Beyond Tocqueville, please! (comment on Rogers Smith, American Political Science Review, vol. 87, p. 549)(includes response)

COMMENT

Rogers Smith's "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America" (1993) both speaks to and embodies several deficiencies in the explication of American political thought. The most troublesome problems are the implicit and sometimes explicit claims to originality. Similarly, by virtue of publishing this as a lead article, the American Political Science Review signals that its authors do not have to be responsible for a full spectrum of relevant political writings, but only those that dominate Hartzian-inspired reading lists. Smith's silence on others who have preceded him suggests epistemological missteps, not simple bibliographical ones. I want to be clear that while Smith is the immediate focus of my attention, I see the article as symptomatic of far broader difficulties in the construction of knowledge and history. For tacitly urging what I shall argue is a politically constituted "mainstream" into different avenues of inquiry, however, Smith is to be commended.

As I read the essay, Smith is claiming that all scholarship in American political thought makes one of two mistakes. First, racism and sexism are regarded as deviant sidesteps in the otherwise forward march of liberal ideas in America's political culture. This is the fault of Alexis de Tocqueville (1969), Gunnar Myrdal (1944), Louis Hartz (1955), and anyone who takes their claims seriously. Smith's article begins, "Since the nation's inception, analysts have described American political culture As the preeminent example of modern liberal democracy, of government by popular consent with respect for the equal rights of all" (1993, 549). Second, in contradiction to his first claim, Smith notes books in which racism and sexism are treated as central aspects of American political culture, but these works wrongly suggest that inegalitarian ideologies are of a piece with the liberal nation-state: the "recurring admixture" of racist, sexist, and liberal values "does not prove that ascriptive inegalitarian outlooks have been logically compatible with liberal democracies" (p. 556, emphasis original).(1) Although some writers do recognize that racism is a crucial feature of American politics (e.g., writers in Critical Race Studies) and recognize that this is not at one with liberal aspirations, these texts are "rare and do not yet extend to explicit critiques of Tocquevillian frameworks or to any developed alternatives" (ibid.). Smith offers to prove for the first and definitive time that racism and sexism are a part of this country's political culture and so is liberalism and that the ideologies are incompatible. Smith labels this theoretical insight the multiple traditions thesis: "At its heart, the multiple traditions thesis holds that the definitive feature of American political culture has been not its liberal, republican, or 'ascriptive Americanist' elements but, rather, this more complex pattern of apparently inconsistent combinations of the traditions, accompanied by recurring conflicts" (p. 558).

Smith's expository discussions as well as his thesis misinform. First, sweeping claims about the hegemony of Tocqueville, Hartz, and Myrdal are naive and wrong, as Smith himself illustrates in his use of both historical and political theory texts that specify how the narratives of his troika are incorrect. So why is Smith saying that analysts tell a Pollyanna-ish version of our country's history when his own references, published under the imprimatur of university presses, falsify this claim? At the heart of the error is the status of what Smith calls mainstream approaches (or "conventional narratives" or "recent major works" [1993, 550, 556]), which are defined only implicitly, and circularly at that: Tocquevillian approaches are mainstream and mainstream approaches are Tocquevillian. This is the unconquered terrain that justifies his expedition. Smith never explains the formation of this mainstream scholarship or its relation to credible but nonmainstream thought. So Smith is never prompted to consider why his intervention will be a mainstream one, while other scholarship making similar points is not. Yet this distinction is really at the crux of his article, which offers no significant original arguments, but offers old ones to a mainstream (i.e., white, male-dominated) forum. Smith's essay is not published in the APSR because it is innovative to the mainstream (lots of people have made Smith's critique, and far more persuasively, including some of those Smith cites). Rather, his ideas are innovative to the mainstream because they appear in the APSR.

"Analysts" do not write a monolithic narrative of American political culture, as Smith's introductory paragraph implies (1993, 549). Rather, some people write some things, and some people write other things. For some reason, Smith and mainstream scholarship choose not to discuss the views of American political culture held by W. E. B. ("The-problem-of-the-twentieth-century-is-the-problem-of-the-colo r-line") Du Bois. Smith refers to Du Bois just once, to say that he was a Lamarckian (p. 562). Smith's silence on Du Bois, who engages in precisely the kinds of analyses Smith believes are absent, is disturbing. What would we make of an article on the scholarship of American political culture that mentioned Tocqueville only to say that he believed aristocrats innately superior? In any case, although at times Du Bois discusses the relation between the "soul" of a people and its bloodlines, the source of this is more Hegelian than Lamarckian.(2) And Du Bois's insistence on the social determinations and manifestations of race becomes more pointed over time. In The Negro ([1915] 1975b) he writes that race is not a scientific category (1975b, 13). In Dusk of Dawn ([1940] 1992), after Du Bois destroys all conventional definitions of race, the composite interrogator, Van Dieman, asks, "But what is this group; and how do you differentiate it; and how can you call it 'black' when you admit that it is not black?" Du Bois responds, "I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia" (1992, 153). Unless the giraffe is the animal that under legal sanction must eat from tall branches, Smith's allusions to Lamarckianism mislead.

Throughout his career Du Bois was especially attentive to the fluctuations and paradoxes of American political culture, albeit many of his earlier writings (though not all) suggest a more optimistic telos than that which Smith holds. However, in Dusk of Dawn (1992 [1940]), one of his more widely read books, Du Bois restates his 1905 announcement of the formation of the Niagara movement, which describes the "new American creed: fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become the equals of the white. And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ" (1992, 90). At the point at which Du Bois is setting down this memoir, he has concluded that the White World is shot through with antonymies, which pose a "dilemma" for the White Man (153-54, 160). After laying out the contradictory "codes" of the Christian-Gentleman-American-White Man, Du Bois writes:

The trouble was, however, that when my friend tabulated all of the codes which he at once and apparently simultaneously was to put in action, he found a most astonishing reality and here it is:

 
Christian         Gentleman          American          White Man 

 
Peace             Justice            Defense           War 
Good Will         Manners            Caste             Hate 
Golden Rule       Exclusiveness      Propaganda        Suspicion 
Liberty           Police             Patriotism        Exploitation 
Poverty           Wealth             Power             Empire 

Looking them over he doesn't know what on earth to do. It is not only a dilemma, it is almost a quadri-lemma. (pp. 164-65)

Du Bois here recognizes the tenacious survival of analytically separate ideologies in the United States. Clearly and self-consciously, Du Bois neither privileges one column as "truly" American (the move for which Smith faults Tocquevillians) nor adduces any ultimate coherence of this ideological system. Instead, his interlocutor says: "It's all both reasonable and impossible. Take each column alone and it is to me absolutely convincing. I believe in it" (p. 165). The Christian-Gentleman-American-White Man goes on simply to restate the content of each column, conceding that their dynamics are "not logical, correct, compelling" (p. 167). The "quadrilemma" just is. It is not surprising that the terms of this dilemma were popularized by Gunnar Myrdal (1944), whose American Dilemma includes more references to Du Bois than to any other single individual.(3)

Earlier in this chapter, Du Bois, again prefiguring Smith, describes the ascriptive …