Deforming American Political Thought

Challenging the Jeffersonian Legacy

Michael J. Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317294450
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Deforming American Political Thought offers an alternative to the dominant American historical imagination, treating issues that range from the nature of Thomas Jefferson's vision of an egalitarian nation to the persistence of racial inequality. Presenting multifaceted arguments that transcend the myopic scope of traditional political discourses, Michael J. Shapiro summons disparate disciplines and genres – architecture, crime stories, novels, films, and jazz/blues music (among others) to provide approaches to the comprehension of diverse facets of American political thought from the founding to the present. The book's various investigations disclose that there have always been dissenting voices, articulated in diverse genres of expression that cast doubt on the moral purpose and exceptionalism of the American mind.

This highly anticipated updated second edition features a preface focusing on aesthetic theory and the contributions of artistic genres for political analysis, and a completely new chapter on critical thinking about the US western and urban encounters afforded by the two HBO series, Deadwood and The Wire respectively.

1

Securing the American ethnoscape

Official surveys and literary interventions¹

These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one.

Thomas Pynchon²

Every map presses down onto a physical terrain that it, in part, orders and, in part, effaces.

Philip Fisher³

Introduction: The “fact-minded” Thomas Jefferson

When Judith Shklar, the late and much-revered Harvard political theorist, delivered her presidential address at the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) annual meeting in 1990, she said that she felt her responsibilities “particularly deeply.” One aspect of that depth derived from her position as the first female president of the Association. The other was associated with her vocation as a political theorist. Entitling her address “Redeeming American Political Theory,” Shklar insisted that American political theory, “far from being demeaning and scientifically superfluous” ought to be integrated into a political science that is, in its best incarnation, “fact-minded.”⁴

The redemption of American political theory for Shklar was therefore a matter of overcoming its marginal status by challenging the widely held presumption that it has lacked scientific rigor ever since the colonial period. To make her case, Shklar treated what she called “three political sciences in America,” developed during America’s revolutionary and founding periods. These belong to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, whose approaches were “speculative and physiological,” “institutional and historical,” and “empirical and behavioral,” respectively.⁵ Once she casts the “founding fathers” as political scientists, the bulk of her address treats instances of their fact-mindedness and scientific rigor.

However, Shklar’s desire to integrate the inaugural period of American political theory into a scientific political science does not exhaust her historical focus. Unlike most of her predecessors, for whom the American political tradition constituted an unambiguously proud legacy, Shklar noted that among the “political phenomena” that distinguished the development of American political theory was, “most deeply … the prevalence of chattel slavery.” As a result, she asserted, “this country has embarked upon two experiments simultaneously: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.”⁶ Given the dominant tendency of APSA presidential addresses to celebrate “the American political tradition,” this was a stunning departure, but Shklar offered an immediate palliative. She went on to suggest that the stain of chattel slavery had been effectively removed, thanks in part to the social sciences within which “the democratization of values” is implicit. However tyrannical the institution of slavery was, a “democratic political science was eventually to be expected,” and that political science, given to us “in embryonic form”⁷ by Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton, helped to sanitize a besmirched American democratic tradition.

Yet despite her faith in the democratic proclivities of the entire trajectory of American political science, which originates in the “thought-world”⁸ of the framers of the nation-state’s founding documents, Shklar recognized a flawed perspective in, for example, Jefferson’s anthropology with which he was able to legitimate the unjust treatment of “Indians” and slaves. However, we should not blame social science, she insists, only the choice of inquiries. Jefferson’s mistake was his attempt to “assimilate social science to natural history.”⁹ She does admit, however, that ultimately, despite its important role in the democratization of values, America’s early versions of political science had their limits. Even with their exemplary ethos, the founding thinkers “could not imagine a multiracial citizenry.”¹⁰ Remarkably, Shklar was undaunted by this failure of imagination. Since things have worked out well – she implied that America achieved a democratic, multiracial political order, thanks in part to the scientific orientation of American political theory – she could comfortably restrict the theorizing to white founders. The period of chattel slavery that Shklar lamented (however “deep”) is merely one of the “political phenomena” that provoked, in a seemingly positive way, an American political theory that is strictly the provenance of Euro Americans. Shklar felt, for example, that she could safely treat Jefferson as “a revered founder of a nation dedicated to the universal principles of human rights and individual liberties,” and ignore the Jefferson whom many have seen as “an example of that ‘white mythology’ which conceals an oppressive racial imperialism in a language of universal philanthropy.”¹¹

Shklar’s claims for the social science probity of all three thinkers are worthy of analysis. However, given the scope of this chapter and my particular concerns with the rationalization and reconfiguration of the American landscape and with the levels of political eligibility assigned to different groups in the American ethnoscape, I am confining my reactions to Shklar’s claims to Jefferson, who was most concerned with both and was ultimately most responsible for the expansion and reshaping of continental space. I want especially to contest Shklar’s restrictive attention to what she regarded as an ultimately benign and progressive Euro American thought-world and treat Jefferson et al.’s slaves and Indians (among others inhabiting the Americas) not as mere “phenomena” but as loci of enunciation, as situated voices contributing to “American political theory.” Such a move invites a very different kind of redemption. The task of recovery becomes not the integration of a narrow range of Euro American thinking into a “fact-minded,” political science, but a recasting of American political theory to include the diversity of thought-worlds that have, since the seventeenth century, collided and have alternatively ignored and nourished each other. Native, African, and, more recently, Latino Americans (among others) have participated, with Euro Americans, in a process of negotiating what America has been and is about. Heeding a cartography of alternative thought-worlds, with special attention to those articulated across the colonial divide imposed by the European conquest and expansion across the American continent, I redeem neglected portions of American political thinking. Instead of appreciating Jefferson’s implementation of a proto social science, my emphasis is on recovering modes of thought to which his “science,” and the version of those who continue to pursue a scientistic social and political science, have been inattentive.¹²

To prepare the conceptual ground for such a task, I want to note another remarkable blind spot in Shklar’s rendering of “American political theory.” In addition to her restrictive approach to the worlds of thought is her neglect of genre effects. Theory for Shklar is a matter of the relationship of theorists’ empirical propositions to their subject matter. For example, rather than merely lamenting Jefferson’s failure to recognize the intellectual capabilities of African and Native Americans, while defending his social science (his sure grasp of facticity), one can read Jefferson’s incorporation of natural history into his inquiries as extra scientific. His drive to create a particular American future turned him as much into a polemical historian as a scientist. As has been noted, his work on founding a unique democratic present and future required an energetic reconstruction of the past.¹³ For example, because he was bent on attributing democratic proclivities to Anglo-Saxons and, accordingly, to ascribing Euro American political institutions to an Anglo-dominated ethno-history, he picked a quarrel with David Hume’s History of England. The “fact-minded” Jefferson was troubled by Hume’s facts, which challenge the view that England’s representative democracy derived from an “ancient constitution” developed in the Anglo-Saxon period that pre-dated the Norman Conquest.¹⁴

The past that Jefferson sought to establish was based on ethno-historical mythology rather than scientific inquiry. If we heed his mythic stories rather than the data collection that they encourage, we must recognize a Jeffersonian thought-world that consisted less in a scientific approach to facticity than in a commitment to narratives, images, spatio-temporal models and biopolitical conceits, all of which constituted his “facts.” As another president of an academic association put it in her presidential address: “We and the cultural milieus in which we think determine historical significance.”¹⁵ Seeking a different kind of redemption for America’s historical thought-worlds, historian Joyce Appleby urges the recovery of “the historic diversity in our past,”¹⁶ which instead of turning attention to the scientific perspicacity of America’s revolutionary leaders, requires “giving voice … to those men and women who have been muffled by the celebration of American exceptionalism,”¹⁷ and “lift[ing] from obscurity those who have been left behind, excluded, disinherited from the American heritage.”¹⁸

Thanks to recent scholarship, there are abundant examples of the unmuffling of voices that reflect the darker side of the plantation economy that Jefferson enjoyed and the imperial expansion that he sponsored. To heed those voices, one needs to accord more recognition to the bodies from which they come. Or, to articulate the issue within a cinematic idiom, one needs to displace the panoramic master shot with the close-up. Looking outward from his Virginia plantation, Jefferson wrote a comprehensive description of his state’s land- and ethnoscape. After treating the contours and elements of the landscape – rivers, vegetation, minerals, contours and climate – he lists the animals and humans, treating Europeans, Indians, and Africans as distinct species. When he gets to a description of the slaves, whose importation he calls a “great political and moral evil,” he first addresses their “natural” intellectual and civilizational inadequacies as a collective type and then simply enumerates them.¹⁹ In this text, Jefferson’s “facts” are articulated primarily within the genre of natural history, the soon-to-be-displaced episteme of the eighteenth century, whose method (its meta-facticity), consisted, as Michel Foucault noted, of “nothing more than the nomination of the visible, an arrangement of elements into a grid.”²⁰

Yet Jefferson’s famous Notes on the State of Virginia are not only descriptive. In addition to what Myra Jehlen refers to as his “almost aggressive objectivity,” one can discern in Jefferson’s writings a turn from “fact gathering to political pleading,” a case being made for building a nation by heeding the summons of nature.²¹ For example, while describing a landscape seen from his Monticello plantation, he “constructs a visible scene” not as a dedicated empiricist but as one witnessing “an icon of historical change,” and a symbolic narrative of the movement from chaos to pacified order.²² After he remarks on the “disruption” that nature creates, he has nature promise a pacified locus of possession, asserting that what nature “presents to your eye” is a “smooth” vista “at an infinite distance in the plain country inviting you, as it were from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and participate in the calm below.”²³

Shklar is correct: Jefferson was indeed fact-minded; however, not in Shklar’s (empiricist) sense that his conclusions were warranted on the basis of objective observations. Rather, he was fact-minded in the sense that he wanted nothing left unclassified. Impatient with enigma, he mobilized the dominant modes of European thinking, especially natural history, to displace contingency with necessity. The American future he sought – ultimately a continent dominated by Euro American yeoman farmers – was something that the world had been preparing to invite. According to Jefferson’s romantic historical narrative, by the eighteenth century nature was beckoning the Euro Americans: “[W]e have an immensity of land courting the industry of the hus...