Will Morrisey Reviews

Thomas L. Dumm: Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 18, 1988.

 

A reverse sandwich, bread encased by baloney: in the center of this book, Professor Dumm offers an informative, brief history of the rationale for prisons in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. At the beginning and end, he lays on thick slices of ‘Left’-Nietzscheism, perhaps the most dubious meat now available in academe’s busy cafeteria.

Friedrich Nietzsche utterly despised both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ partisans in the Europe of his time. This has not prevented certain German and French thinkers, and their American imitator, from attempting to use him for political purposes. The ‘Right’s’ efforts ended in the debacle of fascism. Leftists deserve credit for greater caution; they confine their vulgar Nietzscheism to cultural and political criticism, leaving action to the few rash souls who take professorial cant seriously.

Channeling wind from the late Michel Foucault, Professor Dumm commends the study of prisons as instruments and symbols of the subtle, frightening oppression we all suffer in American liberal democracy. If by chance you are not frightened, then I fear you lack subtlety. Professor Dumm will do his best to sensitize your benighted soul.

The United States, you see, “is a disciplinary society.” Few Americans know this, having “fail[ed] to face the strategies of power that constitute them as subjects.” The System needs no obvious methods, such as a centralized and despotic state, which would serve as a focus for popular resentment. Instead, it exercises a device of truly Machiavellian cruelty, “repressive individualism,” whereby each person abides by moral rules voluntarily, in order to work its tyrannical will. “Moral assertions” and “appeals to truth” ought to be ‘deconstructed.’ What, you ask, will replace these mind-forged manacles of the bourgeoisie? Imagination. I hope you’re satisfied.

So go the first sixty pages of a slim book. When the imaginative professor finally gets down to the subject, he turns out to have some intelligent things to say. He considers three prison systems: that of the Pennsylvania Quakers; the “republican” model of the founding period, and the “democratic” model of the nineteenth century.

The Quakers wanted to maintain freedom of conscience while enforcing Christian virtues. Their prisons “maximized the free play of the techniques of moral suasion” by eschewing corporal punishment and treating imprisonment as a time of solitary contemplation and repentance. “Imprisonment was to be a pedagogy.” Dumm shows limited knowledge of Quaker theology. He never mentions the importance of free will and “Inner Light” in Quaker moral psychology. He evidently believes Quakerism innovative in conceiving of the soul as “the battleground of power.” In fact, the Quakers only followed the teachings of Jesus opposing spiritual “principalities and powers.”

On the “republican” penitentiary, Dumm rightly challenges historians who contend that American Founders merely continued English tradition in this and other areas. He shows how the Founders revolutionized “the use of repressive power.”

Dumm concentrates on the reforms of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the physician/statesman who tried to reconcile the republicanism of modern political philosophy and the most recent discoveries of modern science with Christian morality. In a civil society dedicated to liberty, incarceration by itself punishes severely. This, coupled with solitary confinement—a re-enactment of Locke’s state of nature to which the criminal had returned himself, in violation of the social contract—and followed by hard labor—the basis of economic value—aims to re-channel anti-social passions and refit the individual for republican life. Dumm adds that Rush’s penitentiary also stressed Bible-reading—intellectual work to supplement the physical labor—but falsely concludes, “the proposition that all are fundamentally alone is the most extremely liberal aspect of what was designed as a liberal institution.” The Bible hardly teaches that anyone is fundamentally alone; presumably, Dr. Rush wanted prisoners to learn exactly the opposite lesson from their studies.

The “democratic” penitentiary had the more modest aim: to habituate the inmate to socially useful action. Dumm finds this despotic, an instrument of the Demon Industrialism, and puts Tocqueville’s warning against majority tyranny and the replacement of political and republican institutions with bureaucracy, to good if slightly tendentious use. Oddly, leftist critics of ‘the State,’ forgetting that it consists of people, indulge in at least as much mystification as those they claim to enlighten.

Dumm concludes with another Foucaultian chapter, now claiming that the cultivation of fear “might contribute to a rearrangement of the current regime of truth.” Robespierre and Stalin believed that, too (as a reviewer, I exercise my right to counter-tendentiousness) without much wholesome effect. But a ‘disciplinary regime’ that needs a professor to persuade us to believe it exists, may lack needed plausibility.

In the old days, not so good but better than these, Professor Dumm would have written a study longer on research, shorter on polemic. May Nietzsche’s derided but less pretentious “scholarly oxen” return to the fields of published research.

 

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.