Since we are a seminar that is directly addressing the "problem of class," perhaps it is most valuable to begin our discussion with Gienapp's assertion that class divisions in early America are a "myth" produced by the New Left and the "Politically Correct" academy. Gienapp writes through a critique of a particular class based historical analysis, Sellers' work on Jacksonian Politics, but he also implies a wider attack on the use of "class" in the study of history. Because much of Gienapp's work is directly concerned with Sellers, so we must infer how he objects to class based history in general. I propose that we begin by discussing Gienapp's critique so that we can situate our discussion of the other pieces in the historiography.
But in order to understand Gienapp, we might start by looking at his own historical situation. Gienapp spends a lot of time labeling Sellers as an historian "firmly rooted" in the academic climate of the 1960's. He contends that Sellers is part of a mislead "counterculture" and that he produces a "polemical and at times bizarre interpretation of Jacksonian America." (233) But while Gienapp is quick to dismiss Sellers 1991 work as a callback to a confused 1960's, he does not recognize that he is also writing in a deeply polemic time. Across academic disciplines, the end of the Cold War was taken as an intellectual victory for American Liberalism and the market system. Gienapp is correct then when he states that Sellers' work is out of place in 1991, but he takes the current political climate as reason to dismiss class as a means of analysis. As we have discussed in class, the impact of this intellectual climate on social history was to minimize class and elevate 'multicultural' categories like race, gender and ethnicity. This is important for us to recognize because contrary to his claims, Gienapp is himself taking the easy political road.
What is more, Gienapp's piece is written for a policy journal. Although this might seem irrelevant to the subject matter, I think that the study of "policy" requires an implicit endorsement of the American political system: if one wishes only to optimize political policy, then it is necessary to believe that the American political system is, at the very least, fixable. In fact, many places in the text, Gienapp suggests that class history is not compatible with the study of American Democracy (See his discussion on page 251). I think that this kind of analysis is confined by the very paradoxical promises made by the American system that we have hitherto studied in early American History.
If we wish to identify the impact of class on American history, then it is necessary to liberate ourselves from faith in the political system in this country. The culture of equality in American politics is predicated on the expansion of political rights to those who have frequently have not had political representation. But as we have seen so far in our studies, even as America represented an expansion of democratic politics to the many, that expansion takes place without an agreement of what democracy is, or what democratic representation means. I think that the conclusion to draw from Morgan and Bouton is that the expansion of democratic rights is not a political liberation of any kind, but rather a political distraction that occurs, never at great risk, as a means of quelling inherent conflicts that do not fit into easy classification according to liberal political philosophy. This is the intellectual landscape we work from when we analyze class in early America: as long as we maintain allegiance with the American system, our historiography is subject the to the history.
With this in mind, I think that we can move on to Johnson's call for a new mode of social history. Johnson makes one of his most important points when he notes that the current understanding of agency is dependent on the historical conditions in the western world.
[The definition of agency] is saturated with the categories of nineteenth-century liberalism, a set of terms which were themselves worked out in self-conscious philosophical opposition to the condition of slavery. To put this another way: the term "agency" smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of self hood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural condition was originally defined...[ending] up with a more-or-less rational choice model of human being. (115)This argument is essential because it shows how the category of analysis, in this case agency of the enslaved, is a product of the very historical subject that it is trying to define. Johnson is referring to the fact that western liberalism predicated on a ridged individualism that requires an endorsement of a certain psychological state as "rational" and everything else as irrational or even inhuman. Johnson contends that to a historian operating within the tradition of liberalism, which defines humanity in contrast to slavery, slavery is inhuman phenomenon. Johnson's contention is that while slavery is a terrible part of human history, it is an inseparable part of our humanity. As he shows, the institution of slavery actually "makes use" of humanity through psychological terror and abuse. (116) Johnson's is a crucial insight about the categories of enslaved and free and human and inhuman in early American history.
If we are to apply Johnson's article to our efforts as historians of class, then it is necessary to make an analogous insight about the role that class plays in the liberal model of the individual as a rational actor. In reformulating Johnson's argument of agency among the enslaved to an analysis of class, we arrive at essentially the reverse. According to the American liberal tradition, humanity and equality are defined by the participation in a democratic society and equal participation in the government. Slavery, the ultimate political unfreedom, is on this view the ultimate inhumanity.
But as a critical reading of Gienapp shows, the liberal understanding of humanity as participation in the American democratic system is incompatible with an analysis of class. It is not that class is incompatible with the American political system, but rather that the liberal understanding of American politics does not leave room for class. As long as individuals are guaranteed equal political rights, they fit the liberal definition of the human condition.
More to come as an afterwards.... Print this post
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