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)