"Always Historicise!"

- Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 1981

In my writing about coming of age so far, I notice I've been treating this phenomenon as static or eternal. But of course like everything, it also changes. Although perhaps this needs more proper clarification, which I haven't achieved yet, I want to use coming of age both as a psychological reality and as a cultural metaphor: both are inextricably linked in ways I will explain later. But should those two forms be historicised in different ways?

The question of historical, or 'evolving' psychology is worryingly close to the philosophical question about what is 'human nature' and can it be seen as fundamental. Freudian (or any psychological) ideas seem to imply certain levels of unchanging-ness: that everyone is affected by the same types of complexes. But that is perhaps a superficial reading: we can be affected in different, changing ways; complexes can take different, changing forms. I need to confirm that my model of the child/adult shift in thought could be applied to eighteenth-century minds. How much will my argument here be circular, pointing to the ambivalences in the sources to show that the psychology exists, and then using the psychology as an explanation? Is such an approach illegitimate?

Historicising texts and metaphors is much more familiar to me, and historians generally. That said, it sometimes seems that readers - of Quentin Skinner for example - find this concept strangely novel and awesome. Perhaps all Skinner does is lend authority and credibility to techniques literary scholars had long understood, but that historians had shunned, until a grand old Cambridge man could show the way. I'm sure that is selling him very short. Anyway, I have been reading about changes in the literature of child/adult relations in the eighteenth century, which must be taken into account by my work. We are shooting moving targets from a moving train.

Psychology and Metaphor in History

Here are some further, but still preliminary, thoughts about how the psychology of coming of age might relate to a historical explanation of the Federalist movement in the 1780s. Clearly, people are going to be pretty skeptical about this as an approach. To be accommodated it has to be carefully defined.

To begin with, I agree with Peter Hoffer that "the strongest justification for psychohistory is that it can unravel riddles of motivation and expression which have resisted (or escaped notice in) conventional treatments." [Revolution and Regeneration, 1983, p.13] The unsolved problem of the Federalist movement, in my view, is its ambivalence towards power. Conventional histories either assume basically power-seeking or altruistic motives, without accounting for what seems to be an inner conflict. That is why I think psychology is relevant. (Such an inner conflict would need to be demonstrated, but it can already by inferred from historians' disagreements with each other, and their use of paradox and irony.)

Some historians have drawn on psychology to help explain the revolution itself, and I find their ideas interesting and fruitful. However, in some ways I think the Federalist movement is a more appropriate field for this type of analysis, because it is more closely tied (it seems to me) with a few individuals' thoughts and actions. That does raise a question: is the 'conspiratorial' or 'reform caucus' interpretation of the consitution movement correct, and if so how should we explain the constitution at a popular level? That question, though interesting, is outside the main scope of my concern.

In the 1780s, American elites (and presumably others!) reflected on the experience of revolution and the next steps for the nation and themselves. There is less question here of 'the heat of the moment' or the press of events than there is in the revolutionary crisis of the 1770s: we can give even more concern to thought, and therefore to psychology. The real problem is, how do we access the psychology of proto-Federalists, even those who wrote a lot?

In "The American Revolution: the ideology and psychology of national liberation," (1972) Edwin Burrows and Michael Wallace stress "symbolic collective identity" [p.274]: they find such an identity in the language of parent and child that was common in the rhetoric of the revolutionary period. Drawing that point out, we can say that the metaphor of child/adult relations, with its long period of development in the American political vocabulary, had the power to shape thought in the 1780s. It is all the more powerful for being a deep metaphor, acting primarily on the unconscious, rather than an element of rational or ideological thought. As literary scholars and now scientists tell us, metaphors indeed have power over us. It is the implications of this metaphor, and its workings in the Federalist mind, that I want to explore.

Republicanism, Liberalism, and Social Discipline

My conception of the coming of age in the 1780s has a lot to do with social discipline. Federalists who had fought "arbitrary" British authority came to feel that their responsibility was to establish and enforce order in the independent nation. These ambivalent drives relate to the classic problem of republicanism and liberalism in the political thought of the revolutionary period, for both sets of ideas contain strong but opposing prescriptions for social discipline.

Classical republicanism emphasises virtue, which is in most cases another word for self-discipline: moderation and disinterestedness are central. Republican institutions are meant to encourage or enforce these kinds of self-discipline - so that in fact we are really talking about social discipline (on this general point see Robin Hanson). Classical republican government is highly visible, and citizens are supposed to be acitvely engaged. Its forms of discipline are structured by mutual surveillance and the threat of censure.

Liberalism is obviously quite different: in fact, it appears to offer a great relaxation, or even elimination, of social discipline. Liberal capitalist citizens have few responsibilities: they are supposed to act in their own best interests. Yet the liberal society exercises its own, social discipline, beginning with the rule of law but extending to a set of conditions that organise people and communities around economic markets. The contraction of the public sphere, and loss of positive liberty, restrict citizens in general to acting out their roles as rational producers and consumers. This liberal, capitalist social discipline is invisible; the penalty for disobedience is poverty.

Ten American Books

So many books, so little time! Here are ten I want to read, in an effort to consolidate my credentials as an Americanist... Five from the 19th century, five from the twentieth. Setting myself a deadline: the end of the academic year.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850
3. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
4. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881
5. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884
6. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1920
7. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940
8. Saul Bellow, Herzog, 1964
9. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1973
10. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1997

What is interesting?

Robin Hanson against sophistication:

Interesting folks, in contrast, get so far into a particular topic that they become at risk of violating conversation etiquette, by talking too enthusiastically for too long on topics of minor interest to sophisticates. Yes, interesting folk are at risk of being distracted from dress or hygiene, or from carefully climbing their local status ladder. But they are also at risk of making a unique contribution to the world.

Responsibility and the Public Sphere

One of the many ambivalences in the Federalist experience of the 1780s was towards the public sphere, or as George Washington would probably have called it (he was fond of theatrical metaphors) 'the national stage'.

Retirement fantasies were common and acted-upon to different extents: Washington 'retired' but continued his political involvement on many levels - whether or not entirely by his own choice. Hamilton retired from political life in favour of his legal practice, but he of course re-entered the scene in 1786. Madison and Jay were very much engaged in the public life of nation and state. Jefferson and Adams were away from America (but acting on its behalf), and so had a different relationship again to the public sphere.

The question of a proper relationship to public life and the public sphere is (I now see!) closely bound up with the problem of adulthood, and coming-of-age. Not to get too speculative, but we can presumably link childhood with privacy and adulthood with being in public - even more so in the eighteenth-century, I would imagine. For revolutionary leaders in the 1780s, facing the idea that they were now responsible for the country's wellbeing, their renegotiation of the public sphere was an important part of coming of age.

Supervisor as Safety Net

So I pitched the Coming of Age idea to my supervisor yesterday over dinner. He was pretty skeptical, but he was at least 'intrigued'. 'If I thought it was completely ridiculous, I wouldn't be sitting here in silence,' he said. On the other hand, he also actually said, 'The 1930s called, and they want their pychology back!'

As I remember it, he had two main points to make: 1) child/father language is one of the vocabularies of development used in the 1780s, but to make it the whole thesis would be distorting; 2) my previous work emphasised material reality and I shouldn't abandon that: Federalism was a coalition of groups whose outlooks were shaped in a continental direction by their political and material circumstances. I'll give responses (in the sense of discussing how I could incorporate this advice) soon.