Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American saw political transformations that were to have (as Hegel might have put it) ‘world-historical’ significance. Americans framed the first government that was republican—based on representation—in all three branches. As The Federalist observes, previous republics had been ‘mixed’ regimes, exemplified in antiquity by Rome and in modernity by Britain and the Netherlands: regimes in which various social orders—monarch, aristocrats, commoners—each controlled one branch of government. The American Founders established the first unmixed republic; moreover, the new regime was designed to falsify the Montesquieuian truism that republics could only exist on small territories, and could survive only in loose confederations. In the United States, however, a moderate centralization of governmental authority occurred, as the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution of 1787. This vindication of popular sovereignty led to the increasing democratization of the regime throughout the early nineteenth century, culminating in the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
European regimes experienced considerably longer transformations to republicanism. What was it about the political, economic, social, and ideational preconditions of the American founding that lent themselves to the success of the Founders’ political experiment? The question matters now as much as it did then, as peoples around the world struggle for and against the founding of democratic and commercial republican regimes in their own countries.
Military and Political conditions
The English colonists in America exercised considerable self-government before the Seven Years’ War. British interests thereafter required a better-integrated empire in order to raise taxes needed to pay the war debt and to enhance military preparedness, but Americans, relieved of the bothersome French, needed British protection must less, and needed the empire not at all. They were sitting on territory big enough for their own empire, even if it were to be an ’empire of liberty.’ Foreseeably, the empire of liberty would need only local militias as land forces for Indian ‘removal.’ For national defense, it would need not so much an army as a navy; this circumstance favored republicanism, inasmuch as navies seldom threaten civilian rule.
The Revolutionary War helped to establish popular sovereignty because the American gentry needed soldiers who would fight the British. As political sociologist Michael Mann remarks, “the first mass mobilization war of modern times” contributed to the first popular-sovereignty republic, as the petite bourgeoisie and small farmers organized into militias (Mann 152). “Self-government and the militia went together” (Hintze 196). In Europe warfare had led to aristocracy, but in America there was no aristocracy, and the gentry could not win without the ‘commons’ (Hintze 168). Thus the American Whigs in a sense reversed the Whiggish account of political development, which held that war breeds despotism. A militia isn’t a standing army; it empowers a vigilant, arms-bearing citizenry, not social and political elites. (Future American state-builders, from the old Federalists to Theodore Roosevelt to the New Dealers who established the ‘national security state,’ advocated a standing army, professional and/or conscript.) A democratic military structure enhanced the chances for a Jeffersonian, and then a Jacksonian America. Washington’s policy of disentanglement from European affairs minimized the need for a larger-scale land force, thus combining political liberty with geopolitical Realpolitik.
Civilian politics in the colonies featured local self-government; the New England townships are best-remembered, but in one form or another, colonial governments mostly made their own laws. American colonies saw more political participation as measured in terms of suffrage than England had; much of colonial government was republican, forming the civilian basis of popular sovereignty once the king’s men were pushed out (Huntington 94). Huntington claims that American colonial institutions were Tudor leftovers that the English immigrants had brought with them and never ‘updated’: balance of powers, decentralization, subordination of governments to fundamental law—all guards against statism (96) and, particularly, against modern English-style parliamentary sovereignty (105). He contends that the Tudor conception of the constitutional monarch, as distinct from the modern-European absolute monarch, was transferred to the office of the presidency (107). On the other hand, as Huntington also sees, the Americans did not exalt the state over the churches or empower a real, hereditary monarch; they were decidedly selective, republican ‘Tudors.’
Economic conditions
The political economies of the American colonies were local and mostly regional. There was no national political economy, a fact the Constitution’s commerce clause was intended to alter. Although broadly commercial/capitalist, they came in four varieties: state-patronage, slave-based agricultural, free commercial agricultural (Mann calls this “agrarian petty commodity capitalism”), and commercial-landed (Mann 142-143). These economies were 90% agricultural, but this was commercial agriculture, not feudal, ‘manor-and-peasant’ agriculture, as still seen in Europe.
Crucially, the colonists did not need the British imperial system for trading; indeed, that system only impeded them, preventing free markets for American goods in the Caribbean. Smuggling ensued. The colonial system also inhibited the development of local manufactures, much to the displeasure of northern and middle-Atlantic colonists; fortunately, slavery was not much used in the manufacturing industries, else its abolition in the North might have been delayed. For their part, the colonists’ slogan, ‘No taxation without representation,’ was not only a statement of moral-political principle but an economic threat: Let us participate in the governance of the Empire or we will cut off the lifeblood of Leviathan.
The war got rid of the American Tories and much of the state-patronage capitalism, which would appear, under republican auspices, in the move for ‘internal improvements’ in the nineteenth century. This left a rivalry between slave-based agriculture and free agriculture, which became entwined in the catastrophic, near-fatal military/political conflict, four generations later. But the 1787 Constitutional Convention avoided a serious split between the northern and southern states with the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave importation clause. Instead of a truly virulent regime division among states, north and south, the ratification debate resolves into intrastate debates between eastern and western interests. The Middle Atlantic states ratified quickly; they were already full-fledged commercial republics. A strong, well-coordinated national state would protect their coastlines and thereby protect their international trade. Southern and northern states were more reluctant, but in each case, a state-by-state examination of the ratification debates shows that the eastern, coastal areas supported the new constitution, with its promise of interstate commercial regulation, resistance to debtors’ demands, and coordinated national systems of military defense and (at least in some, Hamiltonian, minds) of modern finance.
The commercial economy begun by the colonies and reinforced by the Constitution played out politically in the formation of mass, competitive parties in the early nineteenth century. The Madisonian policy of giving ‘factions’ or interests their play within a legal framework gave considerable leeway to party organizing. The commercial economy, undermining the planter gentry, induced the gentry to appeal to the democratic/republican people in order to defend their own way of life, even as they had had to appeal to the people for military support during the war. This led to a synergism of republicanism and commerce, each side dissolving the elitism of the other. Thus ‘gentry’ politicians like Jefferson and Madison laid the groundwork for the organization of parties, an act followed by the recognizable, and much democratized, parties of the 1830s. Alternatively, America might have developed long the lines Jefferson professed to fear: a high-toned Federalist state with a quasi-monarchic president in alliance with a strong bureaucracy and standing army, eliciting sharper, more politicized class struggles. America might then have come to look more like Europe.
Social structure
Tocquevillian moeurs or habits of the heart include a democratic/republican religion (Protestantism), a love of orderly home life carried into public affairs, a separation of church and state that makes religion more, not less, powerful because it is now fully consensual, and widespread literacy, encouraged by the Bible-based, democratized religion of Protestantism. All of these social features existed in the colonies; although of course the Puritans were not exemplars of church-state separation, they did have a democratized and above all individualized religiosity; further, the Middle Atlantic states contained many of the English and other European ‘dissenting’ sects, which did insist on church-state separation. The very diversity of sects in colonial America lent itself to the Madisonian solution, identical to his solution of factionalism: Increase the number of sects and you decrease religious intolerance. The political payoff was that the First Amendment had civil-social reinforcemtn; George Washington could do what no state had ever done—tell Jews, Catholics, and Quakers that they were not merely to be tolerated but must be allowed free exercise of religion as a matter of natural and civil right—and expect the American people to redeem his promise.
On the more sinister side, the colonial implantation of slavery had the social consequence (cited by Tocqueville) of allowing southern whites to scorn labor. Commercial republicanism stands on the labor theory of value; Tocqueville rightly concludes that slavery attacks the American Union indirectly, through its moeurs, by enabling the whites of one region to imagine themselves aristocrats, living off slaves and reading altogether too many novels by Sir Walter Scott. Modern or race-based slavery, supporting an honor-bound, warlike, high-spirited class of whites, yielded the series of Southerners’ miscalculations of Northern commercial-republican willingness and ability to fight, miscalculations that eventuated in the Civil War.
The major colonial social condition with political consequences was the lack of a titled nobility. Without this, an unmixed republic was possible; without a titled nobility, a thoroughly commercial republicanism was possible; without a titled nobility, a very strong central state is unnecessary and Hobbes’s argument that such a state, with a monarchic regime is the best rode to ‘modernization’ falls flat. A relatively egalitarian, consensual society needs no central government to dislodge an anti-modern aristocracy (Huntington 126). The political principles of self-government and equal civil rights for citizens were socially reinforced by fluid, diverse English America, in sharp contrast with both French Canada and Latin America (Hartz 74-75). Gianfranco Poggi observes that in Europe concrete standestaat claims were not easily translated into the more abstract terms of natural and legal right (Poggi 87); Americans did not have this impediment to popular sovereignty or to the understanding of government as security for natural rights via the rule of law.
Ideas
There is a limit to Huntington’s hypothesis. He rightly says that ideational modernism means the Machiavellian-Baconian project of conquering fortune and nature. But he does not say that ‘Tudor’ America limited that project. American obviously partook of what Harvey Mansfield calls the modern-liberal ‘taming’ of the Machiavellian project.
Hartz describes seventeenth-century Americans as individualistic; their Christianity did not include acquiescence to the doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule, for example (73). He concedes that those Americans were not secularists (nor, he should add, did their asceticism comport with profit-maximizing) but claims, Weber-like, that their ‘Protestant ethic’ lent itself to subsequent secularization of Lockean-liberalization. As for the South (which Hartz does not much discuss), although it is true that the planters resisted Lockean principles with respect to their families and slaves, white men there very much wanted to apply them to themselves, leading to tensions visible as late as the post-Civil War self-defense of Jefferson Davis.
Although much ink as spilled over the alleged contradiction between a ‘liberal’ and ‘republican’ tradition in America, the writings of the principal Founders show no such thing. Colonists and Founders alike associated the principles later labeled as ‘liberal’ with republicanism. While there were anti-Federalists who disliked any thoroughgoing commercial ethos, their sentiments were fatally compromised by Lockean elements, as Herbert J. Storing has demonstrated.
Conclusion
Karl Polanyi identifies four institutions of the nineteenth-century European states: a balance of power among states; an international financial system based on gold; a self-regulating commercial market leading to industrialism as technology advanced; generally liberal if not yet stable republican regimes. Huntington defines modernization as ‘rationalization’ of authority (in the Weberian, rules-governed-bureaucratic sense of rationality), along with differentiation of social structures and expansion of political participation (93). Colonial America featured the preconditions of liberalism, of democratization/expanded political participation, and the market economy. It had the making of its own balance-of-power system—federalism—which would however prove unstable as it was (mis)conceived by later American politicians. It did not anticipate a modern financial system; that awaited Hamilton and Robert Morris. It did not conceive of bureaucratization at all, and in fact had revolted against the extension of British state bureaucracy to its shores. Such a political society interacted with Europe primarily by trading with it and by proving to Europeans the viability of commercial republicanism. The success of that regime here proved not so easily maintained in Europe, where war, political regimes, and socio-economic conditions all impeded it. Only after commercial/market economies were established there, thanks in large measure to state intervention (Zolberg 87) did commercial republican regimes become increasingly feasible.
Works Cited
Hartz, Louis: The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955.
Gilbert, Felix, ed.: The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Huntington, Samuel P.: Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
Mann, Michael: The Sources of Social Power. Volume II: The Riuse of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Poggi, Gianfranco: The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978.
Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963 [1944].
Storing, Herbert J., ed.: The Complete Anti-Federalist. Five volumes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Zolberg, Aristide: “Strategic Interactions and the Formation of Modern States in France and England.” In Eli Kazancigal, ed.: the State in Global Perspective. Paris: Gower/UNESCO, 1986. See also “International Engagement and American Democracy: A Comparative Perspective.” In Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds.: Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
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