for example, to the quietistic Merton’s engagement with the work of Marxist Herbert Marcuse, McCarraher pays very little attention to Christians who were more accepting of the standing order, or defenders of it. Yet the “critical” tradition he traces achieved much of its shape in dialogue with these other Christians, who often proved more influential than McCarraher’s subjects. “Fundamentalism” is not listed in the index, nor is Father Charles Coughlin. From McCarraher one gets little sense that Christianity is a highly contested charter for society and politics, rather than a prophetic if elusive set of truths that some people grasp better than others. Nor does McCarraher deal with the important question of what place his subjects had in mind for non-Christians in a United States to be reformed on the basis of a distinctly Christian worldview. Many of the radicals pursuing the class-centered and science-centered strategies McCarraher scorns were of course Jews, a category of Americans also absent from McCarraher’s index. Except when discussing Daly and other feminist theologians of the 1970s, McCarraher rarely explores the possible implications for gender equality of a “critical” Christianity, especially as espoused by Catholic thinkers devoted to “family.” Even when praising the intellectuals he most admires for their “fidelity first to principles and historical communities,” McCarraher dances around the sexual conservatism of these communities, acknowledging in passing that even his heroes are “sometimes chained to militantly (and ahistorically) anti-liberal stances (especially on sexual matters)” (p. 188). He laments Daly’s eventual repudiation of Christianity in favor of a gender-defined religious outlook, but, looking willfully away from the masculinist biases in the Christian tradition to which Daly’s extreme apostasy
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responded, McCarraher discredits Daly’s concerns by treating her as another lackey of capitalist elites: her celebration of “individuality and diversity” offered “keywords soon to be siren sweet to the ears of (mostly male) corporate leaders” (p. 177). The tradition McCarraher addresses is more interesting than Christian Critics makes it. Preoccupied with finding a past more usable to him as an adamant anticapitalist than the one he actually found, McCarraher ironically underestimates the historical significance of the tradition to which his book rightly directs us. Although a useful corrective to the histories of the left that leave out Christians altogether, McCarraher is as sectarian as the secular left historians at their notorious worst. Christian Critics ends not with a summary of what his subjects achieved, nor even with a frank admission of how badly they let him down, but with a hortatory and threadbare affirmation of his own religious vision to the complacent exclusion of all others: “Christianity remains the motherlode of the moral imagination essential for deliverance from the glittering imperium of American capitalism,” setting “faith,” “hope,” and “charity” against “the hubris of secular skepticism” (p. 190). But hubris, as McCarraher’s own poorly concealed portion of it testifies, is not limited to secular skeptics. How different are both the authorial voice and the material addressed in D. G. Hart’s The Lost Soul of American Protestantism. While McCarraher and most of his subjects are determined to incorporate America itself into their Christian witness, Hart and his subjects are more interested in being left alone to practice Christianity on their own. Hart’s subjects are the church-centered, creed-affirming, ritual-appreciating denominations—especially the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and the most conservative of the Presbyterians—that resisted revivalism in the nineteenth century and remained distant from revivalism’s two twentieth-century descendants, the “evangelicals” and the “liberals.” Hart calls this historiographically neglected minority “Confessional Protestants” in recognition of their emphasis on embedding individuals in institutions and ritualized practices, and their inclination to downplay the religious significance of public affairs, including those of the United States. Both the liberals and their rival evangelicals “dismissed church creeds, structures, and ceremonies as merely formal or external,” tested faith by its ability to transform individuals, and expected these transformed individuals to display their transformation in “all walks of life.” The confessionals are very different: they situate “the things of greatest religious meaning” not in worldly social and political engagements, but in “the sacred sphere of the church and its ministry” (p. xxiii). Clarifying the role of Confessional Protestants in American Protestant history is only one of Hart’s major goals. He also wants to vindicate confessionalism as a superior kind of Christianity. This aspect of the book will be of interest chiefly to Christians involved in disputes specific to that community of faith, but I deal
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with it here because Hart’s history and his religious argumentation are closely connected. Hart argues that the liberals and the evangelicals alike “abandoned large pieces of their Christian heritage by working so hard to make their faith practical and relevant to everything from the personal lives of ordinary citizens to the affairs of the most powerful nations in modern history” (p. xviii). By departing from the good sense of the other-worldly saints of the early Reformation, the mainline evangelicals and liberals, Hart continues, are largely to blame “for the self-righteousness and moralism that has characterized American culture.” Mainline Protestantism “looks for evidence of genuine religion more in the everyday affairs of citizens and national officials than in the religious observances of believers gathered as the body of Christ” (p. xxx). Historians of almost any religious orientation can profit from Hart’s detailed account of several major moments in the development of confessionalism. He has the most to say about three specific cases: eighteenth-century Presbyterians, nineteenth-century Lutherans, and twentieth-century Missouri Synod Lutherans, along with those Presbyterian and Reformed groups that held to the old ways when other Presbyterian and Reformed organizations assimilated into either the evangelical or liberal camps. His most provocative sections detail the differences between the confessionals and other conservative Protestants in the twentieth century. Confessionalism’s strongest modern theorist, Hart believes, was J. Gresham Machen, the Presbyterian theologian of the 1920s and 1930s often characterized as a “fundamentalist” and given some visibility by Walter Lippmann’s respectful account of his ideas in A Preface to Morals (1929). Hart builds upon his own previous book on Machen to explain that Machen was not so much a fundamentalist or even an evangelical as he was a confessional. Machen cared little for social reform. Hart contrasts Machen to William Jennings Bryan and other noted fundamentalists of the 1920s who campaigned against alcohol and the teaching of evolution in public school, and also to Carl Henry and other fundamentalist and evangelical theorists of the 1940s and later who shared with liberals a determination to change the world but attacked the liberals for insufficient attention to Christ. Machen was known for his strict standards for who was and was not Christian. These standards were indeed sectarian and intolerant, Hart explains, but they took on their meaning in the context of a sharp public–private distinction that placed churches decisively outside the realm of public affairs. Hart’s account of the varieties of conservative Protestant doctrine will challenge readers who assume that the distinction between liberals and evangelicals is the only one you need in order to adequately understand Protestant thought in the twentieth century. Hart draws too sharply the distinction between the confessionals and all other Protestants in regard to the role of the institutional church. A genuine and abiding
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concern with the community of believers as nurtured by the church is a more robust component of Methodist, Congregational, and Baptist theory and practice than Hart acknowledges. Hart’s sectarianism gets the better of his history when he repeatedly leaves the impression that his confessionalism is a unified and clearly bounded persuasion rather than a space into which reach the extreme ends of several neighboring spectra (one concerning ritual, another concerning church polity, and another concerning the character of the ministry). Yet for all his absorption with the destiny of other-worldly communities, Hart engages earnestly with American political theory at the very end of The Lost Soul of American Protestantism. The quasi-separatism of confessional churches can be justified, he suggests, in largely the same terms that are widely accepted for the quasi-separatism of American ethnic communities, especially now that the degree of an individual’s identification with these communities is coming to be understood as more voluntary than ascribed. Hart concludes that Confessional Protestantism is “a religious form of multiculturalism,” and one that reduces rather than intensifies “the strains that Protestants have historically put on American society.” The reduction is achieved “by making the church, not the nation, the locus of religious energy and norms,” thus freeing arguments about the nation from the obligation to meet strict religious imperatives. Hart interprets the ecumenical movement of the liberals, as institutionalized in the National Council of Churches during the second half of the twentieth century, as an excessively assimilationist “smoothing over” of distinctive traditions in order to preserve for Christianity “a more prominent public presence” (p. 182). Hart’s relative humility about religion and nation might well have found a biblical emblem in Amos’s warning that in God’s eyes, all are goyim (“Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?”).7 But this emblem is offered instead for a book that concentrates sympathetically on the story of Protestantism’s liberalization, and ends up, remarkably, at a place almost identical with Hart’s embrace of religious multiculturalism. William R. Hutchison’s Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal shows how the reality of diversity within and beyond Protestantism prompted conflicting efforts to include and exclude, yielding, by the end of the twentieth century, a greater acceptance in relation to religious groups of a pluralist principle long since established in relation to political groups: that many different persuasions could co-exist rather than try to incorporate or expel each other. This is the most ambitious book yet from the dean of historians of religion in the United States: a wonderfully discerning exploration of how Americans have variously confronted and tried to evade the challenge of religious diversity.
7
Amos 9:7.
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Hutchison organizes his history around three different senses of religious pluralism that have prevailed at different times. It was once considered highly generous simply to tolerate faiths outside the early republic’s heavily AngloProtestant center of religious gravity (90 percent of white Americans at the time of the Revolution were not only Anglo-Protestants, but came out of the Calvinist rather than the Lutheran side of the Reformation). Later, to include Catholics, Mormons, and other persuasions distant from the Anglo-Protestant center generally meant that “the newly included” were formally allowed to share in the exercise of cultural authority in the society, but that they “sat at the back of the bus” (p. 6). In the 1920s it would have been outrageous to suggest that the “seventeen million Catholics should perhaps have as much influence on American public policy as was enjoyed by three-quarters of a million Congregationalists” (p. 138). Only in the second half of the twentieth century did pluralism understood as a liberty to fully participate take hold, entailing the assumption that Jews as well as Catholics were equally part of the American nation along with Protestants of all varieties. Animating Hutchison’s narrative is a dialectic between (a) demographic diversification resulting largely from immigration, and (b) theological liberalization within the old Anglo-Protestant mainstream resulting from deeper engagements with science and the Enlightenment as well as from a need for a generic version of Protestantism capable of providing a unifying canopy for the proliferating denominations. As the warrants for particularistic versions of the faith lost their hold in the light of worldly experience, the liberals concentrated on the “essentials” of Christianity, and made overtures even to non-Christians in the great “World’s Parliament of Religions” organized in conjunction with the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Again and again, the establishment liberals made invidious distinctions—other faiths would eventually “evolve” to become more like American liberal Protestantism—yet were caught up in a logic that led them gradually to more complete acceptance of the value of at least the “great” religions of humankind, if not the pretenders and the freaks. From the 1910s through the 1940s the liberals’ social gospel program put them in close contact with urban non-Protestants who deprovincialized the liberal Protestants in vital respects, and their foreign mission experience made denominational particularism seem all the more parochial. How to persuade a Chinese peasant that it was really important to become a Northern Baptist, rather than a Southern Baptist, or to join the Dutch Reformed as opposed to the German Reformed Church? By the middle of the century, Hutchison shows, liberal theory and the experience of diversity at home and abroad had driven the ecumenical impulse to an unprecedented extreme. The welcoming of Catholics and Jews into the newly celebrated “Judeo-Christian tradition” uniting religious believers against communist and other forms of secularism followed this logic. From the 1960s
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to the end of the century the debates about pluralism were both complicated and sharpened by the immigration of Muslims and Hindus, by the rise to public prominence of politically active evangelicals who had little patience for liberal theory, and by the sudden shift from religious to ethno-racial categories in the national conversation about cultural diversity. And it is in this last setting that Hutchison finds his way to the same debates about the management of diversity that engage Hart. It seemed imperative by the 1990s to recognize the need of people for closely knit, culturally particular communities based on religious affiliation or shared history, yet at the same time to encourage members of these communities to participate in the larger solidarity of the nation without trying to impose their own particularism upon it. Styles of multiculturalism that promote this balance, Hutchison concludes, have recently pushed the old debate about religious pluralism to a new stage in which pluralism is embraced as a positive value, rather than accepted as a practical necessity. Hence Amos: various groups may think of themselves as “the chosen,” but they might be better advised to see themselves as just “a people among peoples” (p. 237). Religious Pluralism in America sometimes slights the reasons democratic egalitarians had for resisting the full participation of some groups. The most striking case is Hutchison’s discussion of Paul Blanshard’s book of 1949, American Freedom and Catholic Power. He treats Blanshard as a sign that “anti-Catholicism in its venerable anti-Vatican shape had not evaporated” (p. 206), and he accepts uncritically the denunciations of Blanshard as a bigot offered at the time by Murray and other Catholics. But Catholic behavior for the previous 15 years had given the multitudes of politically liberal intellectuals who praised Blanshard substantial reasons to regard Catholicism as more of a threat to pluralist ideals than a potential means of fulfilling them. Catholics had offered extensive support for the Vichy government in France and for fascist regimes in Italy and Spain, had successfully promoted the censorship of Hollywood motion pictures, had mobilized in several states to prevent the dissemination of basic information about contraception, and had repeatedly refused cooperative endeavors with Protestants and Jews on the grounds that such cooperation implied the equal validity of the different religions. By 1960, when the Catholic John F. Kennedy was elected President, the political face of American Catholicism had changed decisively. The Cold War created opportunities during the 1950s for Catholics to ally with others against “godless communism,” while liberal priests labored to change the church’s character from within. Hence the greater integration of Catholics into American life under the aegis of pluralism took place not so much because a by-thenembarrassing anti-Catholic prejudice declined, but because Catholicism by the early 1960s no longer presented itself politically in the way it had when Blanshard wrote his famous polemic. Blanshard himself acknowledged that by the time of
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Vatican II, Catholicism was no longer what he had said it was only a few years earlier. These bits of evidence for the character of Catholic political initiatives in the 1930s and 1940s are found in John T. McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, the title of which is an obvious play on Blanshard. McGreevy quotes the eminent Catholic historian Carleton J. H. Hayes, writing to Murray privately in 1943 wishing that the too-conservative bishops would “frankly accept the fact of cultural pluralism among us” (p. 205). McGreevy details richly the arguments within the Catholic community about just how the Catholic Church should orient itself to the pluralist ideal. The church eventually adopted Murray’s position on church–state separation—that it was just fine, subject to interpretation and litigation—and has long since honored Murray as the great theorist and political negotiator of the accommodation of Catholicism with American democracy, the key advisor to Kennedy in 1960, and a quiet tornado driving Vatican II. But it was a real fight: as late as 1955 Murray’s Jesuit superiors gave him the “order” to “stop writing on church–state issues” (p. 208). No fan of Blanshard’s, McGreevy nevertheless enables us to see more clearly than ever before that Murray’s achievement was to transform the political demeanor of American Catholicism so that it came close to meeting the standard of democracy that Blanshard had set for it. The freethinking Blanshard could say things about Catholicism that no priest could. McGreevy’s account of Catholic history from the 1930s through the early 1960s liberates the Blanshard controversy from the bigot-or-not idiom and places it, instead, in the tense struggle of Catholics themselves to understand their own faith and practice as historically embedded, and to convince non-Catholics that Catholics could accept pluralism. McGreevy approaches these pivotal mid-twentieth-century events in the context of the entire sweep of Catholic experience in America. Catholicism and American Freedom begins with a spectacular case of Protestant prejudice. The official of a Boston school publicly whipped a ten-year-old Catholic boy for refusing to recite the King James Version of the Ten Commandments, instead of doing what Catholic children had generally done, to “mutter a different version” (p. 7) approved by priests as a way of complying with the Massachusetts statute requiring the recitation at the start of each school day. The Boston school officials were scarcely endorsing “pluralism” here, and McGreevy delivers a vivid and convincing account of the dilemmas of Catholics when surrounded by an overbearingly Protestant public culture. McGreevy is also a good guide to the career of the progressive priest John A. Ryan, and other leading characters in the story of Catholicism’s engagement with American politics. McGreevy too often stops short of pulling together the analysis that his formidable research might support. He is at his best when little interpretation is invited, as when we see an innocent and courageous schoolboy whipped,
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or when the evidence is before us of the profound American influence behind Vatican II’s promulgation in 1965 of the “Declaration of Religious Freedom.” In a strong chapter on the debates over contraception, featuring the theoretical work of John T. Noonan, McGreevy demonstrates that it was exactly while changing the church’s stance on birth control that Catholic intellectuals succeeded in gaining more widespread recognition for the still-radical idea that Catholicism was a historically developing presence in the world that changed its collective mind from time to time. Yet when McGreevy turns to abortion, he becomes tentative and elliptical. He quotes at length from various partisans during the 1970s, before and after Roe v. Wade, but says almost nothing about the discussion since 1980. Instead, he rushes from 1980 to the present moment in a slap-dash concluding chapter pivoting on the sexual abuse scandals of the early twenty-first century. About those scandals and what they may reveal about the political culture of Catholicism even long after Vatican II, McGreevy has surprisingly little to say. He is willing to cite the case of the Boston Catholic mother who slapped her son when he tried to confide in her about sexual abuse by a priest. But rather than explain what incidents like this, and the behavior of the child-abusing priests and the bishops who protected them, might mean, McGreevy shies away from the interpretive consummation his generally excellent book leads his readers to anticipate. This final chapter might well have been called “Blanshard’s Revenge” in recognition of the measure of vindication the recent scandals provide for the charges of the old “bigot” that the Catholic Church’s perspective on sexuality was deeply problematic. Or, if that is not what McGreevy thinks, he should tell his readers what he does think. By setting up his book antiphonally to Blanshard’s, McGreevy takes upon himself an interpretive obligation that he does not complete.8 Liberal Protestants dot McGreevy’s account of how Murray and his contemporaries renegotiated the terms of Catholicism’s relationship with American politics. Reinhold Niebuhr and other leaders of the liberal Protestant establishment attended closely to American Catholicism’s internal changes and gradually effected alliances with the Catholic Church that were generally avoided by the evangelicals. Liberal Protestantism figures importantly also in the stories told by McCarraher and Hart, where it is the context out of which so many of the “Christian Critics” arise and the foil against which the “Confessional Protestants” largely define themselves. And liberal Protestants are the chief movers of the story told by Hutchison. 8
McGreevy’s title is taken word-for-word from a book of 1951 written explicitly as a refutation of Blanshard: James M. O’Neill, Catholicism and American Freedom (New York, 1952). I owe my own awareness of this book to Healan Gaston.
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All four books, taken together, point to the unique centrality of liberal Protestantism. This centrality has been somewhat obscured by the decline in numbers experienced by the old, “mainline” denominations during the 1960s, and by two other much-discussed developments: the subsequent rise in numbers and political engagement by right-wing evangelicals, and the integration into American public affairs and cultural conversation of members of the nation’s largest religious organization, the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, one reason why liberal Protestantism is now so little studied is that its historical significance is too often wrongly measured by its success in maintaining its numbers. This yardstick is an artifact of the Christian survivalist bias common to popular and scholarly discussions of religion in recent and contemporary America. How has a given initiative or behavior advanced or retarded the cause of Christianity itself? From this perspective, the story of the evangelicals is generally counted a resounding success, the story of the liberals a failure, and one that is often said to confirm the notion that liberalism is a slippery slope to secularism. But if we emancipate ourselves from a preoccupation with what is good for Christianity, we can analyze the liberal and evangelical strains in twentiethcentury American Christianity in other terms. That liberal Protestantism smoothed the way for consumer capitalism in the twentieth century is no doubt true, and has been widely remarked upon in what scholarly literature we do have on liberal Protestantism. But if that were its chief role, its huge old churches might have grown rather than declined as that capitalism went from triumph to triumph in the last third of the twentieth century. Liberal Protestantism was also a means by which countless persons of Protestant origin negotiated challenges that they, given their social and psychological circumstances, were simply not prepared to confront in a secular context. A historical function of liberal Protestantism has been to serve as a crucial intellectual and emotional space for exploring the diversity and contingency of a modern world kept at a greater, more suspicious distance by evangelicals. Evangelicals have often maintained the integrity of their tradition by closing themselves off from experiences that the liberals, at risk to their faith, have engaged. Two critical and closely related examples are the study of non-Christian religions and the calibration of missionary endeavors to populations where Hinduism, Islam, or other religions are firmly entrenched. The liberals eventually decided that seeking conversion of the peoples abroad to whom they ministered was highly problematic, and moved first toward educational, medical, and other service-centered missionary activities and then, after the 1960s, phased out most of what had once been a vast missionary project. Simultaneously, the liberals promoted and carried out rigorous scholarship on world religions, entailing a large measure of empathic identification. The evangelicals, in the meantime, eschewed the sympathetic study of other religions, and with enormous energy
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took up the missionary enterprise where the liberals had abandoned it. “It is indisputable,” observes Grant Wacker, “that evangelicals have not yet proved that they are able to hold their hand against the hot flame of sustained, disciplined study of world religions—and keep their evangelical convictions.”9 The liberals held their hand to that flame of broadened historical experience, and decided either that Jesus mattered differently than they had thought before, or that he did not matter so much after all. The idea of liberal Protestantism as a halfway house, as a stepping stone to modernity, even as a slippery slope out of Christianity, is problematic only if one looks at twentieth-century history as a Christian survivalist. To recognize liberal Protestantism’s historic function as a set of mechanisms for critically engaging exactly those parts of modernity that most challenge a provincial faith is not to imply that liberal Protestantism is simply and exclusively a pathway to something else. The liberal Protestant denominations retain a greater constituency today, and are more intimately allied with liberal Catholics, than is often recognized when Christianity’s media face is likely to be a blur of the countenances of a corrupt Catholic bishop avoiding jail and a son of Billy Graham calling for the conversion of Iraqi Muslims to Christianity. Religious communities have long served as vital mediating devices between the individual and the nation in a society where the church–state separation frees religious groups to play a more important civil society role than in societies where religion has been incorporated into the state. In this American context, liberal religions are likely to maintain themselves, and may even experience some growth, as conservative religions become more and more identified with reactionary political programs of limited appeal to millions of Americans. Liberal Christianity may yet have a long future. We do not know. But one does not have to declare religion dead in order to analyze accurately aspects of its history that flow to the outside of the perimeter of faith, making Jesus matter less.
9
Grant Wacker, “Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions,” in Joel A. Carpenter and Wilber R. Shenk, eds., Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980 (Grand Rapids, MI, 1990), 300.
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