Absent-Minded Hegemony

My supervisor gets worried when I talk about things like hegemony and social control. When I say "Federalists wanted to adapt mechanisms of control that could function in the context of republican values." It makes it seem like there was a conspiracy. If they wanted to do these things, it makes it seem conscious, and calculated, and malicious.

Actually, that reaction seems very similar to the reaction to Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation. As much as he wanted to talk about forces, about class, ideology, and structure, his readers wanted conspiracy theories - which they could then shoot down. Sympathetic analysts of Beard point out the 'slips' where he does seem to be advocating a kind of conspiracy, and a kind of personal responsibility - and therefore a personal, moral failing - in the Federalists. But he always maintained that that wasn't the point.

The point is in one sense fundamentally structuralist, Marxist: that it's class, inequality, materiality, that really cause change, and not individuals. But you can think of it in a different way, as actually a really personal, individualist, humanist kind of approach: that is, nobody is really evil, or thinks they are. People in general want to be good and do the right thing. It's just hard to know what the right thing is, and there are lots of factors that constrain and influence - structure.

When I started postgraduate work I wanted to be a champion for the Federalists. I thought, 'these seem like good guys, and my book is going to defend them.' Now I see Federalism as part of a transition in power, the creation of the structure of the modern world, where certain concepts like rights and property define our choices, and where power is preoccupied with hiding, disguising, and legitimising itself. But it's not that Federalists set out to create liberal hegemony. They set out to do good.

The historical questions are, a) what determined their idea of good, and b) how did they act on those ideas. Then there's a question that is more than historical, it's also philosophical: c) what was the relationship between their idea of good, and the outcomes of their actions?