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 âfact-mindedâ Thomas Jefferson
When Judith Shklar, the late and much-revered Harvard political theorist, delivered her presidential address at the American Political Science Associationâs (APSA) annual meeting in 1990, she said that she felt her responsibilities âparticularly deeply.â 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 âRedeeming American Political Theory,â Shklar insisted that American political theory, âfar from being demeaning and scientifically superfluousâ ought to be integrated into a political science that is, in its best incarnation, âfact-minded.â4
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 âthree political sciences in America,â developed during Americaâs revolutionary and founding periods. These belong to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, whose approaches were âspeculative and physiological,â âinstitutional and historical,â and âempirical and behavioral,â respectively.5 Once she casts the âfounding fathersâ as political scientists, the bulk of her address treats instances of their fact-mindedness and scientific rigor.
However, Shklarâs 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 âpolitical phenomenaâ that distinguished the development of American political theory was, âmost deeply ⌠the prevalence of chattel slavery.â As a result, she asserted, âthis country has embarked upon two experiments simultaneously: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.â6 Given the dominant tendency of APSA presidential addresses to celebrate âthe American political tradition,â 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 âthe democratization of valuesâ is implicit. However tyrannical the institution of slavery was, a âdemocratic political science was eventually to be expected,â and that political science, given to us âin embryonic formâ7 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 âthought-worldâ8 of the framers of the nation-stateâs founding documents, Shklar recognized a flawed perspective in, for example, Jeffersonâs anthropology with which he was able to legitimate the unjust treatment of âIndiansâ and slaves. However, we should not blame social science, she insists, only the choice of inquiries. Jeffersonâs mistake was his attempt to âassimilate social science to natural history.â9 She does admit, however, that ultimately, despite its important role in the democratization of values, Americaâs early versions of political science had their limits. Even with their exemplary ethos, the founding thinkers âcould not imagine a multiracial citizenry.â10 Remarkably, Shklar was undaunted by this failure of imagination. Since things have worked out well â she implied that America achieved a democratic, multiracial political order, thanks in part to the scientific orientation of American political theory â she could comfortably restrict the theorizing to white founders. The period of chattel slavery that Shklar lamented (however âdeepâ) is merely one of the âpolitical phenomenaâ 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 âa revered founder of a nation dedicated to the universal principles of human rights and individual liberties,â and ignore the Jefferson whom many have seen as âan example of that âwhite mythologyâ which conceals an oppressive racial imperialism in a language of universal philanthropy.â11
Shklarâs 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 Shklarâs 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 Shklarâs restrictive attention to what she regarded as an ultimately benign and progressive Euro American thought-world and treat Jefferson et al.âs slaves and Indians (among others inhabiting the Americas) not as mere âphenomenaâ but as loci of enunciation, as situated voices contributing to âAmerican political theory.â 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 âfact-minded,â 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 Jeffersonâs implementation of a proto social science, my emphasis is on recovering modes of thought to which his âscience,â 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 Shklarâs rendering of âAmerican political theory.â 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 theoristsâ empirical propositions to their subject matter. For example, rather than merely lamenting Jeffersonâs failure to recognize the intellectual capabilities of African and Native Americans, while defending his social science (his sure grasp of facticity), one can read Jeffersonâs 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 Humeâs History of England. The âfact-mindedâ Jefferson was troubled by Humeâs facts, which challenge the view that Englandâs representative democracy derived from an âancient constitutionâ 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 âfacts.â As another president of an academic association put it in her presidential address: âWe and the cultural milieus in which we think determine historical significance.â15 Seeking a different kind of redemption for Americaâs historical thought-worlds, historian Joyce Appleby urges the recovery of âthe historic diversity in our past,â16 which instead of turning attention to the scientific perspicacity of Americaâs revolutionary leaders, requires âgiving voice ⌠to those men and women who have been muffled by the celebration of American exceptionalism,â17 and âlift[ing] from obscurity those who have been left behind, excluded, disinherited from the American heritage.â18
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 stateâs land- and ethnoscape. After treating the contours and elements of the landscape â rivers, vegetation, minerals, contours and climate â 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 âgreat political and moral evil,â he first addresses their ânaturalâ intellectual and civilizational inadequacies as a collective type and then simply enumerates them.19 In this text, Jeffersonâs âfactsâ 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 ânothing more than the nomination of the visible, an arrangement of elements into a grid.â20
Yet Jeffersonâs famous Notes on the State of Virginia are not only descriptive. In addition to what Myra Jehlen refers to as his âalmost aggressive objectivity,â one can discern in Jeffersonâs writings a turn from âfact gathering to political pleading,â 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 âconstructs a visible sceneâ not as a dedicated empiricist but as one witnessing âan icon of historical change,â and a symbolic narrative of the movement from chaos to pacified order.22 After he remarks on the âdisruptionâ that nature creates, he has nature promise a pacified locus of possession, asserting that what nature âpresents to your eyeâ is a âsmoothâ vista âat 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.â23
Shklar is correct: Jefferson was indeed fact-minded; however, not in Shklarâs (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 â ultimately a continent dominated by Euro American yeoman farmers â was something that the world had been preparing to invite. According to Jeffersonâs romantic historical narrative, by the eighteenth century nature was beckoning the Euro Americans: â[W]e have an immensity of land courting the industry of the hus...