sweet christ did it need to be this long?

The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800

Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick

Oxford University Press, 1995

944 pp.

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ideology

In the introduction to their tome The Age of Federalism, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick define ideology as

… a shared body of reference—a configuration of more or less formal abstract ideas, unified through conviction and held in place by the hopes, fears, anxieties, and prejudices that normally accompany them—[which] is nevertheless not to be thought of as a “cause” for the actions people take. Nor ought it be seen primarily as a “justification” for actions they have already taken.
Page 13

I’m on board with most of this by instinct: Made up of abstract ideas? Check. Fundamentally emotional? Check. But neither cause nor justification for action? If not, then what the heck is it? They write that

… ideas are simply there; they inhabit the same field of force in which any action occurs…

Ideas, ideology; atmosphere, scenery. Ideology is (“simply”) the ocean that we’re all swimming in.

But does this mean we can’t ever accuse someone of hypocrisy or inconstancy? Certainly it cuts a few knots of history—how slaveowners could claim to found a nation on universal liberty, eg—to say that action doesn’t in fact follow from ideology. Though it’s pithier, cutting the knot isn’t near as satisfying as unravelling it. It takes Elkins & McKitrick several hundred pages more to suggest where instead, if not to ideology, we should look for the justifications and causes of history.

I love this thought not because I agree with it (I might, I might not, I don’t know!) but because it’s one I would never in a million years have on my own. It explodes my preconceived notions, turns them upside down. It gives me words I didn’t have before, which means I can think thoughts I couldn’t think before. And that means more than a happy tingle in my changing little brain: because

The language people draw upon sets bounds to the range of action they can imagine; they are never quite free to do whatever they might please or to fashion any language whatever to justify it—or, more precisely, to give it meaning.

20 December 2021

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inertia

Good(?) to see that the battle over whether the Constitution granted narrow & enumerated powers or broad & implied powers began, like so many of the political battles that continue to this day, uh, immediately. The question was whether Congress had the powers necessary to enact a central part of Hamilton’s financial plan and create a national bank.

Then, as today, positions taken on this had very little to do with any consistent theory of government. Hamilton proposed the bank, therefore believed its incorporation was within bounds of the “necessary and proper” clause and powers implied in the national sovereignty of the United States. Madison, Jefferson, et al. opposed the bank, therefore believed Congress was restricted by its enumerated powers and the tenth amendment.

Elkins & McKittrick point out that Madison had once upon a time been generally of a mind with Hamilton:

… one will argue broad construction when convinced that a generous use of the government’s powers will have a positive and salutary effect on the community… Both Hamilton and Madison had found themselves in precisely this position when they were writing The Federalist.
Page 233

But now they were on opposite sides of the question, and Madison had to scramble for ground. His arguments against the bank itself broke against Hamilton’s greater grasp of finance, leaving one last redoubt. Rather than see the Constitution as he once had, as “a sanction for achieving [his] own ends”, Madison now argued it was “protection against those designs of others which [he saw] as usurping and corrupting”.

Strict construction, then, is in a special sense the resort of persons under ideological strain. It represents a willingness to renounce a range of positive opportunities for action in return for a principle which will inhibit government from undertaking a range of things one does not approve of.
Page 234

There’s also a kind of inertia at work here: once government starts to do things, doing things gets easier. All it takes is enough energy to get started. Broad construction, in its very words, gives proponents wider range to maneuver in both argument and implementation, and positive visions tend to be more energetic than negative ones.

… being on the offensive, expounding the positive side of any argument, dealing with positive innovations, and being on top of one’s subject all have more than a casual relation both to the energy of a person’s convictions and to the effectiveness with which the case is made.Page 233

Also, given that the Constitution as written was vague on a number of questions, anyone filling in the blanks, rather than trying to keep them empty, has a rhetorical advantage.

… one is enabled to perceive a range of implications—social, economic, and political—of reading the Constitution liberally, which has a tendency to enhance comprehension rather than limit it.

1 January 2022

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turning of the spheres

In on revolution, Hannah Arendt explores the significance of using the word revolution to describe those first-of-a-kind events that redefined politics in eighteenth century America and France. Revolution, Arendt writes, was first used in astronomy to refer to the revolving and orbiting of the planets; revolutions were massive, stately, slow–moving. They could be mapped and predicted. And—most significantly—they never changed. It hardly seems a word for sudden and violent changes of regime. And indeed it wasn’t:

[The] word was first used not when what we call a revolution broke out in England and Cromwell rose to the first revolutionary dictatorship, but on the contrary, in 1660, after the overthrow of the Rump Parliament and at the occasion of the restoration of the monarchy.Page 33

Likewise, the Glorious Revolution was not a revolution in our sense but another restoration, returning Protestant rule to England and “monarchical power to its former righteousness and glory”. With the dread certainty of planetary motion, revolutions returned things to the way they had been—ie, the way they were always meant to be.

This was revolution’s meaning to the Founders as much as to any other men of their time:

[The French and American revolutions] both were played in their initial stages by men who were firmly convinced that they would do no more than restore an old order of things that had been disturbed and violated by the despotism of absolute monarchy or the abuses of colonial government.Page 33

Far from desiring separation from England, the Founders desired the return to them of their rights as Englishmen. Their aims—respect for the terms of their charters, fair trade with the mother country, representation in Parliament as condition of taxation—were all theoretically possible under the monarchy. In his essay “The Political Philosophy of the Framers of the Constitution”, Richard Hofstadter suggests that some American theorists envisioned an arrangement like the modern Commonwealth of Nations. He writes that Americans “would gladly have accepted fealty to the king and repudiation of all Parliamentary authority over them, if that would have been acceptable to the English.” (LOA 330, page 804)

Of course, it wasn’t. The revolution was not long in its initial stages, and the Founders were not much longer Englishmen. When the course of events made complete separation necessary, the basis of the revolution remained the same. The revolution was still conceived of as a return to an earlier, better, the proper, state of affairs. But the restoration now had to be cast in nearer-to-universal terms—all men had certain inalienable rights, and these just so happened to be the same as those ancient rights of Englishmen.

One other astronomical implication of the revolutionary metaphor is inevitability. This implication was taken further in French than in American thinking. Indeed, Arendt writes, the idea that freedom was not just possible but historically necessary, part of an “irresistible movement” beyond human influence, became dominant among French revolutionaries. (Page 38) This historic inevitability came at the cost of human agency: actors in a campaign for freedom came to believe they were not truly free to influence the course of their own history.

The various metaphors in which the revolution is seen not as the work of men but as an irresistible process, the metaphors of stream and torrent and current, were still coined by the actors themselves, who, however drunk they might have become with the wine of freedom in the abstract, clearly no longer believed that they were free agents.
Pages 39–40

To those intimately involved in the revolution, as much as to those watching from afar,

[w]hat appeared to be most manifest in this spectacle was that none of its actors could control the course of events, that this course took a direction which had little if anything to do with the wilful aims and purposes of the anonymous force of the revolution if they wanted to survive at all.
Page 41

The French revolution became excessively theoretical as participants were reduced (or reduced themselves) to observers, observers to theorists. The American revolution, in contrast, remained ever practical:

the sentiment that man is master of his destiny, at least with respect to political government, permeated all its actors … [who were] … proud architects who intended to build their new houses by drawing upon an accumulated wisdom of all past ages as they understood it.Pages 41 & 46

According to Arendt, this difference is a fundamental part of why the French revolution failed and the American revolution succeeded. The French laded the revolutionary metaphor with meanings until it became worse than useless, extended the frame of thought to paralyzing extremes. One legacy of the French revolution was this dooming victory of history over actions of men.