Forging American Capitalism

After over a month of faffing around, Prospect has finally published my review of the late Thomas McCraw's The Founders and Finance (Harvard UP, 2012). It's here. Sadly, their editor hacked it up some. So here's what I actually wrote.

* * *

In the winter of 1781, the army of revolutionary America was near breaking-point: ill-equipped and under-nourished to the point of mutiny, encamped in snow-bound New Jersey. George Washington wrote, ‘it would be well for the troops, if like chameleons, they could live upon air.’ Then in May that year, Congress appointed Robert Morris to take charge of the financing and supply of the war. This was a desperate measure: they gave Morris wide-ranging powers over army employment and supply contracts. What was his plan? A radical austerity package. Morris would ‘reduce the expenditures as nearly as possible to what in reason and justice they ought to be,’ and thereby restore public credit.

This is not a story that Thomas McCraw tells in The Founders and Finance. Fortunately for the rebels, Washington persuaded Morris to hold off on his austerity plans and fund just one more campaign – to besiege the British in South Carolina. By the end of the year, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown and the war was effectively won. The part we learn in this book is how Morris ‘almost miraculously procured the necessary funds,’ even contributing his own money. After all, he might have said to the near-starving men as they marched southward through Pennsylvania, we’re all in this together.

Although Morris gets a potted biography in chapter six, he isn’t one of the major protagonists of The Founders and Finance. He died in disgrace after bankrupting himself on land speculation and serving a term in debtors’ jail. Instead, McCraw’s account is built around very conventional biographies of two much more acceptable heroes. This is a book in a long, grand, and profitable tradition – admiring portraits of the so-called founding fathers, the elite white men who signed the Declaration of Independence, wrote the Constitution, and served in the first governments of the United States.

David McCullough’s Pullitzer-winning John Adams, with its attendant HBO series, is the most successful recent example of this genre, and can be credited with reinvigorating it for the twenty-first century. Since then, one prominent trend has been to pick out ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ examples, like Aaron Burr, the dissolute Vice-President accused of treason by Thomas Jefferson, or Noah Webster, the ill-tempered dictionary compiler. These figures may stretch the definition of ‘founder,’ but the purpose of these books isn’t to question the category so much as to fill it fit to bursting.

Thomas McCraw, the Harvard business historian whose earlier books were paeans to twentieth-century liberal capitalism, has picked two pretty sure-fire winners in his own foray to the founding era. These are the Treasury Secretaries whose statues now grace the Treasury building in Washington D.C.: Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin. As the title neatly encapsulates, The Founders and Finance is a high-concept marriage of two presently-powerful themes. It promises to offer a little of McCraw’s moderate perspective to the Tea Party set who love their founders, but also to bring some wisdom from down the ages for those reeling in the current crisis.

As if being money-men wasn’t alluring enough, McCraw also ruminates on his heroes’ status as immigrants in America. Hamilton was born on the Caribbean island of St Croix, part of the Danish empire; Gallatin in Geneva; Morris in Liverpool. Is there a significance here worth noting? McCraw toys with the notion that these men are something like ‘money doctors’ or the IMF, experts who bring dispassionate, surgical knowledge to needy economies. Yet ‘at bottom’ the comparison fails, he tells us. What really matters here is simply the exotic, cosmopolitan patina that immigrant status confers.

Like Joseph Schumpeter, the subject of an earlier McCraw biography who surfaces several times here too, Hamilton and Gallatin are supposed to embody the creativity, freedom, and brilliance that both drive McCraw’s idea of capitalism and thrive under it. This is a book about ‘financial wizardry,’ in which the pyrotechnics of individual heroism divert attention from the structural underpinnings of finance, politics, and society. What McCraw has set out to do here is rebuild the screen that separates us from the messy back-stage glimpsed in the financial crisis, to renormalize finance and politics and close down moves for radical reform.

In this process, The Founders and Finance turns on an appeal to moderation. Yes, McCraw tells us, Hamilton and Gallatin were opponents. In the habitual symbology of the American founding, Hamilton stands for a strong central government and the manipulation of national debt as a policy tool; Gallatin, by contrast, stands for laissez faire and deficit reduction. William Hogeland, whose new book Founding Finance (Texas University Press, October 2012) will be a helpful corrective to this one, has recently exposed  the ways both left and right make use of this crude dichotomy. But for McCraw, it was the ‘fusion’ of the two that ‘came to constitute the basic capitalist framework’ of America. He frames contemporary capitalism as a middle course between two extremes, and thus of course, the only reasonable option.

Behind all this wizardry there is a real framework to American capitalism, which does not appear in this book but is worth more historical attention. When The Founders and Finance discusses how ‘the development of the American West’ was the centrepiece of Gallatin’s economic strategy, it pays scant notice to the violent removal of Native Americans. This ‘genocide’ is named as such, but literally in a footnote to ‘the American Dream.’ Meanwhile the regressive taxation on which Hamilton built his financial system, which lined the pockets of public investors with the scant surpluses of rural farmers, is also passed over. McCraw instead presents the Whiskey Rebellion, a major insurrection resisting these taxes, as a political battle between his two heroes. His is a history as if only the policy elite existed.

Of course, that policy elite is made up of the men who drew up the institutions of federal government in the United States. In that respect, their influence can’t be denied: they really were founding fathers. But just what they founded is something of a different story. Far from the champions of democracy and equality that we sometimes imagine bestriding the American Revolution, men like James Madison and George Washington, as well as Hamilton and Gallatin, were instrumental in entrenching American capitalism. The constitution they wrote didn’t guarantee voting rights for citizens, but it did guarantee that democratic legislatures wouldn’t break contracts with investors, or print money to inflate away public debt.

The two primary conceits of The Founders and Finance – immigrants’ role and the ‘long-term merging’ of Hamilton and Gallatin’s policies – are both harnessed to McCraw’s defence of the ideological and economic status quo. By telling the life-stories of these two men as if they were the story of finance in early America, McCraw imagines a world where individuals hold the reins of the economy, determining the future wellbeing of millions through the genius of their ideas. By telling these stories as heroic tales of trial and sacrifice, conflict dissolving into consensus, he informs us that our involvement is unnecessary and unwarranted. The founding father industry consistently warns that politics is best left to demigods. McCraw adds finance as well. We should sit back and let the magicians work.

Taking Gender Seriously in Teaching

I've just finished giving my first lecture and seminar as an Associate Lecturer in Colonial American History at Oxford Brookes. So that's one occasion for writing this post. My plan is to come back to this blog, and use it to discuss issues arising from teaching the course, as well as from organising a conference in April 2013. Oxford's IT department are running a programme of social media engagement this term, too - so, it seems a good time.

I've also just read the SOAS Gender Report (PDF), which presents a very straightforward set of concerns and recommendations about the place of gender in teaching. The report is addressed to SOAS Politics and Development departments, but it absolutely concerns teachers in all human disciplines in all universities. Since I want to use this space to reflect on how to teach better (as well as how to run better conferences), this is a good place to start.

What Berry & Roelofs' report basically highlights is the disconnection between academics' own theoretical commitment (on the whole) to gender analysis as at least an important part of any human discipline, and the content of our actual teaching and reading lists. Part of the problem might be that designing teaching is hard and time-consuming. But it might actually be less boring if we thought more about how to integrate our own intellectual goals, interests, and ideas. If we conduct teaching and research in different paradigms, we're kind of letting down one possible justification for research universities as valuable public institutions.

Here's my course module as it stands: there is one main textbook, written by a man; there are nine lectures and none of them are on gender; all primary source reading I had planned is written by men. All of those elements essentially carry over from the original design of the course (which I'm filling in to teach for this semester). But that's not really an excuse. I should do better.

As I mentioned, I've just given the first lecture and seminar - I read the report after I'd finished. One thing made me less disappointed in myself. We took some excerpts from Frederick Jackson Turner's classic essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" as the seminar text, and discussion went well, and in both back-to-back classes we spent time discussing the nature of "individualism" and its relationship with patriarchy.

Granted I hadn't planned this. It's just so obviously present as a contradiction in Turner's text. He declares that the frontier generates individualism, and also that it promotes disaggregation into family units. The contradiction is ideological: in Turner's mind, the individual subject is the white male head-of-household. I'm so glad we discussed this, because it's so central to the American colonial and revolutionary story. But it does make me wonder all the more, if it's so central, why hadn't I planned to include it?

I think too often it's easy to consign all this stuff to the "too difficult to worry about" bin. We should make a decision not to do that, and take the SOAS report's recommendation to take gender seriously. Next week I'm teaching the French and Spanish in America; the following week, the colonisation of Virginia: the combined roles of gender (including masculinity) and race (including whiteness) in those stories are vital, and should have a prominent place in my lectures.

One other thing to add. I am concerned about a slightly different aspect of gender in teaching, which is how gender affects the learning environment. My class felt like it was mostly men. But when I read back over the register, the class is only about 60% male. How do I encourage girls to take a more active part in class discussion? How do I ameliorate the gender-related obstacles here (not least of which, I guess, is that I'm a man too)? Putting women on the reading list must be a start. I haven't finished thinking about it.

When is a conversation a failure?

A couple of weeks ago I was in Nottingham at a conference on “The History of Failure and the Failure of History”. I was shamefully late, so I didn’t hear all the papers, but one that struck me was by Anthony Barker of George Washington Law School. The main thrust of his argument wasn’t that surprising. The American Revolution and the settlement that followed failed to achieve the large goals it set for itself in terms of freedom and equality; and specifically, it failed to achieve much of anything for women.

Perhaps there can be no failure where the terms of success are unreasonable, or anachronistic. But that wasn’t the case in revolutionary America. There, a far more radical change had been realised intellectually, only to be smothered politically. If only John Adams had listened properly to his wife Abigail, when she issued her famous call to “Remember the Ladies”:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independancy—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” (Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776)

 More than the failure of the revolution as a whole, it was John Adams’ personal failure to comprehend this letter that was the crux of Baker’s talk. John had responded to his wife, of course. But he had treated the whole exchange as a joke: “I can not but laugh,” he wrote to her. As Woody Holton has written, “He viewed the whole exchange as a continuation of the banter that, from the early days of his and Abigail’s courtship...” (Abigail Adams, p. 103). For Baker, that was Adams’ failure. He’d missed the real importance of his wife’s words, which deeply challenged the political theory of the revolution.

My question is, what constitutes a failure in conversation? Or, what constitutes success? I wonder how John felt when he sealed and sent his reply. All we have is interpretation, and – for some historians – conviction.

“Abigail Adams herself, I am now convinced, would have been mortified to learn the meaning that has been read into some of her private – and not entirely serious – correspondence with her husband,” wrote Linda dePauw in 1978. Charles Akers in 1980 reckoned that “by treating her “Code of Laws” as a joke, [John] saved [Abigail] the embarrassment of seriously prosecuting a case against one of the least guilty of men.” By the standards of both these historians, then, the exchange was... successful?

Historians are conducting a peculiarly one-sided conversation of our own, with the past. Can that conversation fail? What kind of understanding needs to be built up? Biographers often tout their unique appreciation for their subjects. Edith Gelles claimed to capture “the Abigail who emerges from her own words”. That claim reminds me of Ranke’s, that history arises mystically from the archive, as if it involves the same kind of je ne sais quoi as a good conversation. But what does it mean to fail?

A Glorious Consummation

How much does the use of metaphor tell us about the psychological state of a writer? Metaphorical reasoning is very important to the way history (or any text) is constructed, and both hidden/dead and explicit metaphors need to be analysed as an integral part of the whole. But sometimes historians just seem to go a bit crazy.

I wonder what was on David Hendrickson's mind when he was writing Peace Pact?

Because the confederation had not yet been made, July 4, 1776, may perhaps best be regarded not as their day of betrothal [between the American states] but as their night of passion, a glorious consummation to the warm embraces of the previous two years yet an act that fell well short of a regular marriage. [p.126] 

And he goes on!

The final line of the Declaration was a pledge that they would see each other throughg the making of the union and the winning of independence, but it was not yet an achievement of either. In a technical sense, therefore, they were living in sin. If the fond hope of British strategists was to catch these Americans in flagrante delicto - that is, without the union - American whigs were just as determined to proceed rapidly to the formalization of their vows. [p.126]

Then a hundred pages later:

The Constitution, as it emerged from the shuttered conclave at Philadelphia - was the offspring of a mating that occurred there with a group that may be thought of (without prejudice to the eighteenth century, or to the twenty-first) as the mothers of the new child. These ladies frowned upon the advances of the nationalists, believed their claims to be quite excessive if not outrageous, and were as determined as their prospective partners to exact terms that would accord with their dignity and status. The elaborate courtship went on a whole hot summer, its consummation in doubt until the very end. Not surprisingly, the offspring they produced resembled both father and mother but was very different from what either parent had anticipated or hoped for. [p.219]

So the question is - can a historian win the bad sex award?

Crisis, Transference, and Synecdoche

This is an outline of a paper I am planning to write, which grows out of the concluding section of a different paper I will present in Cambridge later this month. It will also a significant element of the argument in my DPhil thesis.

The American revolution and the circumstances of its aftermath represented a threat to the status and perhaps existence of American elites (whether tory or patriot). Most notable among these circumstances were the weakening of bonds of credit and the inflationary measures of democratic state governments. Democratic (or "populist") electoral choices also contributed. As I said, this represented a threat to elites. But not to the people themselves, or to their security and prosperity per se.

Yet elite leaders and publicists (such as the authors of the Federalist) were able to effect a strategy of transference. That is, they "convinced" the American people that they themselves were the ones under threat, in terms of their livelihoods, their independence, and their actual existence. The word "convinced" is used with a caveat here: it was not a logical argument but a psychological and rhetorical strategy. The post-revolutionary crisis, which was in reality a crisis of the patriarchal elite, thus became a "national" crisis.

This strategy of transference was also a strategy of synecdoche. It required that the elite come to metaphorically represent the people and nation, while also representing the state of the nation back to the people. Thus threat to the part became threat to the whole. The strategy also required the formation or entrenchment of a "national" subject: that is, the ordinary individual who is to be represented by the elite. To repurpose Crevecoeur, this is a new man: an American. Rhetorics of nationalism and national unity were thus integral to the Federalist programme, as method rather than motive.

By transferring the situation of crisis from themselves to the "nation", American elites created the conditions of stress necessary for the re-creation of institutions. Americans responded to the financial and existential threat by acquiescing to (even if they did not, as a majority, vote in favour of) the new constitution and the subsequent Federalist programme. In this way - through transference and synecdoche, the formation of a new American subject - the elite manufactured the necessary consent to restructure and maintain its hegemony.

Mr Jefferson, Mr Paine, and the Question of Generations

In September 1789 Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison from Paris that "the question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water." In making his own answer, Jefferson famously declared that "the earth belongs in usufruct to the living," that "by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another," and furthermore that "no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law... Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."

Jefferson's concern was with the principle of popular and legislative sovereignty, for that principle seemed to potentially come down on both sides of the issue. If the people were sovereign they could make any laws and contract any debts they liked, without impediment, including those that had effect after the lifetimes of the lawmakers. If there was no sovereignty above the popular representatives, then there was nothing to restrict them. On the other hand, this freedom ought to apply just as well to future sets of representatives. Otherwise, as Jefferson said, the world "belongs to the dead, and not to the living."

But Jefferson was wrong to say that the question had "never... been started either on this or our side of the water." More than three years earlier, in 1786, Thomas Paine had addressed this very question in his pamphlet, Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper-Money. The issue that raised the question for Paine was the middle one, the affair of the bank. the Pennsylvania legislature had repealed a charter it had granted to the Bank of North America. Did it have the power to do so? Paine argued that it did not.

"The election of new Assemblies folowing each other makes no difference in the nature of the thing. The State is still the same State. - The public is still the same body. These do not annually expire though the time of an Assembly does. These are not new-created every year, nor can they be displaced from their original standing; but are a perpetual permanent body, always in being and stil the same." Hence, contracts entered into by the state, i.e. by the public, could not be broken by later representatives. And the charter was not so much a law as a contract.

Paine prefigured Jefferson's entire train of thought, but from almost the opposite direction. He asked his readers to imagine how it would be "if we adopt the vague inconsistent idea that every new Assembly has a full and complete authority over every Act done by the State in a former Assembly... It will lead us," he wrote, "into a wilderness of endless confusion and unsurmountable difficulties... Every new election would be a new revolution, or it would suppose the public of the former year dead and a new public risen in its place."

Yet that last clause opens new space for Jefferson's attack. The Virginian's position really does rest on the former public being now dead - at least a majority of it - and a new one arisen in its place. In his pamphlet, Paine leaves the issue at this point, and moves on to a history of the bank charter itself. But a few pages later he picks up the thread:

"As we are not to live forever ourselves, and other generations are to follow us, we have neither the power nor the right to govern them, or to say how they shall govern themselves. It is the summit of human vanity, and shews a covetousness of power beyond the grave, to be dictating to the world to come." His prescription? That it "be made an article in the Constitution, that all laws and Acts should cease of themselves in thirty ears, and have no legal force beyond that time." So from the position of an anti-Jeffersonian defender of stability, Paine has become, in the space of five pages in his pamphlet, the precursor of one of Jefferson's most famous - and famously original - thoughts.

Natural law, popular sovereignty, and the power of consent: sequel to come.

Couple of Things

First of all if you don't already get Stephen Elliott's overly personal emails from the Daily Rumpus, go do that now. Today he wrote, "I get ideas and if I don't act fast they go away. My life is a race against my own enthusiasms." I had a couple of ideas that I'm not going to be able to do right now but maybe some time soon like the summer?

1.

I want to make a film (first of all, yeah, I just want to make a film) about architecture and time. For me it feels easy to think about a building, or especially about "architecture" as an art-form, as being timeless - I mean, it has a time, but that time is the moment (moment!) it was built, and it's like it is stuck in that time forever, as a sort of fossil, right? But that's not, of course, true, because buildings are always changing along with everything else around them. They really do exist in time. They get altered or extended or revamped, deliberately, or they get rained on and worn away, and covered in soot, or struck by lightning, or flooded. The trees in their gardens grow enormous and begin to undermine their foundations, as well as block out their light. Ivy and other climbing plants climb them. And so on. So, yeah, I want to make a short film about architecture (which is something I kind of love, but don't have any formal knowledge of at all). I think it could have great music.

2.

I also want (and this is, basically, a lot less realistic even than the film idea; I mean, this is something that I might do in, say, ten years time) to write a cultural history of email. Not the whole internet, although someone should definitely also do that, I'd read it. Just email, and its relation to other forms of communication, its birth and (perhaps?) decline, its variety, its power. A history of email would also, of course, be a history of the nineteen-nineties and the two-thousands, and it would be a history of business and networks, rhetoric and friendship, love and the evolution of grammar. Not to mention spelling and punctuation. The Wikipedia page for email doesn't list any books of this kind already out there. In ten years someone could get there first, I suppose. And if they do I'll read it. In a way I think the history of how we talk to each other is the history of everything. Well, maybe not. But it's something.

The Federalist Persuasion: A Table of Contents

Here, in the spirit of free writing, is the table of contents for my thesis, as written on the back of a piece of paper while I was invigilating an accountancy exam in college a week and a half ago - fleshed out with some vague and folksy musings on the content of each chapter and the arc of the overall argument.

Introduction

What people usually talk about when they talk about Federalists, especially in the 1780s, is nationalism. That's obviously a complex thing, in a complex context. It has a relationship with parochialism and cosmopolitanism that goes both ways (sometimes Federalist nationalism means "let's drop state divisions and unite," but sometimes that really means "all the states should be like my state"). It's also about relationships with other "nations". But that thinking makes it easy to go down the road of lumping all Americans together, and forgetting the importance of the "struggle for rule at home." We need to think about where the lines of power really are.

1. Education and the National Character

So, start with national identity. What is that, and how is it made? Thinking about that means thinking about culture, and especially education. There was a significant body of discourse about education in the 1780s, and even more about American identity: that's what the first chapter will analyse. The most important question is, what is the purpose of identity and education? Of course Americans' attitudes were never completely clear. What kind of national community, and what kind of citizen, did they want to build? I'll argue that this discourse helped Federalists to develop their sense of obedience, legitimacy, and justice in citizenship. While not everyone agreed, more and more by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the purpose of national identity and education was about markets, transactions, and law. Obedience to God and the community was replaced by obedience to an apparently-scientific, and therefore apolitical and legitimate, set of rules about how to live. Being a citizen and an American was about understanding and following these rules.

2. Commerce, Interest, and Cohesion

The science of political economy underlying these ideas was all about interests, and their potential for harmonious interaction. There was a variety of thought about how that harmony could best be brought about. One aspect involved changing the way people think: that's education. Another involved changing the way government worked, giving it more power to effect harmonious, mutually beneficial schemes - or preventing it from getting in the way of the useful workings of self-interest. For some Federalists, the power of interest was the greatest discovery of recent times, and there were all sorts of things to be done with it. Others (more conservative) resisted this conclusion. But they were more often than not brought onside, when they looked at their own interests. The economy really was a force for bringing people together.

3. Property, Legitimacy, and Social Order

But that issue of interests and government did raise some questions about property and social hierarchy. It was one thing to think about how harmonious interest could make America richer as a whole, but what about the question of who got rich, and what everyone's relation would be to each other? Many Federalists (even more than those who resisted the power of interest) were concerned about maintaing existing social hierarchy - they called it order and justice; especially to the extent that it helped them. On the other hand, the revolution had of course raised all sorts of questions about equality and democracy. Luckily, the new laws of the market could be useful here, because they could legitimise inequality and wealth: it wasn't a creation of arbitrary monarchy, but of the simple, rational functioning of the market. At the same time, of course, it was important to make sure that those rules benefited the right people the nation.

4. The Use and Abuse of Government

In order to do that, the right governmental and legal structures had to be in place. Governments and legislatures that did bad things (the state legislatures) had to be restrained, while those that did good things (Congress, at least some of the time) had to be bolstered. Congress was very much less than perfect, however. It was also an international laughing-stock, and that put America in a bad position in the international commercial world. Just as individuals had to be educated (disciplined) into the status of good economic citizens, so too did America itself need to be reformed into a proper player in the world of economic states. That might also, of course, mean trying to change the international system, at least a little bit. But that could hardly be done if America had no international clout. You have to learn the rules before you can break them.

5. Conspiracy, Responsibility, and Rule

That notion of rules, and their corrolary responsibilities, was close to the heart of every Federalist, from the most traditionalist to the most radical, commercial, and modern. In fact, the indeterminacy of the line between old kinds of rules - the ones called by names like honour and virtue, but which extended to things like heredity and deference - and new ones - things like justice (fuliflling your contracts, paying your debts), politeness (separating commerce from morality in everyday proceedings), and order (obeying the [legitimate] laws!) - was vital to the cohesion of the Federalist coalition.

At the centre was not just economic self-interest; there was no conspiracy. Rather, Federalists saw themselves as plain, honest men with a set of responsibilities to themselves and their country. What's interesting isn't the moral character of Federalists, whether as individuals or group, but the way structures, discourses, and interests combined to shape those responsibilities, and the way Federalists fought with themselves, each other, and eventually their political opponents, trying to carry them out.

(Epilogue: the effects of all this stuff on Federalism and America for the next twenty, thirty, two-hundred years &c. &c.)

Methodology of Governmentality

"To analyze political power through the analytics of governmentality is not to start from the apparently obvious historical question: what happened and why? It is to start by asking what authorities of various sorts wanted to happen, in relation to problems defined how, in pursuit of what objectives, through what strategies and techniques?" p20

"[Studies of this kind] investigate the ways in which debates and strategies concerning the exercise of political power have delineated the proper relations between the activities of political rule and different zones, dimensions or aspects of this general firle of conduct of conduct... They concern themselves with the kinds of knowledge, the ideas and beliefs about economy, society, authority, morality and subjectivity that have engendered these problematizations and the strategies, tactics and programmes of government." p21

"These studies do not seek to describe a field of institutions, of structures, of functional patterns of whatever. They try to diagnose an array of lines of thought, of will, of invention, of programmes and failures, of acts and counter-acts. Far from unifying all under a general theory of government, studies undertaken from this perspective draw attention to the heterogeneity of authorities that have sought to govern conduct, the heterogeneity of strategies, devices, ends sought, the conflicts between them, and the ways in which our own present has been shaped by such conflicts." p21

- Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: reframing political thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Who Owns Ownership?

When Henry Knox reported the news of Shays' rebellion to George Washington in late 1786, he wrote with trepidation that the rebels even intended to abolish private property. In the same year, Washington was vacillating over a gift of shares in the Potomac Canal Company, granted to him by the Virginia legislature: could a statesman accept such gifts and remain virtuously disinterested? Some men made large fortunes while working for the patriot war effort. Others like Alexander Hamilton were "public fools" who separated his work done for money from work done for his country. America's founding generation had no answer to the question of how property related to government and to society. But they were deeply interested in the question.

Exegetes of liberal philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith have for some time been correcting the nineteenth-century understandings of their thought. They are no longer always seen as theorists of the private, "economic" man, who should be governed as little as possible, and whose own "life, liberty, and property" must be the state's chief - it's only - objective. Rather, property and its accumulation are good only inasmuch as they are good for society. The right of property is natural, but it is also instrumental: it is part of the function of society and government for alleviating poverty, and creating "the wealth of nations." Wealth and the ways of making it are as much public as private.

It was on these foundations that James Madison could argue that protecting the "different faculties" of men for acquiring property was the first principle of government; and that Hamilton could argue that the welfare of the richest men in the country - the creditors of the national bank - was the best support to the welfare of the state itself. On the other hand, to say only that would be to obscure the division between Madison and Hamilton at every phase of their relationship, and between many other Americans with different ideas.

The twin birth of capitalism and the modern state was messy and drawn out. It occurred in the midst of almost continual war, and the necessities and opportunities of warfare on a larger and larger scale were among the most pressing reasons for asking questions about property and society. These questions became still more important, in America, after the end of monarchy, around which an entire conception of property - and its relation to society - had once been constructed. Elements of such patriarchal thought of course remained, and played a role in the ongoing conversation; they were even bolstered by what many Americans saw as the excesses of the French revolution.

By examining the relationship between property and society in early liberal theory, historians of American political thought can further dissolve the conceptual boundary between liberal and republican schools - they can, in other words, think more like late-eighteenth-century Americans. And by focusing on the relationship between property and society, a relationship that is considerably more complex than laissez-faire neoclassicism implies, we can also see further into the development of categories that inform modernity: public and private, individual and community, and (in a different sense) positive and negative liberty.

Causation and Affinity

The "antislavery debate", as embodied in Thomas Bender's volume of that name, is similar to the debate over the US constitution from the early and mid-twentieth century. Here I'm going to discuss these debates a little bit in order to suggest a way they might supply a helpful way of thinking about early Federalists.

Both debates revolve around the question, what is the role of capitalism? But actually framing the question in that way seems to have damaged and distracted historians' arguments. In the antislavery debate it's particularly pronounced, because the central problem can be rendered (as Bender renders it): "is there anything to be made of the near simulateity of the rise of capitalism and the emergence of organized antislavery?" This for me is not an inherently interesting question. What is interesting is, rather, what caused the emergence of antislavery, and (a different question) what was the nature of capitalism and its rise?

The question "what is the role of capitalism" combines those in a somewhat awkward way, which in an important sense creates the argument around which the volume pivots. Thomas Haskell writes, "What, then, did capitalism contribute to the freeing of the slaves? Only a precondition..." So, although his argument is relevant to the specific question he asks, it is not very illuminating at all about the two questions I find interesting: what is (and why) antislavery, what is (and why) capitalism?

The reason the debate can move in this direction in the first place is that it begins from the work of David Brion Davis, who does find a strong link between the two (not "only a precondition"). For Davis, "free" but disciplined wage labour is essential to capitalism, and slavery is antithetical; antislave and humanitarian movements thus had an important role in creating the conditions necessary for capitalism to flourish. They represent the expansion of capitalist moral economy, from cores in e.g. the Quaker religion/network, towards (by the nineteenth-century) total ideological hegemony.

I find Davis' model highly plausible; Haskell does not. He is concerned with the moral qualities of antislavery and capitalism, and therefore with the problem of causation. Did capitalism cause antislavery? Were antislavery activists motivated by capitalism? Haskell thinks that the answer to both questions is no; but he imputes to Davis the position that the answer is yes, but unconsciously, through self-deception (i.e. activists really cared about capitalism, not slavery, but they deceived themselves into thinking otherwise). This is the model of "class interest" that Haskell constructs. It is in my view a straw man.

John Ashworth points towards (without elaborating on) a more robust conception, when he writes that "one can say a person is moved by certain ideals that have grown out of class interest... the individual may or may not be aware of the relationship between ideals and self-interest." Haskell rightly identifies the rhetorical slipperiness of the metaphor "grown out of," but I think Ashworth's point is still useful. Class interests privilege certain values and ideas, certain cultural structures, within which people then act, from their own limited knowledge and perspective.

It's not that values like "promise-keeping" (which Haskell himself emphasises), or to use Federalist parlance, "justice", are not good values. You don't have to be a hypocrite to privilege them. But prioritising certain values - say, "justice" over "equality" - does obviously serve class interests. People don't choose what values to privilege by consciously consulting their class interests. Or even unconsciously. They don't really "choose" at all: to a great extent, culture chooses for them. To explain how that works, we need to go back to Skinner and discourse theory; but it's easy to see, at least, how discourse limits and directs our choices about values.

The same problems are at play in the debate over the constitution. What we should call the "vulgar Beardian" (i.e. not what Beard actually wrote, but how he was read) approach imputes to the founders the motive of active class interest. This argument is frequently said to have been "demolished", and so it has; it was never Beard's argument to start with. But what Beard did show was that the values the constitution privileges (justice, contract, property, minority rights) are those that favour capitalism.

There is a complication here, over the constitution's defence of slavery - which is a defence of elite interests contrary to capitalism. It is the slavery provisions that display so-called "naked self-interest." But the (capitalist) values encoded in the document itself are the values of a discourse that achieved a certain intellectual, ideological hegemony in post-revolutionary America - in a way that slavery did not. This is, in fact, what necessitated the more "naked" promotion of self-interest (through bargaining at the convention) on the part of the defenders of slavery.

So far I have described capitalism as a system that privileges certain values, and  constitutionalism (and antislavery) as movements that are animated by those values. It's important to add, here, that these movements themselves serve to further entrench the values they embody. That is, in part, how discourse is shaped. Activists can trace their belief in "justice" or "humanitarianism" to the founding fathers of constitutionalism or antislavery - rather than to capitalism or class interest.

It is this final point, the question of "elective affinity" (to invoke Weber, as the antislavery debaters do), that may be useful to help understand the early Federalists. Those who affiliated with the Federalist vision or persuasion, and later the Federalist party, did not need to fundamentally share the same class interests, or the same complete sets of values. Rather, they might be Federalists if some of the values that they privilege are also privileged by Federalism.

Antislavery activists like John Jay could also be ardent constitutionalists, in spite of the pro-slavery provisions of the constitution. And proslavery advocates like Charles Pinckney could be constitutionalists too. They were both Federalists. These men hold, and represent, different class interests. Beard was wrong to try to find a core interest - personalty as opposed to realty - that united them; it's that part of his argument that failed. But they do share an elective affinity with certain values that animate the Federalist persuasion.

Federalism should be seen as a movement, not a party in the Marxist sense, where it would represent a single class interest. Its members, or affiliates, might quite often disagree with each other, even in fundamental ways; they share no single causal class interest. But, in the battle over the constitution, they did not need to trace their ideas back to these disagreeing interests. Instead, they worked together to achieve a victory on behalf of the values that they all shared.

Capitalism and/or Freedom

History isn't just history. When we try to understand the relationship between the past and now, a lot depends on what we think the 'now' is like, and what we'd like it to be like. The example I'm thinking of is the emergence of capitalism in America, and the role of the revolution and the founders. Part of that is also the idea of modernity: in what sense is modernity defined by capitalism, and vice versa? And so in what ways did the revolution and founders help create the modern world?

Last year the newest volume of the Oxford History of the United States came out: Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: a history of the early republic, 1789-1815. So it's not unreasonable to say that Wood's position (still) represents the historiographical orthodoxy. What is that position? For him, the early republic is all about the triumph of Jeffersonianism, and moreover, Jeffersonianism means capitalism. He deals with the state-interventionist Jefferson, the Jefferson of the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act, as a paradoxical contradiction to the true Jefferson, who represents the individual pursuit of happiness, through competitive commerce, without government interference. My review of the book is here.

The Federalists, in this picture, are aristocratic stick-in-the-muds dedicated to clawing back a hierarchical and deferential society from the teeth of revolution. This is a bit different from the story in Wood's earlier book, The Creation of the American Republic, when he gave the (Madisonian) Federalists the triumph: their constitution was 'the end of classical politics' and the beginning of modernity. In the 1980s, Wood's tune shifted subtly away from this constitutionalism towards a celebration of the market. I would suggest that he had two major influences in that shift: Joyce Appleby and Ronald Reagan.

Wood and many others see a pretty straightforward link: freedom, to laissez-faire, to market capitalism. It works forwards and backwards, each element standing in for the others. Since we have market capitalism, it seems to follow, then we have freedom; and since we have those things, the Jeffersonians won, and the Federalists lost.

But it doesn't work if we don't see capitalism in the same rosy way. What if we see it as, instead, a system of rules that protect and entrench certain priorities? Capitalism isn't a question of non-interference with the individual, it's not a question of autonomy. It is, just as much as any system of power, a continual series of interferences: it creates and enforces ownership, labour, and finance contracts, which ultimately rely on the power of law and the state. It has to be continually propped up, stimulated, and bailed out. They were doing those things in the 1790s just as much as they are now.

Historians like Wood and Janet Riesman, following E. James Ferguson, point out that while the Federalist opposed paper money emissions in the 1780s, now we take paper currency manipulation as the sine qua non of financial capitalism. But they miss the point that the Federalists themselves made: the market can't work when currencies are controlled democratically. Capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy. It runs on rules that can't be broken by popular majorities, because the majority are always losers under capitalism: they get left in the dust by the concentration of wealth.

If we see capitalism this way, it's the rule-making Federalists who matter more in the making of modernity. They were the real founding fathers of American capitalism - and, in that sense, of the modern world.

The Boredom of Reading History Books

Mainstream history books are too long, with too many facts, presented in a too-straightforward fashion... For all their facts, there is often no coherent or abiding "truth". And maybe I need a mixture of both, when reading about the past; a sort of stylised history, true and informative but not prosaic.

Darragh McManus' criticism of mainstream history (via Moby Lives) seems fair and right to me. He's talking about popular, Waterstones-friendly books (like The Court of the Red Tsar), but there's not as much of a gap between these books and many of their academic cousins as we might think. There's actually a reciprocal influence. After all, academics want to be popular too. But readers - the kind of people who buy history books in Waterstones - want to be, well, a little bit academic. Think Peep Show's Mark, with Rubicon on his desk and pick-up lines about Stalingrad. Am I being too snobby, or generalising too much, when I say these people think 'facts' and 'history' are basically cleverer than fiction, which is, commensurately, for girls?

And you know, I bet your Waterstones history readers read like academics too.* That is, they don't read a history book like you'd read a novel. They read pages here and there; they dip in where they think it might be interesting. They get what they want, then it's back on the shelf. So it's irrelevant if books "simply spool out information, doggedly and relentlessly – and often very samey information at that." That's even kind of the point. If the structure was more complex, if the presentation wasn't chronological, if the book spent time creating an atmosphere or a peculiar internal logic, you'd have to read it like a novel. And men don't like novels, remember?

The question for historians is, to resist or not? As with all publishing, there's a dialectic about bowing to or trying to shape public taste - or, in practical terms, you do what the publisher tells you. But if we're talking about what a history book should be, should it be more like a novel? Should it be, basically, less boring - less full of relentless information, more shaped by voice and atmosphere, more interestingly structured? And, behind that, the question: do those things actually help to create "abiding 'truth'"?


* To add another insult to the history-reading public, I'll question whether most of the books sold actually get read at all.

What is the law?

My thesis about Federalism is that the post-revolutionary project is about more than just the constitution, it's about reconstructing and settling social norms. As Federalist theorists (especially educationalists) pointed out, there's no use enshrining respect for property (say) in law if people aren't prepared to accept that as a value. So the problem of political culture, and the structures of social power, seem to be beyond and beneath the law. The law is, if anything, an expression of those hegemonic values - a superstructure, in vulgar Marxist terms.

But it also seems that that's a shallow and broad way of looking at the law. Political culture is an amorphous phenomenon - it's the outcome of hegemonic (and counter-hegemonic) practice. But what kind of action is that practice itself? Well it's rhetoric, and it's force. Law is the hegemonic practice par excellence because it's a combination of both rhetoric and force. It's law that holds political culture together: through law, we negotiate and institute (and then renegotiate) all sorts of specific limits and structures that would otherwise be out of control.

Law fills in the gaps that ideology creates, and in that sense it's all about negotiations within hegemony. For example, ideology may say property is an absolute right; debts have to be paid - but it falters when there's a case of prioritising one debt over another (e.g. in the American post-revolutionary case, the problem of repaying credit notes to soldiers - pay at face or real value? Original or final holders?). Law enters that arena. In my example, politicians had to make the law to fit the case, but mostly the law is already there, pre-emptively, although always ready to be renegotiated.

In a sense, law is powerless against the larger claims of ideology within hegemony. Property is still king here. But in the war of position, law is a powerful tool. Precisely because it acts on tensions within the hegemonic structure, and because it shapes specific local practice only broadly governed by ideological norms, it can be a site for some level of resistance. Good laws can make things a bit better for the worse off. The guardians of law (a professional class that is in general beholden to hegemonic interests, but not always or necessarily so) could potentially, through winning many small battles, create significant change.

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?

The Second Date

I’ve been on two real dates in my life, both of them in my freshman year of college, nearly a quarter century ago. The first, as it happens, was with the eldest daughter of Robert Ross, the founder of TACT. We met at a party and took up with each other for a while. The date itself came later, on the first night of Christmas vacation. We went to “Burn This” on Broadway. I remember John Malkovich stomping around onstage and then my date catching a train back to Scarsdale. She remembers that we went to a Chinese restaurant and (this hurts) that I ordered a tequila sunrise. That night, anyway, was the end of it for us.

For the next date, on the advice of a classmate from Staten Island, who claimed to have dating experience, I took a sophomore I liked to a T.G.I. Friday’s, in a shopping center on Route 1 in New Jersey. On the drive there, a fuse blew, knocking out the car stereo, and so I pulled over, removed the fuse box, fashioned a fuse out of some aluminum foil from a pack of cigarettes, and got the cassette deck going again. My companion could not have known that this would hold up as the lone MacGyver moment in a lifetime of my standing around uselessly while other people fix stuff, but she can attest to it now, as she has usually been the one, since then, doing the fixing. We’ve been together for twenty-three years. Needless to say, we had no idea that anything we were saying or doing that night, or even that year, would lead us to where we are today, which is married, with children, a mortgage, and a budding fear of the inevitable moment when one of us will die before the other.

 Nick Paumgarten, Looking for Someone (in The New Yorker)

The Poor We Will Have Always With Us

I was talking to my friend about charity and Giving What We Can. I was making an 'argument' that went like this: if you want to do good (and we should take that as given!) then isn't the most good to give to the worst off. And if everyone gives to the worst off, and when he's no longer the worst off, give to the new worst off, and so on, then eventually everyone will be equal. The rich will have given away all that made them rich and the poor will no longer be poor. That seems like the end-point of charity, and of the GWWC idea, to me.

But then she said, well, suppose everyone in the world, one day, has exactly £100. They're all equal. But by the end of the day, some of them have spent all their money, or even borrowed money and spent more - wasted it, say - and others have made money, sold things or whatever. Now at the end of theday, they're not equal any more. So what do you do about it? I sat there for longer than I should have done, thinking about this. I mean, ok, what is the answer? I don't know.

But that isn't the point, is it? It seems to me like an evasive sort of argument. Because the real people that charity helps are not poor through their own bad choices. They're poor because they were are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And we're rich because of the opposite. No matter how much we earned the money we have here (and my friend worked hard for what she has, which must make it so much harder to think like this), we really started off already so far ahead of the average, just by being born where we were.

Yes it makes some sense to think about what the outcome scenario is for all this charity. But how can we let it stop us working to get there in the meantime. Maybe all that's needed to say is that the one-day-after-equality-world is a hell of a lot more equal than the world is now. It's taken thousands of years to get here, so shouldn't we start reversing it? Because it's not really about reaching the end. I think that is what Jesus meant when he said, 'the poor you will always have with you.' Maybe we really can change the world eventually. But right now, the poor are with us, and they need our help, and it is right to help them.

Shyness, its History, Culture, and Politics

In a similar vein to my 'project' on irony - which resulted in this piece in the Oxonian Review - I'm starting something new: this time, about shyness. I guess I see it also in the vein of Adam Kotsko's Awkwardness, which I reviewed here. (And so this project is also a meta-project: is it possible to deliberately build an online, blog-based project which will be picked up by Zero Books?)

Shyness is obviously related to awkwardness, but is it the same thing? There's a lot that I don't know about shyness. It feels to me like it's essentially universal, that everyone must have feelings of shyness, even if they don't seem shy to me. But is that right, or are there structures in society and culture, or in the brain, that make it a phenomenon of specific people, times, or places? Have there always been shy people - were there shy cavemen? Is there something about our modern, liberal constructions of identity and society that establish the conditions for shyness - or perhaps something older, to do with our notions of family, love, community, and outsiders?

What does shyness mean now, for the people who 'suffer' from it, and for other people? Is the world deprived of creative, intelligent people who are too shy to put themselves out there? Are shy people actually self-deceiving narcissists who are too vain to countenance their own imperfection? How, when, and why do people become shy? Is shyness a personal trait, or a category of experience, a quality of certain moments or relationships, but not others? What does shyness mean for love, and for understanding between people? What does it mean for happiness, fun, creativity?

For me, it seems like shyness creates a paradoxical relationship towards others. I often feel like I don't like to be with other people; but I also long to give myself up totally to someone. Again, I feel like, surely everyone feels this way? For now, here are some lines of Dostoevsky that touch me, because they remind me of this feeling:

"Oh my dear, my dear, why don't you ever ask me anything?"
"Because you won't tell, that's why I don't ask."
"I shan't tell you. I shan't, I shan't; even if you kill me, I shan't tell you,' she said quickly. 'Burn me, if you like, but I shan't tell you. And however much I've suffered, I shan't tell anything. People will never know!"

- The Possessed

Music

Music uses similar mimetic effects to writing. Unlike painting and sculpture, but like writing (but even more than writing - you can't experience it 'at your own pace'), music is relentlessly temporal, but it expresses the kind of non-linear temporality that we really experience. The same things characterise my experience of music as characterise my experience of life: not only repetition (and no, nothing is completely a repetition, things are always different even when they're the same), but the sliding together and apart of different layers of experience, different registers, different pace, volume, effect. Sometimes change is gradual, sometimes sudden, overlapping, hanging, dropping. (Great rock pauses.) Sometimes it will surprise you in a way that straight away seems obvious, predictable, and perfect. That is the great moment of pleasure in music for me - and, maybe, in life.

Thoughts on The Trip

I know I'm a latecomer on this, but The Trip was really great. I tried to talk about it to my friend, who it turns out has never heard of Steve Coogan or Rob Bryden. It seemed to me that the show relies on some background knowledge about who they are - and obviously there are plenty of references to be got. But I wonder, what if you did watch it without that background. Perhaps it could be done, it would still work, with these characters (now presumed completely fictional) really expressing enough of themselves to make sense, and to be poignant and effective in the same way as it is for normal viewers.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say about The Trip was that it seemed to me to be mainly about acting. There's obviously the level on which it's about real people 'playing themselves', which must be a weird kind of acting but is definitely that (although not quite in the same way as, say, Extras was). Then there's the constant thread of competition between them, which centres on impressions but is really about acting, as a skill, an art. Coogan's mock funeral oration for Bryden may be the key moment, I think; because as much as we know Coogan's being an asshole, and Bryden is the good guy, the funnier and nicer guy throughout, actually what Coogan's saying - the hiding, the masking, the distraction that comedy and acting offer from basic misery - is the foundation of the programme.

Hell is other people, especially a dinner for two, with someone who wasn't your first choice to be there; it seems like they can only escape that hell by being other people, and still others, and others.