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Tag: democracy

The Mouse That Roared: The Democratic Movement in Hong Kong

an essay by Arif Dirlik
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In 1997, the British government handed Hong Kong over to the People’s Republic of China(PRC) after 150 years of colonial rule. Some observers at the time could not but wonder if Hong Kong would be absorbed and remade by the behemoth to the north, or transform with its proverbial dynamism “the motherland” that already was undergoing radical change. The popular uprising under way in Hong Kong is the most recent indication that the question was not an idle one. The answer is yet to come.

Hong Kong investments and technology played an important part in the 1980s in laying the ground for the PRC’s economic take-off. The “special economic zones” that were set up in Guangdong province at the beginning of “reform and opening” as gateways to global capitalism (while keeping the rest of the country immune to its effects) were intended to take advantage of the dynamic capitalism of neighboring Hong Kong. And they did. To this day, Guangdong leads the rest of the country in industrial production and wealth. It also heavily resembles Hong Kong with which it shares a common language and, despite three decades of separation after 1949, common cultural characteristics. Hong Kong has continued to play a crucial part in the country’s development.

It has been a different matter politically. Since the take-over in 1997 the leadership in Beijing has left no doubt of its enthusiasm for the oligarchic political structure that was already in place before the end of colonial rule. The many freedoms and rule of law Hong Kong people enjoyed were less appealing to a regime that preferred a population obedient to its strictures and a legal system more pliable at the service of Communist Party power. Already in the 1980s, Hong Kong people’s doubts about unification with the “motherland” were obvious in the exodus of those who could afford to leave to places like the United States, Canada and Australia. The exodus speeded up following the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989 which put to rest any hopes that reforms might open up a greater space for political freedoms. The colony practically disqualified itself as any kind of political inspiration for the Mainland with the enthusiastic participation of Hong Kongers in the Tiananmen movement leading up to the June Fourth massacre, and annual commemorations thereafter of the suppression of the student movement. In the early 1990s the Party under Deng Xiaoping settled on the example of Singapore as a model more attuned to its own authoritarian practices.

The same reasons that made the regime suspicious of Hong Kong people for their “lack of patriotism” due to the legacies of colonialism have made Hong Kong into an inspiration as well as a base for radical critics of the regime struggling for greater freedom and democracy on the Mainland. The take-over of 1997 was under the shadow of Tinanmen, but even so few would have imagined at the time that within two decades of the celebrations of the end of colonialism and “return” to the motherland, protestors against Beijing “despotism” would be waving British flags. Once the initial enthusiasm for “liberation” was over, Hong Kongers rediscovered as the source of their “difference” the colonial history which in nationalist historiography appeared as a lapse in the nation’s historical, a period of humiliation remembered most importantly to foster nationalist sentiment. PRC democracy activists such as the jailed Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have drawn the ire of the regime for suggesting that Hong Kong’s freedoms and democratic sentiments were legacies of colonial acculturation that Mainlanders had missed out on.

Current protests have their origins in a consciousness born of the anxieties provoked by the prospect of unification in the 1980s and 1990s, and even though both the Mainland and Hong Kong have changed radically in the intervening period, the Hong Kong identity that assumed recognizable contours at the time is a fundamental driving force of the protests. The immediate issue that has provoked the protests—call for universal suffrage in the selection of the chief executive and legislative council of the Special Administrative Region—harks back to the Basic Law of 1984 agreed upon by the British and the PRC as a condition of unification. The Basic Law stipulated that Hong Kong would be subject internally to its own laws for fifty years after the take-over under a system of “one country, two systems,” with its own chief executive and a legislature elected by an election committee representing various functional constituencies in a corporatist arrangement. The arrangement openly favored the corporate and financial ruling class in Hong Kong which in turn was prepared to align its interests with those of the Communist regime in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) was something of a political counterpart to the “special economic zones”—an exception that was granted not to compromise national sovereignty but as an act of sovereign power. In all matters pertaining to governance and the law, the SAR would be accountable to the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing. Hong Kong was granted representation in the NPC which, like all representation in that body, has served more to consolidate central control than to allow for the democratic airing of public opinion and grievances.

“One country, two systems” was an unstable structure. It was important to the PRC for patriotic reasons to put an end to the colonialism at its doorstep and retrieve territory lost a century and a half ago. But some compromise with the departing British was unavoidable given the strategic importance to the new project of development of the global corporate and financial hub that was Hong Kong. The autonomy granted to Hong Kong was subject to the good faith of the Beijing government. What might happen if the PRC no longer needed this hub seemed like a remote contingency in the 1980s, but already by the 1990s there was talk of the rise of Shanghai as a competitor. It is not out of the question that the present unrest which may undermine faith in Hong Kong as a corporate and financial center is not entirely undesirable to the regime now that preparations have been completed to launch a new financial center in Shanghai.

A similar uncertainty attended the issue of governance under the system. The Basic Law held out the possibility of democratic government and universal suffrage in Hong Kong subject to circumstances to be determined by the NPC. It nourished hopes in democracy, but reserved for Beijing final say on when and how democracy was to be exercised. There were no guarantees that full democracy would be granted if Hong Kongers invited the displeasure of the government in Beijing—or circumstances within the country made it undesirable. This is the immediate issue in the current protests (along with public dissatisfaction with the current chief executive, Leung Chun Ying who, like his two predecessors since 1997, is widely viewed as a Beijing puppet). To Hong Kong democracy advocates, the offer of universal suffrage is a mockery of the promise of full democracy when the choices are limited to candidates carefully selected by an electoral commission packed with Beijing loyalists.

The take-over in 1997, and the circumstances of its negotiation, had one very significant consequence that in likelihood was unanticipated: the politicization of Hong Kong society. Hong Kong long had a reputation as a cultural and political “desert.” The British colonial regime was successful in diverting popular energies to the struggle for everyday existence, and for those who could, the pursuit of wealth. At the height of the Cultural Revolution on the Mainland in 1967, labor disputes erupted into riots against the colonial government led by pro-Beijing leftists. But sustained political activity dates back to the negotiations surrounding the take-over, especially the mobilization instigated by the Tiananmen movement in Beijing. Politics over the last twenty-five years has revolved around the assertion of a Hong Kong identity against dissolution into the PRC. As a new political consciousness has found expression in the efflorescence of a Hong Kong culture in film and literature, the latter has played no little part in stimulating political activity. Ironically, while the goal of “one country, two systems” was to ease Hong Kong into the PRC, the very recognition of the differences of Hong Kong from the rest of the country would seem to have underlined the existence of a Hong Kong identity that differentiated the former colony from the rest of PRC society.

Current protests have focused attention on issues of governance. Far more important are the social tensions and the economic transformations that lend urgency to protestors’ demand for political recognition and rights. One important indication is the part young people—teenagers—have played in the protests. Joshua Wong, who has emerged as a leader, is seventeen years old, which means that he was born in 1997, the year of the take-over.

The generation Wong represents has come of age in a society subject to deepening social and economic problems. The wealth gap in Hong Kong is nothing new, but as elsewhere in the world, inequality has assumed critical proportions with increased concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite allied with Beijing. Since 1997, the experience of marginalization has been intensified with the inundation of the city by Mainlanders with their newfound wealth which has increased prices of commodities, put pressures on public services––including housing, health and education––and introduced new cultural fissures. Some Hong Kong businesses prefer Mainland customers on whose business they have come to be dependent. In the 1990s, Mainlanders living in Hong Kong used to complain about the prejudice they suffered from Hong Kongers with their pretensions to superior cultural sophistication. That has been reversed. Even the most uncouth Mainlanders are likely to look down on Hong Kongers for not being authentically Chinese, which typifies PRC attitudes toward Chinese populations elsewhere. While Hong Kongers complain about “locusts” from the North, a very-unConfucian Beijing University professor descended from Confucius refers to Hong Kongers as “bastards” contaminated by their colonial past. The central government in Beijing, sharing the suspicious of southerners of its imperial predecessors, is engaged in efforts to discourage the use of Cantonese while instilling in the local population its version of what it means to be “Chinese.” We may recall that the present protests were preceded two years ago by successful protests against Beijing-backed efforts to introduce “patriotic” education to Hong Kong schools. It is not that Hong Kong people are not patriotic. They are very patriotic indeed. But their patriotism is mediated by their Hong Kong identity, a very product of the take-over that Beijing would like to erase.

The upheaval in Hong bears similarities to “Occupy” movements elsewhere in the economic issues that inform it. It also has its roots in the special circumstances of Hong Kong society, and its relationship to Beijing. The movement may be viewed as the latest chapter in a narrative that goes back to the 1980s, the emergence of a neoliberal global capitalism of which the PRC has been an integral component, and the Tiananmen movement which was one of the earliest expressions of the social and political strains created by shifts in the global economy. The demands for democracy in the protests are clearly not merely “political.” Democracy is important to the protestors not only as a means to retrieving some control over their lives, but also to overcome inequality. The authorities in Beijing are quite aware of this link. A Law professor from Tsinghua University in Beijing who also serves as an advisor on Hong Kong affairs just recently announced that democracy would jeopardize the wealthy who are crucial to the welfare of Hong Kong’s capitalist economy. It may seem ironic that a Communist Party should be devoted to the protection of wealthy capitalists, but that is the reality of contemporary PRC society that the protestors are struggling against.

The protests are also the latest chapter in the formation of a Hong Kong identity which assumed urgency with the prospect of return to the “motherland” in the 1980s. This, too, is a threat to a regime in flux that finds itself threatened by identity claims among the populations it rules over. It seems superfluous to say that allowing the people of Hong Kong the self-rule they demand would have adverse consequences in encouraging separatism among the various ethnic groups already in rebellion against the regime, and further stimulate democracy activists among the Han population. Hitherto pro-Beijing Guomindang leader in Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, has recently voiced his opposition to unification under the “one country, two-systems” formula.

It would probably take something of a miracle for the protest movement in Hong Kong to achieve its stated goals. Rather than risk a Tiananmen style confrontation, the authorities have taken a wait-and-see attitude, waiting for the movement to spend its force, or opponents to force it to retreat. There are signs already that the movement has run its course in clashes between the protestors and members of the general public weary of the disruption of life and business. It is suspected that the attackers included members of Triad gangs. Whom they might be serving is, for the moment, anybody’s guess.

What the next chapter might bring is uncertain, to say the least. It is unlikely that a movement that has been in the making for two decades will simply fade away into oblivion. The problems it set out to resolve are very real, and offer little sign of resolution, and the movement has proven its resilience through the years. The distinguished scholar of Hong Kong-Mainland relations at the City University of Hong Kong, Joseph Cheng Yu-shek,who is also an advocate of democracy, stated in a recent interview that, “All the protesters here and Hong Kong people know it is extremely unlikely the Chinese leaders will respond to our demands…. We are here to say we are not going to give up, we will continue to fight on. We are here because as long as we fight on, at least we haven’t lost.”

October 29, 2014
Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Prodigal Political Emerson

by Sarah Blythe
~

Much like the other volumes in the series, the chief aim of A Political Companion to Emerson is to challenge the notion that a particular author is much more politically minded than past scholarship has allowed. Ralph Waldo Emerson was no stranger to such censure, even within his own lifetime. The most biting assessment comes from fellow author, Rebecca Harding Davis, who reflected on her interactions with Emerson and his “Atlantic coterie” in her 1904 cultural memoir, Bits of Gossip. She describes the coterie as thinking “they were guiding the real world,” while in fact “they stood quite outside of it, and never would see what it was.”¹ Of Emerson as an individual, she had only this chilly assessment: “He took from each man his drop of stored honey, and after that the man counted for no more to him than any other robbed bee.”² This version of Emerson—the alienated dreamer, or worse, the intellectual vampire—is certainly unfair but not altogether groundless. Some of Emerson’s writings can be off-putting at times, especially when taken out of context. Most famously, in Emerson’s hymn to nonconformity—“Self-Reliance”—the transcendentalist professes such a radical disavowal of social obligations in pursuit of genius that his individualism seemingly transforms into something akin to an unfeeling libertarianism. He first proclaims he will “shun father and mother and wife and brother” when his genius calls, writing on “the lintels of the door-post, Whim,” and in the next breath flippantly disregards his obligation to the poor: “Are they my poor?”³ But to suggest that Emerson is simply coldly rejecting his social obligations or taking an apolitical stance is to willfully misunderstand him.

The primary achievement of A Political Companion to Emerson, then, is in righting this complicated, and oft-skewed version of the famous transcendentalist. As several of the critics in this volume point out, Emerson is posturing here. He aims for shock in his attack on “the thousandfold Relief Societies” that merely conform instead of reform and thus offer relief to no one.⁴ Ever the “reluctant reformer” (as Lawrence Buell terms him in his recent biography), this younger, ³more idealistic Emerson ultimately confirms his commitment to self-reliance even when faced with the pragmatic realities of slavery and other social injustices later in life.⁵ It is only after his death that Emerson became increasingly estranged from these moments of political activism. Defanged of his radical politics and abolitionist stance beginning with Holmes’s and Cabot’s biographies in the 1880s, this depoliticized version of Emerson was perpetuated by critics through the 1980s, who tended to emphasize his passive self-reliant (and apolitical) individualism, as volume editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk highlight in their lengthy introduction (16-17). Within this context, Emerson is a prime candidate for sustained political study, the first of its kind in Emerson studies.

Youthful scholars more familiar with Emerson criticism of the last twenty years will be surprised that he was ever so roughly handled by late-nineteenth- and earlier twentieth century Emerson scholars. It may seem strange to image an author, who wrote so movingly about abolition, de-politicized first by his contemporaries and later by the academy. Some readers might even question the value of pushing against such fossilized scholarship. However, working through A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from its “classic” re-readings of Emerson’s political mind from the 1990s through more current twenty-first century scholarship, readers will perceive not just a dynamic picture of the famous transcendentalist’s political mind, but also a multi-vocal intellectual history of political scholarship on Emerson. As a political companion, the collection sketches the complicated and sometimes contradictory development of Emerson’s political thinking as much as the complicated and contradictory development of scholarly uses of Emerson’s political thinking. Dissonant and melodious, frustrating and engaging, the authors and texts thankfully do not present an explicit or clear picture of Emerson’s politics; but nor should they. The selected authors instead rub up against each other, praising and censuring accordingly, but never quite coming to consensus, forming the kind of dissensus that Emerson would heartily approve.

A substantial volume (thirteen essays in all), the book is divided into four sections beginning with four “classic” texts on Emerson by notable political theorists and philosophers: William Carey McWilliams, Judith Shklar, George Kateb and Stanely Cavell. In choosing a chapter from McWilliams’s formidable 1973 study of national manhood, The Idea of Fraternity in America, to begin their collection, Levine and Malachuk forward a version (albeit mild) of the apolitical Emerson the volume is designed to contradict. But this is done to effect. McWilliams argues that Emerson wasn’t so much an apolitical thinker but a political idealist who believed that human progress would eventually abolish slavery and the United States would become a “political brotherhood.” For McWilliams, Emerson “firmly believed that progress did not require a movement; it was written in the motion of nature, and would come of itself” (46). Because the political brotherhood was inevitable, Emerson was able to eschew politics, McWilliams maintains. While McWilliams briefly concedes that Emerson’s rhetorical use of fraternity has allowed numerous critics to cast Emerson as a philosopher of democracy, he ultimately concludes that, “Emerson’s was a doctrine of activity, individualistic romanticism, not democracy” (48-9). Emerson, then, is not a champion of democracy but of individualism in such a reading. McWilliams’s essay may seem out of place given the aim of this volume, but it represents an important shift from previous attacks on Emerson’s self-reliant individualism: McWilliams does not completely depoliticize Emerson but instead makes him politically passive. It is this version of Emerson’s political passivism that later essays in this volume vividly confront.

The second “classic” text by Judith Shklar likewise reconsiders the notion that Emerson’s individualism was at odds with democracy. Where McWilliams sees in Emersonian thinking a call for a progressive political brotherhood, Shklar finds reconciliation between democracy and individualism in Emerson’s skepticism. Focusing on Representative Men and “Self-Reliance,” Shklar suggests that skepticism and democracy were joined in Emerson’s mind because individuals participating in a democracy necessarily have doubts about the opinions of fellow citizens (65-66). But Emerson’s purpose in writing Representative Men is not merely to praise Montaigne’s skepticism, Shklar maintains, but to demonstrate the “absolute necessity of great men for revealing the possibilities of reason, imagination, discovery, and beauty” without “begrudging the great men their glory, not because he was small minded but because an uncritical belief in great people was not compatible with his democratic convictions” (59). Because Emerson thought we were all reformers, there must be doubts, Shklar ultimately insists.

Shklar’s essay is in many ways a platform for her working out of her own political theory to contend with the current problems of American democracy and has been used as such by fellow political theorists. Shklar finds redemption in political skepticism. In this sense, the editors might have been better served using Sacvan Bercovitch’s “Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent” (published in 1990) in the South Atlantic Quarterly instead of Shklar’s more politically provocative piece. Bercovitch’s essay comes to roughly the same conclusion—finding in Emersonian thinking a space for dissent within a democratic consensus—and has had a greater impact on American literary studies than Shklar’s treatise.

The final two authors in this first section—Cavell and Kateb—are most aptly selected. In Buell’s fitting assessment, “No one has written more searchingly about Emerson’s theory of self-reliance than George Kateb.”⁶ As the essay selected for this volume demonstrates, Kateb has come to understand Emerson’s self-reliance as promoting an individualism that works within instead of against democracy. Emerson’s problem with democracy, as Kateb notes, is that it requires “association,” which has the potential to disturb self-reliance. But since Emerson calls for self-reform in his self-reliance, Kateb finds in Emerson a means to defend the individual against institutional regulation. Elsewhere Kateb calls this means “negative individuality,” or the kind of character that disobeys unjust conventions and laws.⁷ The resulting struggle for self-reliance, in Kateb’s estimation, “is a struggle against being used” (87). Stanley Cavell is also invested in the philosophical matter of instrumentalism, but he finds a more suitable answer in Emerson’s skepticism or his “averse thinking” as the title suggests, connecting Emerson directly to the philosophy of Heidegger and Nietzsche. That said, much like Shklar’s skepticism, Cavell’s “averse thinking” has had more impact in philosophy and political theory than Emerson studies or the study of American literature but it is a worthy inclusion none-the-less.

Part 2 of this volume is ambiguously titled “Emerson’s Self-Reliance Properly Understood,” but it might be better identified as “Emerson’s Self-Reliance and the Politics of Slavery.” The three essays contained in it look more carefully at Emerson’s self-reliance in the context of a democracy that suffers slavery, arguably the most troubling aspect of Emerson’s writings. Jack Turner, James H. Read, and to a lesser extent Len Gougeon, each explore Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance in conjunction with slavery and social reform. Both Turner and Read call attention to Emerson’s increasingly public abolitionist stance beginning with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 precisely because it made him and every other northern explicitly complicit to slavery, an institution which likewise denied slave and master the ability to realize self-reliance.

~

Dissonant and melodious, frustrating and engaging, the authors and texts thankfully do not present an explicit or clear picture of Emerson’s politics; but nor should they.

~

In Turner’s careful reading of Emerson’s “ethics of citizenship,” he discerns a “complex interplay” of two key ideas: self-reliance and complicity (126-7). While Turner is attentive to the fact that Emerson never addressed these two terms directly (complicity and self-reliance), he finds in Emerson’s antislavery writings and his abolitionist activities a clear demonstration of his (Emerson’s) belief in their incompatibility, for complicity is just another name for conformity. Turner is likewise careful to not exaggerate Emerson’s activism, noting that he was reluctant to speak out about slavery until the Fugitive Slave Law required more action of him. In the end, Turner finds in Emerson’s ethics of citizenship “a politics of self-reliance that allows for moral compromise” and “a promising model for meeting the contemporary challenge of civic engagement (142).

Moving from Turner’s ethics of citizenship, Gougen and Read focus on the complicating factors informing Emerson’s self-reliance as well as his changing relation to the abolition movement as new laws began to force citizens into conformity and complicity with the institution of slavery. Clearly the traumatic events of the mid-nineteenth century troubled Emerson’s definition of self-reliance. Emerson responded, Read claims, by embracing John Brown and his radical politics and speaking out against slavery more vociferously. Both acts are deeply political for Read: speaking out against slavery in antebellum America was tantamount to taking action against it (162). In this context, Emerson’s self-reliance becomes a model for moral compromise and a means of taking action against slavery “without along the way compromising or suffocating one’s own intellectual and practical self-reliance” (153). But most importantly, Read contributes a picture of Emerson as a growing intellectual mind who recognized the limits of his self-reliant philosophy later in life and strove to reconcile these limits in a democracy that denied self-reliance to slave and master alike. Along these lines, Gougeon looks beyond Emerson’s self-reliant treatise to see how Emerson used his transcendental philosophy in the service of social reform. This philosophy allows for every person (regardless of race) to participate in the universal (the “Over-Soul”) “providing the basis for both individual self-reliance and a collective identity” (186). For Gougeon, Emersonian social reform may begin with the individual, but it does not end there; self-reform leads to social reform. And, like Read and Turner, Gougeon also highlights Emerson’s evolving transcendental thinking, demonstrating a commitment to “rotation” and “becoming.”

Part 3 of the collection is dedicated to probing Emerson’s transcendental philosophy in an effort to recover Emerson’s transcendentalism without setting it apart from his political philosophy. As numerous critics in this volume note, Emerson has been as much denuded of his transcendental philosophy as his political philosophy. The essays put forward in this section, then, “retranscendentalize” Emerson whilst they repoliticize his thinking, locating in Emersonian transcendentalism no opposition to political engagement. Alan M. Levine grapples with Emerson’s skepticism, concluding that Emerson’s doubt was fundamental to his transcendental beliefs, while Daniel S. Malachuk battles past scholarship that has effectively detranscendentalized Emerson, obscuring the commitment to equality in his transcendental thinking. Finally, Shannon L. Mariotti examines Emerson’s metaphors of vision, questioning his ability to see problems clearly with transcendental sight. Noting a change in his thinking around 1844, Mariotti concludes that Emerson came to question the validity of his transcendental vision, ultimately finding a middle ground in his transcendental visual practice of “focal distancing.” Mariotti’s essay ultimately explores a version of Emersonian political theory that reconciles his transcendental idealism with the practicalities of social reform.

The fourth and final section is also the most knotty, designed to cast Emerson as a devout liberal (or progressive) democrat. While Emerson’s progressive democratic leanings are undeniable (Buell goes so far as to claim Emerson personified the Union ideal for moderates as well as progressives during the Civil War), the three contributors concluding this volume emphasize (or perhaps over-emphasize) certain aspects of liberal democracy said to be embraced by Emerson.⁸

Neal Dolan’s recent account of Emerson’s theories of commerce aims to reinterpret our understanding of his vision of liberal democracy. In doing so, Dolan offers a new interpretation of Emerson’s use of the language of ownership, commerce, and property. At once muddled and overly rigid, Dolan’s argument maintains that Emerson uses the language of property and commerce to “symbolically resolve a cultural dilemma” between old world economics and new world economics (344). For Dolan, Emerson championed America’s liberal democratic values against European feudal-aristocratic social systems on the one hand; on the other, he was weary of the American tendency to “reduce all relationships to marketplace calculations” (344). Dolan concludes that “Emerson inflected this economic idiom in distinctive ways in an attempt to raise his audiences understanding of their rightful property, and thus of their rightful selves, to a yet higher, more spiritual, and more ecstatic plane” (345). However, in interpreting Emerson’s economic idioms within the context of “Puritanism, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the full emergence of a market economy in antebellum America,” Dolan strips Emerson (and his contemporary transcendentalists) of his more radical politics in order to frame the transcendentalist as a pro-capitalist liberal democrat (345). This version of Emerson is not only unpalatable but also largely incorrect. One must remember that Emerson rubbed elbows with Orestes Brownson, who espoused a brand of socialism in the 1830s that Marx would make famous a decade later. This is not to suggest that Emerson was as radical a socialist as Marx or even Brownson (no need to rush-order your Che Emerson t-shirts), but I would challenge Dolan’s assertion that Emerson was “pro-market” during his “supposedly radical phase” in both action and thought (361). As evidence for this claim, Dolan first points out that Emerson “participated” in market-capitalism to the extent that he marketed himself (the action). He then offers a problematic reading of a passage from “Politics,” in which Emerson makes the outrageous assertion that “while the rights of all as persons are equal…their rights in Property are very unequal” (the thought). If taken at face value, this evidence is indeed damning, but here Dolan fails to recognize Emerson’s posturing as a mechanism for criticizing a political system of which he was often skeptical.

In contrast to Dolan’s interest in property, Jason Frank probes Emerson’s understanding of representation and representativeness in order to demonstrate the democratic importance the “representative man.” For Frank, Emerson’s representative men are not departures from his philosophy of self-reliance because “they elicit the transformative capacities of democratic constituencies forever in the midst of a process” (385). Because there is a distinct relational dynamic between the representative and the represented according to Frank, “this relation stimulates perfectionist transformation” not at odds with Emerson’s theory of self-reliance. The final essay by G. Borden Flannigan likewise reassesses Emerson’s commitment to excellence in the face of liberal democracy in “Representative Men,” but does so by stressing his debt to Plato and Aristotle.

In reading this collection of essays one gets the sense that Emerson was not an explicitly political thinker; nor was he an explicitly apolitical thinker. He might be best represented as an evocative thinker, a philosopher (often a political philosopher), a humanist, and of course a transcendentalist. He thought carefully and “becomingly” (in an Emersonian sense) about the world in which he inhabited. It is therefore difficult to locate his philosophy—political or otherwise—in just one text or at just one moment in his life. When Emerson wrote, “rotation is the law of nature” in Representative Men, he is not dwelling on physical laws of change; his meaning is social and political, suggesting process, progress, and most importantly change over time on a personal level as much as a national level. And since we now readily accept that personal is political, this volume, along with this series, reminds us never to regard any thinker as wholly removed from the political sphere.

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Sarah Blythe is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at UNC Chapel Hill. Tentatively titled “Juicy Effects,” her doctoral dissertation examines the excessive florid and floral rhetoric populating the American short story in the decades straddling the Civil War.
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Notes
1. Davis, Rebecca Harding. Bits of Gossip. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904. 33.
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2. Ibid. 46.
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3. Emerson, R.W. “Self-Reliance.”
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4. Ibid.
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5. Buell, Laurence. Emerson. Cambridge; Harvard UP, 2004.
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6. Ibid. 158.
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7. Kateb, George. The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithica: Cornell UP, 1992.
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8. Buell. Op. Cit. 206.
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March 20, 2014
Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau

Politically Transcendental

by David Faflik
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A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, Ed. Jack Turner

To begin his study At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature, John Carlos Rowe levels a late twentieth-century charge against American transcendentalism (and, by extension, American transcendentalists) that might as well have been made a century prior. Indeed, Rowe’s antebellum predecessors anticipated his complaint that Concord, Massachusetts’s so-called sage, the sometime area minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a crank; that his idealistic minions were starry-eyed dreamers; and that the “New School” in literature and religion with which Emerson and his adherents were affiliated was hopelessly removed not only from the everyday concerns of this world, but the eternal concerns of the next. In due course the members of the mostly young, middle class, and restless circle surrounding Emerson had the “transcendental” label attached to them. This was not a flattering designation at the time. Nor has the term entirely lost its negative connotations, as witnessed by the modern practitioners of what Rowe styles “political critique.” In Rowe’s reading, and in Rowe’s words, transcendentalism to this day can be said to suffer from inherent “limitations” as a means of ideological inquiry. Central to these supposed shortcomings is “the romantic idealist assumption that rigorous reflection on the processes of thought and representation constitutes in itself a critique of social reality and effects a transformation of the naïve realism that confuses truth with social convention” (1). Transcendental dissent is from this perspective at best an oxymoron. At worst it’s seen as part of an insidious bourgeois cultural apparatus, the dismantling of which is long overdue.

Among those of Emerson’s contemporaries to have escaped, just barely, the dubious charge of transcendental by association is Henry David Thoreau. The Concord native writer, reformer, and day laborer aspired no less than did his mentor to romantic realms of consciousness. Thoreau as a result has received his share of criticism over his alleged Emersonian abstractions. By and large, however, Thoreau is acknowledged in this our twenty-first century to be a different kind of transcendental animal. On the one hand, he’s been accorded the status of a first-rate artist on the strength of his master work, Walden. On the other hand, Thoreau is celebrated today as much for his politics as his aesthetics. The unabashed contrarian’s reform writings and lectures alone have earned him the reputation of being a social activist who didn’t rest on high-minded principles. And it’s within the context of this abiding revisionist view that we receive A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau. The sixteen individually composed essays that are collected in this volume together set out to test the texture and extent of Thoreau’s political convictions. More to the point, they attempt to answer whether and how the politically signifying words of a reputed transcendentalist such as Thoreau could translate into meaningful action. Here the general consensus is that they did.

As part of the Political Companions to Great American Authors series, Turner has rallied his contributing scholars around the premise that the literary is necessarily political. Or, as the Series Editor Patrick J. Deneen writes, American literature itself must be considered “one of the greatest repositories of the nation’s political thought and teachings,” over and above the usual suspects of political theory and philosophy (Turner vii). Turner accordingly divides the essay contributions from his collection into four broad areas of political interest. These include “Thoreau and Democracy”; “Conscience, Citizenship, and Politics”; “Reverence, Ethics, and the Self”; and “Thoreau and Political Theory.” In the first of these, we witness Thoreau in the perennial transcendental light of his public commitments, as opposed to his private pursuits. In Part II, we’re shown a writer whose work is to be judged in the aggregate as a kind of conscientious speech act, the effectiveness of which performance we’re invited to measure by its contemporary reception. Part III takes on the ethical and metaphysical concerns that Turner sees “both informing and issuing from Thoreau’s politics” (7). Part IV, finally, situates Thoreau’s thoughts and deeds within the comparative framework of canonical political theory, past and present. For this final section, we’re treated to a utopian Thoreau who was influenced by the likes of Jean Jacques Rousseau, before we go on to weigh the great chain of political thinkers (Gandhi, Theodor Adorno, Martin Luther King, Jr., Stanley Cavell) who felt, in turn, Thoreau’s influence. Throughout, Thoreau is credited with “repelling us even as he charms us,” in the process fostering what Turner names “intellectual agon” (10). But not once is the Harvard-trained Latinist turned teacher, tinkerer, writer, lecturer, naturalist, and anti-slavery agitator accused of what commentators in the tradition of John Carlos Rowe might characterize as transcendental fecklessness. In every sense of the word, Turner’s Thoreau matters.

The varieties of Thoreau’s political significance constitute the operative argument of this Companion. There are, for example, fresh reexaminations of Walden. Nancy L. Rosenblum writes of that work’s “romantic aversion,” “calculated to épater la bourgeoisie” (16-17). Brian Walker ranks Walden as “a democratic advice book” for anyone seeking “trade-offs … between freedom and consumption” (59-60). George Shulman bypasses Walker’s “alternative economics” to examine the “poesis” of “prophecy” that’s distilled in the multivalent (“extra-vagant,” in Thoreau’s famous formulation) language of the author’s opus (138). Walden in this reckoning becomes a discursive template for transformation, its imaginative prose a provocative model for readers who would “link citizenship to resistance rather than to subjection” (136).

Not all the Companion is dedicated to Walden, of course. Much as Robert Milder once went about Reimagining Thoreau, in a wide-ranging study that bears that title, Turner’s contributors canvass the full catalog of Thoreau’s writings in an attempt at repoliticizing his entire oeuvre. One popular topic for discussion is “Resistance to Civil Government,” the essay Thoreau wrote in 1849 after his refusal to pay a local poll tax. This latter show of defiance, the author’s chosen protest against U.S. involvement in the Mexican War, landed him for a night in a Concord jail. Now it’s become an occasion for continuing political analysis. Some forty years after Hannah Arendt upbraided the author for allowing “moral obligation” to obviate his political involvements (Arendt 84), scholars debate the impact that “Resistance” has had on everything from the current environmental movement to what Jane Bennett posits are the oppositional “techniques of self” (Turner 294). Equally innovative treatment is given to the web of revealing connections to be drawn when we situate Thoreau’s diverse works – A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “Life Without Principle,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and “Walking,” among others – alongside such disparate figures as the American abolitionist John Brown, President Abraham Lincoln, Hobbes, Locke, Plato, and Karl Marx. We’re even asked to read Adorno’s negative dialectics back into Thoreau, and vice versa. There is, in short, a Thoreau for more or less everyone, irrespective your politics, historical period, or personal expectations of a man whose memory led no less an earnest advocate than India’s Mahatma to urge his followers to be “so many Thoreaus in miniature” (Gandhi 7:267).

~

But not once is the Harvard-trained Latinist turned teacher, tinkerer, writer, lecturer, naturalist, and anti-slavery agitator accused of what commentators in the tradition of John Carlos Rowe might characterize as transcendental fecklessness. In every sense of the word, Turner’s Thoreau matters.

~

If there’s anything missing in this Companion, it’s the old Thoreau. By “old” I don’t mean Rowe’s Emersonian transcendentalist, for whom politics was beside the point. Rather, I mean the man of letters who’s been a mainstay of many an English Department curriculum since at least the appearance in 1941 of F. O. Matthiessen’s canon-making American Renaissance. The Companion’s Series editor, Patrick Deneen, is inclined to conceive of “the great works of America’s literary tradition” as “the natural locus of democratic political teaching.” Belles lettres are from his standpoint best suited for attracting citizen readers who’ll remember the message precisely because of the medium. But whereas an Americanist (and Christian socialist) such as Matthiessen might speak in passing of the “possibilities of democracy” without ever committing himself to the specific political qualities of his texts (Matthiessen 146), A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau suffers from the opposite problem. Deneen again speaks of “the pleasures afforded by … literary form,” and all the “subtle” attentiveness the very category of the literary demands from “careful” and “patient” close readers. Deneen in fact dismisses outright any overly politicized readings that have been predicated on “a hermeneutics of suspicion” (Turner vii). Yet in the end there’s precious little “hermeneutics” at all in Jack Turner’s otherwise ably compiled volume. With several important exceptions, and to state the obvious, most of the essayists in this collection approach Thoreau not as formalists but as political scientists. They’re interested in topics, not tropes.

This isn’t to wish for a return to the apolitical days of the New Criticism. A passing fashion for New Formalism notwithstanding, a harkening back to text as text hardly seems possible, or desirable, in the wake of the cultural turn of the 1970s. What I’m suggesting, instead, is for scholars from any and all academic disciplines to recognize that life and language need not be deemed mutually exclusive, any more than transcendental optimism be regarded as proof positive of political quietism. At the very least, A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau marks the start of that project.

David Faflik

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Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. “Civil Disobedience” (1970), in Crises of the Republic. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1972, 49-102. Print.

Gandhi, M. K. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols. New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1958-1994. Print.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. 1941. Rept. New York: Oxford UP, 1968. Print.

Milder, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print.

March 13, 2014
Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

Beyond Belief: The Political Whitman

by Kerry Larson
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For this volume editor John Seery has commissioned ten essays by political theorists from across the country to assess the politics of that self-professed champion of democracy, Walt Whitman. To establish parameters for the discussion, he has also reprinted essays on the poet by George Kateb, Nancy Rosenblum, and Martha Nussbaum originally published in the 1990s. Seery points out that, as a general rule, political scientists and political philosophers have had little occasion to comment on Whitman. This collection gives them the opportunity to do so.

The tone for much of what follows is set by Kateb’s essay, which leads off the volume. For Kateb, Whitman is “a great philosopher of democracy” (19) because his writing is everywhere intent on drawing out the full moral and existential significance of a rights-based individualism, cornerstone of liberal democracy. A key assumption of his account is that such an individualism is a “strange idea” whose true implications are in constant danger of being simplified, overlooked, or irreparably distorted. A poem like “Song of Myself” is exemplary for Kateb in getting us to see how democratic individuality is “valuable mostly as a preparation for receptivity or responsiveness” (20). Here, in his best-known poem, the bard sings and celebrates a self that is not a historical person but “a composite democratic personality” which, in “its tolerance, its hospitableness, and its appetite for movement, novelty, mixture, and impurity” affirms the best qualities of a “democratically receptive culture” (37). Personal eccentricity and empathic connectedness go hand in hand. The self, Whitman’s poetry continually shows, is composed of many selves, a discovery that not only accounts for the perennial “strangeness” of identity but is decisive, in Kateb’s account, for creating an enriched appreciation for the strangeness and diversity of other selves.

Others, taking stock of what Cristina Beltran calls Whitman’s “amazing mobility of identity,” go along with the substance of Kateb’s analysis while worrying at its possible limitations. For Beltran, “Whitman’s all-encompassing ethic sometimes faltered as the poet associated slaves, blacks, and blackness with that which was repellent and/or corrupt” (68), while Terrell Carver finds that Whitman’s “universalizable concept of democracy” betrays a masculine bias that reduces “female difference [to] domesticity, child care, and sexual availability to men” (236). Similar reservations emerge for Michael J. Shapiro, whose “Whitman and the Ethnopoetics of New York” argues that Whitman’s “side-by-side and monocular and optimistic (often dissensus-denying) point of view” does not always do justice to “the micropolitics of the city” (210). But calling attention to the limits of inclusiveness in Leaves of Grass doesn’t make inclusiveness any less privileged as a critical ideal, and in this sense interpretations of the kind advanced by Kateb (or Martha Nussbaum, who shares many of the same views) are prepared not only to take such demurrals in stride but welcome them. So long as recognition controls one’s sense of what counts as political, expanding the scope of recognition may be viewed as advancing the cause of the political. Thus for example when it comes to considering a topic like equality, it’s “equality of respect” (237) that trumps all other considerations in the majority of these essays. Democracy here is primarily a matter of “feeling right,” to recall Stowe’s exhortation at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By and large, it is less a matter of beliefs one might accept or reject than a collection of dispositions and perceptions that one can either experience or fail to experience.

Behind this outlook lurks the old suspicion, voiced most memorably by European thinkers like Hegel and Tocqueville, that liberal democracy doesn’t stand for anything in particular, that it is destitute of higher principles—unless doing as one pleases can be called a higher principle. Kateb and others are excited by Whitman’s verse, notwithstanding its occasional blind spots, because it puts flesh on that threadbare skeleton, rights-based individualism. To read through A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is indeed to discover that the conventional terms of social critique have been turned on their head: rather than the interpreter exposing the mystifications and bad faith of hegemonic practices that perpetuate injustice, we have commentators endeavoring to identify the terms of a mythology robust enough to animate core principles that by themselves are “too thinly cognitive . . . [and] too narrowly calculating” (156) to win full allegiance. Strange as it may seem to describe a collection of analytic essays along these lines, this attempt at extrapolating an ideology worth getting excited about does have the advantage of following the poet’s lead, most especially in his long prose tract written after the Civil War, Democratic Vistas, which begins with the author affirming that, while the United States is incontestably a democracy now that it has passed its severest test, the country nevertheless urgently requires bards to instruct a materialistic and myopic people in the true lessons of democracy. It is in this context that Whitman calls upon his successors to produce the “great poems of death” that might model a vision of democratic governance not motivated by fear or simple self-interest. In an inspired move, the editor dedicates the concluding section of the book to the topic of death and citizenship and includes essays by Peter Augustine Lawler, Jack Turner, and Morton Schoolman that, taking Democratic Vistas as a key text, insightfully probe into the relation between these two vital elements in Whitman’s poetry and prose.

The larger question raised by A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is whether its efforts at ideological retrieval and rehabilitation succeed. Kateb’s account of Whitman’s poetics of empathy is undeniably stirring, but there is a sense in which it is no less abstract or dogmatic than the core beliefs it is meant to enshrine and ennoble. This becomes apparent when Kateb pauses to denounce Whitman’s nationalism on the grounds that its sense of group identity is invidiously restrictive (he says the same about Whitman’s calls for “manly friendship”). But if the objects of the poet’s “receptivity and responsiveness” are in theory boundless, then it would appear that not just nationalism (or homosexuality) is unacceptably restrictive as markers of identity, but virtually any object of the poet’s empathy. The point is not that empathy is stretched thin and thus made superficial by the sheer multiplicity of experiences the world has to offer, as D. H. Lawrence once complained. Rather, the imperative to identify with any and everything necessarily means, as a matter of principle, identifying with nothing in particular. Empathy itself becomes an abstract gesture. Putting receptivity and responsiveness first is a self-defeating policy if it’s really receptivity and responsiveness that we most care about. From this standpoint, I agree with Nancy Rosenblum, who points out in her response to Kateb’s essay that Leaves of Grass invites us to regard democracy as above all an aesthetic spectacle of sublimity and for this reason is more “public than civic” (56). By this Rosenblum means that Whitman’s brand of egalitarianism does not “translate nicely into defense of rights or representative value” since his “attraction to democracy . . . is not to other men and women personally and individually” (56) but rather to a dazzling parade of types such are as put on display in the famous catalogues, where beauty attaches to the abstract idea of a collectivity that for Rosenblum remains expressly independent of any political outcome. (In another essay, Jane Bennett likewise de-couples the poet’s stance from any determinate political result in the course of offering an interesting meditation on the importance of impersonal judgment in Leaves of Grass.)

~

Rather than the interpreter exposing the mystifications and bad faith of hegemonic practices that perpetuate injustice, we have commentators endeavoring to identify the terms of a mythology robust enough to animate core principles that by themselves are “too thinly cognitive . . . [and] too narrowly calculating” (156) to win full allegiance.

~

I conclude with a comment on method. Kateb’s opinion that Whitman’s nationalism is of “secondary importance” (21) and so can be safely excised from our accounts of his work is not necessarily shared by other contributors; Jack Turner, for example, defends this theme on the grounds that it upholds “public identity” in overcoming “privatism” (165). But whether for or against, this pick-and-choose approach blurs the line between trying to understand what Whitman meant and trying to coax various pieces of a poetic puzzle into a picture that will seem compelling to today’s reader. It blurs, in other words, the difference between interpretation and extrapolation. To bracket Whitman’s interest in nationalism because it doesn’t conform to his larger project (or to put it back in because it does) may put us in touch with “the Whitman that matters” (24) for (some) contemporary readers of the poet, but the practice of playing up or playing down various aspects of his writing has nothing to do with interpreting that writing. The blithe disregard of this distinction is all the more striking given the persistent valorizing of openness and the need to accept perspectives at odds with our own beliefs. Martha Nussbaum, to take a further example, is a great believer in “working for a society that treats every [man and woman] as an end, and [not] as a mere tool for others” (100) and applauds Whitman for embracing just this principle. But this doesn’t prevent her from recoiling from his “mystical views of oneness” in certain (unidentified) poems late in his career since in such instances the poet “does not seem to grasp how much at odds these ideas are with his project of teaching America and Americans to accept death” (123). The idea is that poems are instruments—“mere tools,” as it were—for advancing a project and are to be evaluated as such. Actually listening to what the poet is attempting to convey in a particular text drops out as a secondary consideration. The elevation of tolerance and pluralism at the thematic level paradoxically circumscribes the extension of genuine critical interest at the interpretive level.

Perhaps it will be said that literary critics such as yours truly are bound to have their own ways of dealing with texts while the political theorists are bound to have theirs. But in fact I don’t think this confusion between interpretation and extrapolation—between understanding and relevance—has much to do with disciplinary differences. Perhaps the most surprising lesson of A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is how little is lost in the translation across this divide. The identitarianism alone shared by so many (though not all) of the contributors—the premise, that is, that a vitally important connection exists between the experiences that one goes through and the beliefs one ends up acquiring (as when Kateb or Nussbaum tell us that discovering the strangeness within ourselves will enable us to appreciate the strangeness in others)—is for most (though not all) members of literature departments a truism too obvious to need defending. Further, this privileging of a politics of identity has, in reaching across the humanities, created the conditions for what increasingly seems to be the default model for a great deal of scholarship in this area, where the kind of close reading made standard by the New Criticism decades ago is joined to an attempt to lay claim to political relevance of one kind or another. Not always as helpful as it could be in exploring the sources and shape of Whitman’s actual political beliefs (only Lawler mentions the importance of Thomas Paine, for example; the index mentions Barnburners and Loco-Focos not at all), A Political Companion to Walt Whitman nonetheless provides an interesting occasion to reflect on current attempts to articulate the relationship between politics and art in the writings of a figure frequently preoccupied by the same question.

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Kerry Larson
University of Michigan

March 6, 2014
Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Henry Adams

Being Henry Adams

by Barry Maine
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This volume of essays successfully challenges Henry Steele Commager’s assertion in 1937 (reprinted in this volume) that Henry Adams’ “chief significance” is not as a historian or philosopher or teacher or political thinker but as a self-proclaimed symbol of the 20th Century Man educated for the wrong century. It does so by devoting less attention to the author of The Education of Henry Adams than to the other Henry Adams: the editor of the North American Review, the political scientist, the historian, the late convert to the religious scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, and the secret author of two novels. Nevertheless, The Education of Henry Adams, his most enduring literary achievement, functions as the pole star in this volume or, to mix my metaphors, a Rosetta Stone in reverse, its cryptic pronouncements re-interpreted in the light of Adams’ previous work in a variety of genres.

More than a few authors of these essays point out that Henry Adams’ worries about American democratic government are not that different from our own today. Can a politician beholden to a particular set of interests set those interests aside in the service of the greater, public good? Could such a “statesman” be elected (or re-elected) by popular vote? Have political parties hijacked American democracy? Do our elected officials understand enough about global finance to steer the American economy in rough waters? Do advances in technology threaten human control of government? Adams wasn’t optimistic about our solving any of these problems. As editor of The North American Review, Adams could criticize anything and everything that was wrong with American democracy, but he occupied that position in part because he saw that the political landscape of his country had changed so dramatically from the time his famous ancestors served as presidents and statesmen that it would be impossible for him to seek elected office himself. So rather than seek to join in the procession, he became engrossed in the study of it. He wrote biographies of important statesmen, a history of the United States, two novels (Democracy and Esther, published anonymously), a series of scholarly essays on American economics, finance, and politics, a book about the Middle Ages (Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres), The Education of Henry Adams, mislabeled (and too often misunderstood) as an autobiography, and volumes of letters brilliantly analyzing how a changing world challenged democratic government. Henry Adams on the subject of American democracy is well worth listening to, if we know how to read him.

Other volumes in this series on the political thought of important American authors combine, like this one, new essays with reprinted ones, which is certainly a valid practice given the wealth of scholarship on the subject. But fewer than half of the essays in the Henry Adams volume are new essays. This may say something about the failure of Henry Adams (yet another one!) to attract a new generation of scholars. The best essays in this collection, with few exceptions, were written decades ago, and it may well be that Adams’ best commentators belonged to an earlier generation of scholars not represented here: Ernest Samuels, Earl N. Harbert, Charles Vandersee, William Jordy, and J.C. Levenson, to name a few. On the other hand, this is not a volume of essays written by literary scholars. The contributors come from other disciplines: history, government, and political science. One feels compelled to ask, then, are these Adams’ best readers? Well, clearly some of them are. Michael Colacurcio reads the two novels as covert explorations of pragmatism, Richard Samuelson contributes a historically nuanced reading of Adams’ 1894 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, and James T. Young brilliantly interprets the evolution of Adams’ complex and evolving political views as they find expression in The Education of Henry Adams.

“Henry Adams on the subject of American democracy is well worth listening to, if we know how to read him.”

There is of course considerable value in bringing together in one place essays, new and old, on such a multifaceted topic, but there isn’t much that is “new” here. (Young’s essay, for example, is reprinted from his own book on Henry Adams, and Colacurcio’s essay is well known enough to be cited by many scholars.) One exception is Denise Dutton’s revisionist reading of Democracy in which she argues that we should not assume that Adams endorses his heroine’s political disillusionment, no matter how much it seems to mirror his own, for that would be reading the novel as autobiography (an all too common practice). Mrs. Madeleine Lee, Dutton argues, is a target of Adams’ satire (for her ambition, misguided sense of privilege, self-indulgence, and self-righteous “moral posturing”) as much as Senator Ratcliffe (for his overt political corruption), and therefore her rejection of American democracy should be regarded as “premature.” Dutton demonstrates that the secondary characters in the novel work together toward a common goal, affirming democracy’s promise, and that the “form” of the novel positions the reader as a participant in the process of negotiating disparate and often opposing views in order to arrive at sound and synthesizing conclusions, models for participation in a democracy for both elected officials and the people who vote for them. Dutton’s is the most radical and most positive reading of Adams’ political thinking in the collection, and the one most acutely attentive to narrative “form,” which Adams once admitted was always his primary interest in everything he wrote.

Any book that shines a light on Henry Adams, one of the most brilliant writers of his or any other generation, is most welcome. The editor of this one, Natalie Fuehrer Taylor, no doubt took on the project with the intention of re-examining the most important aspects and dimensions of Henry Adams’ political thought. Yet that intention is not entirely fulfilled. The volume tends to spin its wheels over the same set of issues (e.g. did Adams believe that history could become a science?) that have been examined before and sometimes to better purpose and effect by J. C. Levenson and company. Other dimensions of Adams’ political thought are missing altogether. There is no essay in this volume that examines Adams’ views on America’s foreign policy, on the uses and abuses of American power abroad, or on his influence upon his close friend John Hay, Secretary of State, in shaping that policy and exercising that power, all of which can be examined in The Letters of Henry Adams. Nor does the volume have much to say about Adams’ views on politically charged domestic issues, such as Westward expansion or Reconstruction in the South. Finally, the approaches to interpreting Adams’ texts are narrower in range than one might have a right to expect. There is nothing wrong, obviously, with “close readings” of the text informed by relevant historical contexts, but one might never know, reading this volume of essays on the political dimensions of literary production, that Fredric Jameson identified something we now recognize as “the political unconscious.” We can look backwards to Hayden White, John Carlos Rowe, and Paul Bové for more theoretically diverse readings of Henry Adams’ political thought, or look forward, hopefully, to a new generation of scholars.

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Barry Maine is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is the author of “Portraits and Privacy: Henry Adams and John Singer Sargent,” in Henry Adams and the Need to Know (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 177-205.

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January 30, 2014