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The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife. Jon Meacham , Jeffrey A. Engel , Peter Baker and Timothy Naftali. The Essential Debate on the Constitution. The Last Weeks of Abraham Lincoln. The Way We Live Now. The Evil Empire Speech, This is the central problem in all historically oriented cultural studies. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. In a nutshell, the sacred notion of the founding consists of the founding generation first subscribing, by way of the Declaration of Independence, to the idea that all men are equal and endowed with the same natural rights and then incorporating that idea into the original Constitution of through its first ten amendments—ratified in This American Bill of Rights provided the nation with the assurance that the federal government would never restrict freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, or religious freedom.
Hence, we have arrived at the seminal idea of America as a constitutionally, rather than politically, secured free society. This apolitical nature of the founding is its most celebrated aspect, as one may conclude from the fact that politicians so different as Bush and Obama can talk about it in exactly the same way. The political theorist Judith Shklar, for example, once argued that under the Constitution "bargaining replaces the tumult of popular assemblies, as order and freedom are reconciled pre-politically.
Were his attempts perhaps post-political in character? According to the historian Gordon Wood, the "Jeffersonian modern virtue" that "flowed from the citizen's participation in society, not in government" should be distinguished from "participation in politics. Those advocates, contrary to their own vision, not only remained slaveholders, but also failed to foresee the problems that their laissez-faire economic beliefs were bound to cause with the rise of monopoly capitalism by the end of the nineteenth century.
In the final analysis, as champions of "a white male vision" only, the originators failed to realize that women's political rights comprise a logical element of the vision. In sum, Appleby can join the team of Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and others, who find their protagonists constantly anticipating a "coming fashion in thought and feeling. An illuminating example is Michael Zuckert's reading of the Declaration of Independence. In his interpretation, the whole message of the Declaration is derivable from a Lockean, pre-political notion of the universal rights of man. In effect, Zurckert's reading marginalizes all earlier and later historical developments as irrelevant to the true character of the American social contract that this sacred document allegedly embodies.
We are offered a scheme that speaks of political experience but serves mainly to prove how little political history matters. In delineating the "series of six truths" of the Declaration of Independence as a "kind of minihistorical narrative of the political experience of the human race," he offers us "three phases" of society and "the corresponding truths" in this form If government becomes destructive of those ends, there is a right to alter or abolish it.
Human beings, in other words, are not naturally political. This is why all inequalities between them arise from artificial power structures. Instead, the key is the correct ordering of the three truths: This is why the third truth, about instituting a new government, is categorized not as a political but as a "postpolitical" act.
In other words, meaningful change in the Zuckertian "moral history" entails a revolution. Ordinary politics simply vanishes from this ethically charged narrative of the political experience, because any merely political change cannot bring about an essentially postpolitical revolution. Since the original social contract was settled in , the rest of American history automatically loses its significance as anything other than a manifestation of that contract.
In order to carry out his interpretation of the document Zuckert must criticize its wording.
This is how he explicates the weak point: Another way to read the document is that governments were instituted to secure the equal rights of men, and that the problem lay in the revolutionaries' disagreement with the British about the means to preserve their rights. The document begins with their expressed wish to explain to "the candid world" their reasons to dissolve the governmental bonds with the British and establish their state governments anew.
One may argue, therefore, that the revolutionaries' claim for independence was not developed in an apolitical vacuum of extra-historical truths. James Madison, for example, viewed the presumably pre-political state of nature as nothing but sheer anarchy, "where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger" and where "even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to government. Given that even the right to violent revolution is derivable from the Lockean pre-political phase, the middle category of the "political" cannot but represent a peaceful return to that same pre-political phase of unconditional human equality.
Political history—as a sequence of such events as elections, debates, corruption scandals, changes of governments, and the like—is utterly meaningless compared to this grand notion of return. This is why Zuckert's category of politics has nothing to do with what people actually do in politics. It only reiterates their subscription to the first, pre-political Lockean truth. The only genuinely meaningful event that people encounter in the Zuckertian universe of political experience is the Lockean revolution.
He argues, for example, that "no person who understands property as Jefferson does would accept a positive right to life. In the final analysis, our fundamental moral obligation is that of non-interference, because "only a negative right to life can pass the test for becoming a right-in-the-proper-sense. The obvious historiographical problem in Zuckert's scheme is that all human history prior to the American Revolution is diminished to a mere prehistory of "political experience," because the pre-political truth had not yet been grasped.
Yet, any post-Revolutionary event appears equally dependent on this truth, and therefore equally insignificant. As implicated earlier, the "political" phase consists solely of the continuing manifestation of the first, pre-political truth. By the same token, everyday politics begins to seem as a pathetic struggle for nothing but governmental power, and politicians—who, as if by occupational hazard, tend to suggest new policies—begin to seem nothing but an alienated race of corrupt office seekers occupying the nation's capital.
There is no way out of the Zuckertian conception of the politics of return, because nothing else is important enough to rival it. In sum, the fundamental flaw of this conception of politics is that one cannot discern any meaningful difference between the Bush and the Obama administrations' actual policies. Nevertheless, it is not regressive but "progressive" historians who tend to view the national grand narrative as an increasing manifestation of human equality.
On may always construct that narrative upon such events as the emancipation of slaves, women's suffrage, the s civil rights legislation, and Barack Obama's election to the presidency.
Or consider Joseph J. Ellis's statement that "it was Lincoln's expansive revision of the original Jeffersonian version of natural rights philosophy that broadened the message to include blacks. Rather, the principle of human equality became nationalized in the sense that all male Americans were, at least in principle, given equal political rights. The years of racial segregation that followed the Civil War was merely another sad interim, until the s Civil Rights Movement brought about the next return to Locke's pre-political truth about human equality. How could women's struggle for equal suffrage fail to add further proof to this apparently inevitable American progress in manifesting the Lockean truth?
In the historian Daniel Rodgers's apt summary, the Lockean-liberal school could nullify any other competing reading of American history by simply "raising the stakes of what counted as meaningful conflict, until every conceivable demonstration of conflict short of Jacobin or Bolshevist revolution vanished in the all-pervasive liberal consensus. Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Hence one must also encounter the historically variable notion of progress itself. Neem sees the task of national history as "constitutive of one's identity.
Neem also thinks it evident that the "Founding Fathers thought that the nation must embody universal values. For example, in the Presidential elections of , Al Gore's running mate Joseph Lieberman still asserted that the first Amendment of the Constitution has nothing to do with "the freedom from religion. First, it is interesting that for many historians the long-declared death of the grand narrative does not seem to have anything to do with their commitment to the grand idea of globalization.
The problems in adopting globalization as a common denominator of good history writing are similar to those that accompany the American founding. Any such criterion as multiculturalism may have an impact on what appears worth remembering. Do America's founding principles manifest themselves more, say, in the s efforts to desegregate public education than in the policy of Virginia's Prince Edward County of shutting down all public schools in order to stop that process? Certainly, both sides of the controversy could rely on traditional notions of what it means to live up to the standards of the American founding.
Is identity equally important to every individual's self-determination? In theoretical literature the "primary identity" often appears alongside numerous "situational identities. The famous "Celadon" pamphlet, from , has often been referred to as a summary of the Revolutionary generation's multicultural convictions.
In addressing the problem of increasing intergenerational dependence on welfare among Americans, President Ronald Reagan drew on an image of the "welfare queen," but consciously refrained from bringing up the racial aspect of the issue.
According to De Hart this was because "We all 'knew' she was black. Her point is adequate on a much larger scale: What changed in American thought on welfare from the s to the Welfare Reform Act was that for most politicians now "culture rather than structure was the problem.
Her argument that the immigration laws at the turn of the twentieth century were intended to "enhance the shared heritage of the national family" is dangerously close to the typical misconception that human equality in any politically relevant sense can be described by family metaphors. Modern democracy is by definition representative. Whole groups of people are still deprived of political equality even in America, beginning with children and the mentally ill. The innocents are excluded from the constituency; all those included remain responsible also for those excluded.
Common sense is a poor criterion. Quite commonplace patterns of thought sufficed to justify the Inquisition, the sixteenth-century religious wars, slavery in antebellum America, racial segregation, eugenics, the Holocaust, and the like. For a historian who takes it as self-evident that because of scientific progress our common-sense beliefs are of better quality than earlier ones, all this may appear quite unproblematic.
Such a historian can always resort to the notion that the future generations will in any case re-write history. Besides threatening an intellectual bankruptcy such a strategy opens the door for simple political disagreements among scholars. To give an example, when Joyce Appleby defended her view of Jefferson as a forefather of American liberalism against Lance Banning's interpretation of Jefferson as a classic, rather than a liberal republican, she eventually drew on the following maxim: And if theirs is ours, which one of ours?