Daniel T. Rodgers: Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, June 14,1988.
“Logocracy,” not republic or democracy, was Washington Irving’s word for the American regime. Daniel T. Rodgers agrees; our “political culture” coheres by virtue of words that bind, words that “legitimize the outward frame of politics, creating those pictures in our heads which make the structures of authority tolerable and understandable.”
This view of politics, called realistic by its adherents, reduces the meaning of words to their use. Because it denies the existence of any stable ideas to which used and abused words might refer, this school refuses to think that politics can be about anything other than power, fundamentally.
Principles? Mere “abstractions.” Even historians who try to posit “paradigms,” those weak imitation-ideas invented by science historian Thomas Kuhn, commit the “fallacy of misplaced coherence.” “We have been too conflict-ridden a church to have a creed.” Contested, not self-evident truths are what Rodgers wants us to see as we look at the American past. He takes his keyword “keywords” from a British neo-Marxist, ideologically congenial.
Having said that, one also should say that Rodgers doesn’t let his dogmatic skepticism carry him too far into misology and propaganda. Although biased against such “abstractions” as natural rights and Christianity, he does see some of the picture; almost poignantly, he wishes for something his epistemology will not let him have—a public realm where citizens can deliberate meaningfully.
He selects his “keywords” with studious avoidance of the word ‘equality,’ the most ‘key’ of words in any regime where citizenship extends to everyone. In so doing he fails to consider not only the core of the American regime but the theoretical core of its most virulent competitors, his fellow Marxists.
Rodgers begins instead with utility, “one of the glittering words of the Enlightenment.” One might expect Americans to find a doctrine centering on practicality appealing, but utilitarianism, the reduction of human life to the quest for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, failed to win many admirers here. Americans were too afflicted by the “hunger for abstractions”—specifically, Christianity, the Word that does not take kindly to the utilitarian notion of words as mere tools.
The God who created all men equal endowed them with certain unalienable rights; “natural rights” is Rodgers’ second target for deconstruction. Natural-rights talk amounts to thinking “utopianly,” he claims, circularly confirming his argument by dismissing the Declaration of Independence as “a legally impotent document” unconnected to the Constitution. He describes the conflicts leading to the Civil War as “the elevation of practical claims into the higher stuff of rights”—a thesis that explains everything except Abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln, and the war itself.
Turning from the Declaration to the Constitution, Rodgers discusses “the People” who speak in the Preamble through their representatives. Who are the People? A “democracy of white adult males,” Rodgers answers, overlooking the way those whites killed each other over black slavery, and eventually shared their power with women because they venerated those ‘abstractions,’ God and natural rights.
Rodgers prefers to identify Christianity with conservative reaction to the natural rights doctrine and to the Revolution, appeals to which reached something of an extreme with Jacksonian democracy. He does not see that ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ argued over different aspects of the same ideas, both sides appealing to Christian faith and natural rights philosophy, at times exaggerating their claims beyond what the Constitution legitimates. This is the normal working of republican politics. Surface conflict masks a deeper coherence, and when that conflict gets past the surface, the republic risks civil war, a real conflict over real ideas.
Rodgers’ own ideology prevents him from taking the American revolutionary and civil wars seriously. But the post-Civil War period, with its Gilded-Age conservatism and its equally gilt-edged antagonist, Progressivism, deserves less serious treatment, which Rodgers eagerly provides. On the ‘Right,’ judicial review as exercised by the Supreme Court of the day often did not so much defend the Constitution as a body of civil law in defense of natural rights as it undermined natural rights with legal positivism, the doctrine which claims that rights and laws are what lawmakers, most emphatically and indeed preeminently including judges, say they are.
Meanwhile, on the ‘Left,’ the newly-founded political science profession did what it could to strip away such ‘unscientific’ fripperies as the social contract, unalienable rights, and government by consent. Rodgers catches Professor Woodrow Wilson calling Thomas Jefferson’s writings “false and artificial,” indeed “un-American.” Thanks to the professors, God and natural right gave way to ‘History’ in the minds of American elites. This situation persists to this day among social-science academics and their students in the courts and the media.
‘History’ itself has changed noticeably in the century since its popularization by American scholars. At first ‘idealist’/Hegelian, it turned empirical after the First World War knocked the stuffing out of things lofty and Germanic. It ran into the arms of two other Germans, Max Weber and (almost unmentioned here) Karl Marx. Despite this, Rodgers admits “the ineradicability of rights talk, despite repeated efforts to root it out.” It’s almost enough to make you think such rights self-evident.
What we have here is a book of six chapters, two of them worth reading. And that, in the eccentric arithmetic of book reviewing, is not half-bad.
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