In her 1990 APSA presidential address, Judith Shklar noted that much of the tradition of American political thought over the years has consisted of “a profound meditation upon our political experiences and our peculiar and often tragically flawed institutions” (“Redeeming American Political Theory,” APSR 85 [1991]: 15). The two books under review here provide ample evidence that this meditation is ongoing, and that scholars continue to offer creative and insightful interpretations of the American past: its complex diversity, its contested identities, and its animating concepts and principles. Considered as separate pieces of scholarship and together, as indicative of new trends in writing the history of American political thought, Constituent Moments and Hybrid Constitutions are significant and exciting new books, offering compelling readings of important texts and thinkers, and suggesting whole new trajectories of research linking the American past and present to an evolving American future.
The value of these two books, and the new directions in American political thought that they help illuminate, might best be summarized in three points: American political thought is and always has been multigeneric, transatlantic, and deeply contested.
Each one of these points requires some further elaboration.
1. American political thought is multigeneric. Consider, first of all, the canon of political theory “classics” that appear more or less contemporaneously with the settlement of British North America and the founding of the United States. We are accustomed to seeing such works in the forms of philosophical treatises: Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise, or Rousseau's On the Social Contract, to cite merely the three best-known examples. Generally speaking, such works put forward a theory of human nature and offer a theory of politics consistent with that vision. Hobbes, for example, begins with the motions that animate sensory perception, and traces that motion through the physiological bases of human behavior and ultimately to politics and his theory of absolute sovereignty. Locke rejects Filmer's views of natural subjection and paternal power, extrapolating a theory of legislative supremacy from the foundation of natural equality and human rationality. Each of these texts proceeds in a fairly straightforward manner, attempting to convince the reader of the superiority of its vision of politics, legitimate authority, and obedience through the use of arguments, historical analogies, and/or anthropological reflections on human society. The same could be said of the foundational works of the American founding period, such as Paine's Common Sense, the Federalist Papers, and the rejoinders penned by Anti-Federalist critics.
But what would it mean to take early colonial constitutions seriously, not just as arrangements of political offices and distributions of political power, but as genuine works of political theory? Or to treat popular novels, or woodcuts, or newspapers, or engravings, or poetry in this way? Frank and Hsueh ask us to broaden our focus considerably from the “usual suspects” and to analyze carefully the many genres in which political theorizing has taken place over the course of American history. And thus these two books offer keen insights into a wide array of texts that circulated in early America, very few of which resemble the classics of the early modern canon. For Hsueh, the proprietary constitution—the type of royal grant that brought the colonies of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania into being—represents “the (‘on the ground’) working out of political theory in response to the ambitions and contingencies of colonization” (p. 5). Constitutions are works of political theorizing, albeit in a form less familiar to those of us trained to assume that political theory comes in the form of axiomatic deductions from fundamental principles, or the tracing of historical lineages and genealogies over time. The study of such constitutions—their promulgation; their (attempted) implementation; their constant adjustments, negotiations, and renegotiations in response to realities on the ground; and their delicate balance of (attempted) central control and local discretion (in short, their hybridity)—offers scholars of early America a fascinating laboratory for observing political theory emerging in the crucible of contested political practice.
Quite simply, Hsueh argues, the British crown had neither the interest nor the resources to defend and provision its colonies, and thus had to depend on local agents and investors to build societies de novo in the American wilderness. And this dynamic interplay between center and periphery, not to mention the many different constituencies that populated the periphery, gave the colonial foundings Hsueh explores their hybrid nature. “[I]n the proprietary settlements … constitutions were modified, adapted, manipulated, and ignored by a diverse and even unruly set of respondents” (p. 19). Colonial authorities in Maryland and Pennsylvania were granted broad authority to pass any legislation they deemed necessary to deal with American realities, with the significant limitation that such laws must not violate English law (itself a moving target). Given the realities of communication and transportation in the early modern world, laws might be passed and come to be widely accepted in a given colony, only to be struck down after royal authorities in London learned of their passage, sometimes many months later.
Similarly, for Frank, a full appreciation of the radical possibilities that inhere in the notion of “the people” in early America requires an openness to the many different ways in which such possibilities were communicated. He devotes an entire chapter to Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), a novel which, in Frank's deft analysis, “establishes continuities between the dangers of enthusiastic voice and the dangers attending democratic appeals to the voice of the people” (p. 167). Frank also opens up new vistas into the genres of political theory by introducing the reader to Daniel Chodowiecki's 1765 copperplate engraving of a protest against the Stamp Act—where, in addition to a crowd of male patriots, a white woman and a young African American man attempt to join the revolutionary fray (Frank points out that “the patriots quite literally do not see what is going on behind their backs” [p. 23])—and the political cartoon as a vehicle for political theorizing (pp. 148–49). His account of Frederick Douglass's famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” attends as carefully to the staging and rhetorical strategies of the address as to the details of its substantive argument.
All of these various genres—the novel, the engraving, the cartoon, the oration—crystallize the dynamic of constituent moments, which “enact a political power that transcends the state's legal organization” (p. 8). Unlike civil disobedience, with which they might be confused, “constituent moments enact their claims wholly on the democratic authority of the people themselves: out of these enactments a new democratic subject emerges” (p. 8). This sort of democratic emergence is not always well captured by the traditional forms that make up the political theory canon: Indeed, Frank perfectly captures the power of a genred approach to political theory when he contrasts Walt Whitman with John Rawls, arguing that for Whitman, “poetry's reformative power resided in the aesthetic transformation of a polity confronted with its own practices poetically rendered, rather than the moral transformation of a society confronted with the principles of justice implicit to its ethical practice” (p. 208).
To fully appreciate the rich tapestry of American political thought, then, scholars need interpretive tools that make sense of a whole new universe of primary source material. These two books are promising beginnings toward the development of that interpretive and analytic toolkit.
2. American political thought is transatlantic. Theorists of American exceptionalism tend to emphasize the uniqueness of the American colonial experience, the blank slate of new beginnings that America represented to early modern Europeans. But both Hsueh and Frank skillfully articulate the many ways in which early American political thought was shaped by, and in turn shaped, the transatlantic migration of ideas, goods, and populations. Such interconnections must be approached with a sensitivity not only to the practical realities of American life, but also to their importance for the development of American political theory, if we are to understand both the American inheritance as well as the areas in which it diverged from its European experience background.
Surely, no one disputes the origins of much American political thought in the early New England Puritan experience, with its own background of religious turmoil and political unrest in early seventeenth-century Britain. (Such an emphasis has been a staple in the literature on early America since Cotton Mather, and as recently as George McKenna's The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism [2007].) More recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of the pluralistic and commercially vibrant experience of the Middle Colonies. But Hybrid Constitutions and Constituent Moments help us see how much more was going on in early America. Hsueh turns her attention to settlements with different political foundations than the New England colonies, including the Catholic Calverts in Maryland, the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, and the experience of William Penn and the Quakers in the colony that he founded in 1681, relatively late in the colonizing game. Locke appears here not as author of the Second Treatise but as colonizing agent in Carolina. The Second Treatise, which would become important for eighteenth-century Americans, was a quite different type of political writing, penned a dozen years later than the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and for vastly different political purposes. As Hsueh puts it, “[The Fundamental Constitutions] was a text of government, created by a proprietary body, and [the Second Treatise] was initially an anonymous treatise largely composed during a period of political exile” (p. 56). This is exactly right, and theoretically important.
The American Revolution, as Frank points out, certainly represented an American attempt to chart a new political future, but it did not remove Americans from the European orbit. Though it is true that by the revolutionary era, a significant portion of the American elite had decided that, politically at least, they were “not Britons” (p. 19), those who attempted to rally and mobilize “the people” had a variety of historical models to imitate, and a rich transatlantic legacy of popular protest on which to draw. As Frank puts it, “The repertoires of the Anglo-American crowd can be traced back to the fairs, charivari, and ‘rough music’ of the early modern world” (p. 83). Benjamin Rush, the American founder who worried most eloquently about the political dangers of crowd behavior, acquired his “medico-political understanding of sympathy,” which he employed “to evaluate the behavior of a licentious citizenry” (p. 103), during his medical training in Edinburgh during the 1760s, and he brought these insights back with him into the American context. Constituent Moments is constantly aware of what Frank calls “the social context of crowd action” (p. 83).
So the development of American political thought, no less than American political practice, was from its beginnings a deeply transatlantic undertaking, shaped by experiences (or the interpretation of experiences) in England and, more broadly, against the backdrop of early modern Europe's religious wars and the formation of the modern nation-state.
3. American political thought is contested, and was contested from the very beginning. Lines of contestation were multiple: between crown officials and colonial proprietors, between the proprietors and their own agents, between settlers and other settlers, and of course between settlers and the various native tribes that populated surrounding areas. But contestation was not limited to outright violence; one of the great strengths of Hybrid Constitutions lies in Hsueh's emphasis on the significance of negotiation, adaptation, and the insertion of new populations into already existing ones. Thus we find a range of interactions—some blatantly coercive, others far more nuanced and complex—taking place between whites and natives. The picture that emerges from this exploration of proprietary constitutions is one of colonies as sites of cross-cutting allegiances and interests, shaped by heritages of law and practice but also by contingent and shifting conditions on the ground. Colonial constitutions, then, are “grounded practices that rely as much on legal and political precedent as on more tacit and circumspect tactics of discretion, adaptation, and negotiation” (p. 6). The constant revisions and modifications of founding documents and colonial statutes, the scramble to find personnel to fill constitutionally required offices, the often-duplicitous treaty making—all of these sorts of interactions served to channel contestation into a range of social and political relationships and facilitate the emergence of early American political thought. Hsueh provides a careful treatment of William Penn's treaties with the native tribes, and the ways that such treaties served pragmatic and practical interests, pointing out that these sorts of interactions “were deeply imbued with power and contingency,” and that “in seventeenth-century Pennsylvania, cross-cultural knowledge was a relational type of power” (p. 108, author's emphasis).
For Frank, the very notion of “the people”—the foundations of the American system, and the principle of authority on which the national constitution staked its claim to legitimacy—was bitterly contested throughout the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period. At “constituent moments,” such contestation can break out into outright political resistance in the name of a “people” which is always, in Frank's telling phrase, “not … yet” (p. 22). Indeed, the very term “constituent moment” evokes a contentious process by which one group claims the mantle of “the people” over and against some other regnant conception.
In the American case, the difficulties inherent in claiming popular sovereignty only really became apparent in the wake of victory in 1783, and became even more so in the wake of the Philadelphia Convention's proposal of a new constitutional text that departed sharply from the Articles of Confederation and sought to centralize new powers in the federal government. Was the 1779 crowd attack on James Wilson's home, for example, or the Carlisle riots that took place during the ratification debates, the work of a mob, or of the aggrieved, sovereign people? In discussing the latter of these two outbreaks of populism, Frank frames the dilemma for political theorists eager to uncover the foundations of popular sovereignty: “While the Federalists claimed that they celebrated the people's work, as represented in the state ratifying convention, the Antifederalists of Carlisle claimed the Federalists were instead refuting the people's authority. They appealed, in other words, to another people” (p. 94).
The mobilized resistance to such change—and the politics of calling some gatherings of political protesters “the people” and others “the mob”—highlights the ways in which the democratic “people”—then as well as now—refuse to remain meekly within the categories that their elites set up for them.
Frank's account of the contestation around authorization, legitimacy, and the people illuminates some of the most famous moments in American political history—revolution, founding, Douglass's oration—yet it also emphasizes that “these dilemmas appear and reappear not simply in moments of constitutional crisis but in the fabric of everyday political speech and action” (p. 33). And in broader terms, the virtue of Frank's account lies in its ability to establish “lines of continuity between the macropolitical and the micropolitical, and the lines of democratic insipience across time” (p. 251).
Such attention to the contestation at the heart of American political thought usefully complicates consensus interpretations of, or sweeping generalizations about, “American culture.” We learn a great deal about American thought, to be sure, from Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Sacvan Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad (1978), or other consensus interpretations of the American experience; such macro-level theorizing usefully highlights aspects of the American experience. But the reality on the ground was always more plural, more diverse; and as claims about the entirety of that experience, consensus accounts are simply no longer tenable. Frank and Hsueh appreciate the theoretical implications of the deep pluralism that has always constituted the American landscape and refuse to allow theorists of consensus to mask the contested nature of American political thought from its earliest days.
What all this points toward—the multigenred, transatlantic, and contested nature of the American tradition—is the idea that American political thought is creative and original. Perhaps the most damning thing one can say about the long-overwrought “liberalism vs. civic republicanism” debate over the American founding, which shed such heat but so little light during the 1990s, is that it reduced the lively complexity and creative generativity of early American political discourse to two options, that it flattened out a politically adventurous lived reality. These two books liberate American political thought from the straitjackets of a narrowly “liberal” or “republican” approach without jettisoning either the liberal or republican language that was so clearly important to the emerging nation. Rather, they help us see that particular and contingent American developments gave rise to a hybrid set of concepts and practices in various states and colonies, that competing interests produced a national system that was itself enormously controversial and contested.
One could always wish that authors had taken their analyses further, or in a further direction; in Hsueh's case, one would love to have seen these proprietary constitutions placed into conversation with the joint-stock companies that founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and that played such an important role in the development of American Puritanism and New England culture. And of course one wonders what sort of insights Hsueh might contribute to a study of the American constitution, were she to turn a critical lens on it. Is it hybrid in ways that might be only dimly visible to us in our conventional ways of approaching the document? Frank's claim that Wieland “was meant as a warning to Jefferson and his democratic followers” (p. 172) is provocative but unsubstantiated, and his prose tends toward the purple at times (“a revolutionarily self-enacted people also remains forever haunted by the immanent source of its own transcendence” [p. 9]; “forms of popular political action that seemed to interrupt the disembodied communicative economy of the public sphere and its terminus in formal representative institutions” [p. 72]). Hsueh's book might have been a bit longer, Frank's a bit shorter. But these are minor quibbles about two stellar and exciting new books.
Such deeply historical books leave themselves open to the charge that they fail to offer clear insights for contemporary political life: Indeed, Hsueh admits that her attempt to extend her analysis in the final chapter of Hybrid Constitutions “is a bit tricky and, in a way, runs contrary to the basic premise of this study” (p. 114). But if her attempt to finesse this bit of trickiness—using the specific historical cases as “provocation” (p. 115) to study the contested emergence of modernity—seems a bit less than convincing, she nonetheless does an admirable job in relating historical questions to contemporary concerns. Though she wisely acknowledges that historical research cannot generate remedies for historical injustices, she skillfully probes such important episodes as the Mabo v. Queensland decision of 1992 and the multiple American sovereignty issues raised by US treaties with Native American tribes. Frank's book certainly connects a bit more readily with our own political world, in which every election, no matter how lamentably small a portion of the electorate participates, yields inflated claims about “the people” and a governing mandate. That such claims tend to be preposterous is both true and, to an extent, beside the point. Either way, they go to the heart of Frank's claim that “the people” continue to speak to us, even as we struggle to define just who they are.
