Federalists and the Coming of Age

Over the last few days I've been thinking about a new alternative way to approach the Federalists and the 1780s in America, which is quite different from my previous formulations. It stems to some extent from my thinking about sympathy, and the potential novelistic qualities of history.

My thesis (as you know!) intends to examine the social, cultural, and intellectual background of the movement for the Constitution. My thought is that this can be done through the lens of 'coming of age,' the moment of achieving - or the struggle to achieve - adult status. This approach seems to have many possible overlapping and not-mutually-exclusive forms, encompassing both various levels of metaphor, and various levels of psychological experience. I hope to draw out my thinking on all of this over a series of posts here, which I might then be able to turn into some sort of coherent plan.

This idea did not occur to me in a systematic way: like perhaps most ideas, it was presented to me as an answer without a question. So the first job is to work out what the question is. I don't think that's so backward and facile as it might sound, though; I imagine that this is only a process of expressing questions that already existed unconsciously, based on my reading and work so far. The cart cannot have come entirely before the horse! These are the questions I think might generate fruitful answers using this new approach:

What drove the leaders of the movement for the Constitution? What linked them together, and relatedly, why was the politics of this moment so transient (preceding comprehensive realignment in the 1790s)? And, perhaps most interestingly, how can we explain their ambivalence to power, and the tensions in their thought over aristocracy and republicanism, inheritance and independence, conservatism and revolution?

The Safest House of Present-Day Utopias

Fred Inglis (who, as it happens, wrote a biography of R.G. Collingwood, the opening chapters of which are quite beautiful, although I never read the rest) on "Toytown Utopias" in THE:

The safest house of present-day Utopias is, however, to be found in the 50-year-or-so history of television tales for five-year-olds. Trumpton and its sister villages, Chigley and Camberwick Green, all still easily available on DVD, plus the work of the recently deceased but always immortal Oliver Postgate and his utopian planet-home for The Clangers, these noble classics, together with Bob the Builder and Postman Pat, have for two generations taught their solemn audiences the lineaments of the good place...

These tales all corroborate the news from nowhere. Postgate's mouse-people on their distant planet do the same. Nature and industry combine in the harmonious provision of nurture (the Soup Dragon, the Iron Chicken), the denizens of the planet, speaking a language of melodious whistles perfectly endorsing Noam Chomsky's deep-structural theory of meaning, are impelled in all their doings only by kindness and curiosity. Their planet dances also, to the music of the spheres as played by little orchards of bell-bearing trees ... and hardly any lower in the nursery ratings, Bob the Builder and Postman Pat ply the politics of politeness with their unfailing kindness and consideration, the latter in the perfect landscape of the Yorkshire Dales.

In these places, and in their many descendants, the companion books often including their own DVD, the idea of Utopia lives staunchly on. Indeed, it is an agreeable and rational place for it to do so, for what are the stories we commend to our children and grandchildren for, if not to say implicitly and unplonkingly, "Here is how the world ought to be. We grown-ups haven't managed to make things come out like this. Remember these tales and see whether you can do better. One day, they will give you occasion for thinking the best possible thoughts.

EducationMart

Stefan Collini on the Browne Review, in the LRB:

The single most radical recommendation in the report, by quite a long way, is the almost complete withdrawal of the present annual block grant that government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching, currently around £3.9 billion. This is more than simply a ‘cut’, even a draconian one: it signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it...

The report includes various ‘access’ regulations intended to mitigate the more extreme effects of this reallocation of students by family wealth, but differential fees are, of course, absolutely central to its conception of the way the market mechanism will operate, and it is a necessary truth about markets that they tend to replicate and even intensify the existing distribution of economic power. ‘Free competition’ between rich and poor consumers means Harrods for the former and Aldi for the latter: that’s what the punters have ‘chosen’.

History and the Novel

In fiction-writing there's a lot of talk about empathy, which isn't really any different from what I meant by sympathy the other day. Novels are often about the possibility of entering another mind. That idea seems very similar to R.G. Collingwood's conception of what history should be: the rethinking of past thoughts (my understanding of Collingwood comes not yet from reading his books, but from a great lecture by George Garnett). To me, it seems that written history normally fails at this task - or, rather, few historians attempt it - while fiction has been capable of amazing things. To enter someone's mind in fiction is always moving; history rarely is.

What's the different between what novelists are trying to do and what historians are trying to do? Is there a difference between what they should be trying to do, or in what they succeed in doing, or are capable of? From the reader's side, how do we use history, and how do we use novels?

History appears to work on a rational level as opposed to novels working on an emotional one, but I think that distinction is misleading. People use history books to develop and buttress their ideas and beliefs about the world; and they do the same with novels. There's no meaningful way to draw a line between the 'factual' or rational element of those ideas and beliefs, and the emotional or irrational element. One kind of difference could be in scale: histories are macro, novels micro. But that obviously doesn't hold universally: compare War & Peace with The Cheese and the Worms. What does this kind of scaling even mean, and how do novelists, historians, and readers make choices about it?

This problem of scale is central to the greater problem that both history and fiction share: how are we different from each other, how the same? Across time, space, culture, and every other kind of division, what unites us, what divides? The possibility of sympathy must be part of our answer.

Sympathy in History

What does it mean to be sympathetic to someone? Can you sympathise and condemn at the same time, or is a refusal to condemn inherent in sympathy? I saw a play yesterday whose protagonist I loved (or 'sympathised with') but who did something - I was going to write unforgivable, but is anything unforgivable? He did something I condemn. Perhaps the solution is to, as Christians say, love the sinner, hate the sin.

I think the same rule should apply in history-writing; by which I mean I hope to apply the same rule to my work. But how does non-fiction and historical writing work when it comes to things like sympathy and condemnation? It seems not to work in the same way as novels (or plays), generally. Often the affectation of appearing impartial, and relaying the facts, makes real sympathy impossible. But ironically it makes condemnation easier. In history, past actors are made of their acts: the sin becomes the sinner and vice versa. Is this because in history the range of attributable causes is so narrow, in comparison to fiction? How can we solve this problem?

More on the Post-Revolutionary Public

Privacy... underwent a shift in this period from a classical conception of seclusion and withdrawal to a more recognizably modern notion of independence and intimacy [p218]... Discussions of solitude and retirement in the revolutionary period represented fantasy narratives of self-liberation from the public sphere, even as they address that public sphere [p219]... In one sense, private withdrawal made thought about public things possible. Narratives about individuals who chose to leave society had a social function, of course, and one way to account for the prevalence of hermits in the print culture of late eighteenth-century America is to consider them as exemplary figures of the public sphere [p220].

Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art (Chicago, 2009)

Public and Private After the Revolution

The Revolution transformed the landscape of public space in America. People's conceptions of their own and others' public roles were challenged, redefined, and threatened. Elites were in a sense at the forefront of this change, because it was they who were most exposed by the removal of previous colonial elites. They had to radically adapt their conceptions of their own public and private lives. This seems to have resulted in all sorts of exagerrations and contradictions, which shifted and settled through the early national period. As Peter Thompson points out in Rum Punch and Revolution:

Lurking behind this contradiction between self-interest and community development was a fundamental tension between the values and imperatives of private life and those of an idealized but imperfectly realized public world. [p8]

During the 1780s, i.e. after the first great public test of the war itself, revolutionary elites faced anew the challenge of negotiating between private and public roles. The idea or ideal of retirement to private life was strong for men like Washington and Hamilton, both of whom spent the 1780s mostly out of public office. Others like Madison, remained in public life but shifted between national and local spheres.

How did questions of public and private spheres affect other future Federalists; did their answers differ from future Antifederalists? What was the relation between emerging conceptions of the public sphere and the constitutional project? Can that movement perhaps be defined as a deliberate attempt to shape a public sphere - or to define a public/private relationship - for the new nation?