The Myth of the “Weak” American State

Abstract

The American present is at odds with representations of the American past. The American present witnesses the steady aggrandizement of executive, administrative, emergency, penal, military, and war powers as contemporary commentators such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben contemplate the contours of American hegemony and superpower in a new era of empire.1 The global impact of present American politics, political economy, and foreign policy is obvious to any casual observer of current affairs. The story of the American past, on the other hand, continues to be told in narratives that seem to be heading off somewhere else. In place of the growth of power, the history that America most frequently tells itself highlights a story of relative powerlessness—a usually benign tale of legal-political self-abnegation, emphasizing constitutional restraints such as federalism, checks and balances, the separation of powers, limited government, the rule of law, and laissez-faire. When presented more positively, American history is usually framed as a quest for freedom—the struggle for political liberty, emancipation from bondage, the rise of civil, economic, and social rights. Property, contract, and freedom of speech, press, and association form the constitutional backbone of a free market, a vigorous civil society, and a democratic polity—hallmarks of a free people. Oddly, key elements of this tale are kept alive in both older political histories of the liberal tradition in America and newer histories highlighting the rights and agency of particular cultural communities. Coming to terms with the historical rise of the mechanisms of legal, political, economic, corporate, and technological power that currently shape so much of the globe is thus a more difficult task than it should be. A true philosophical and political history of the American present continues to elude historians.2 This disjunction between historical perception and political reality is not an entirely new phenomenon in the United States. As early as 1887, in a penetrating essay titled “The American State and the American Man,” Albert Shaw chided Americans for their laissez-faire fantasy: “The average American has an unequaled capacity for the entertainment of legal fictions and kindred delusions. He lives in one world of theory and in another world of practice … Never for a moment relinquishing their theory [of laissez-faire], the people of the United States have assiduously pursued and cherished a practical policy utterly inconsistent with that theory, and have not perceived the discrepancy.” Surveying thousands of regulatory laws passed by state legislatures in the late nineteenth century, Shaw concluded that “the one common and striking characteristic of this huge collection of new statutes is its utter disregard of the laissez-faire principle … They deal with the citizen in every conceivable relation. They seem to have left nothing for future Legislatures to regulate.” One hundred years later, in the middle of Ronald Reagan's America, Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (D-SC) similarly observed the powerful role of government in the construction of modern life and its renunciation in the American historical self-conception. Seeking the 1984 Democratic nomination for president, Hollings delivered a stump speech deploying several different versions of a story about “a guy who came home from the Korean War, went to college on a form of the GI Bill, opened a business with a Small Business Administration loan, made sure his parents' farm was adequately wired through Rural Electrification and irrigated with assistance from the Army Corps of Engineers, saw his kids get subsidized school lunches at a school that received lab equipment from a National Science Foundation grant, got his mortgage from the FHA and hurricane disaster relief from FEMA, and one day, took AMTRAK to Washington to complain to his congressman about getting big government off people's backs.” Like many Americans, “the guy” never saw the role of collective power in the creation of his individual declaration of independence.3 Shaw and Hollings reveal a disconnect at the heart of the American experience—a tension between the story that Americans themselves like to tell themselves about individualism, self-reliance, voluntarism, associationalism, free labor, and the free market and the actual history of the “concrete national institutions,” as Shaw put it, that have been capable of wielding such broad interventionist, coercive, and regulatory power at home as well as abroad. Samuel Huntington once dubbed this yawning gap between facts and norms “cognitive dissonance”—an almost pathological tendency to confuse a fictional American ideal with historical political reality. From Thomas Jefferson's elision of slavery in the Declaration of Independence to Ronald Reagan's anachronistic invocation of John Winthrop's shining “city upon a hill,” examples are obvious and legion and not always merely rhetorical. At the turn of the last century, Roscoe Pound surveyed the damage done when the United States Supreme Court took a “long step into the past” and imposed the fallacy of “liberty of contract” on modern industrial labor relations, as if the parties were still individual “farmers haggling over the sale of a horse.” As Pound's example suggests, the problem is one not so much of psychology as of political economy. Shaw and Hollings foreground a particular American version of the tension at the center of social and political thought—the between and power, freedom and and and and A of this American the power, and of the American much of modern history with the of powerful and the of their and of the American state one of the more in in a different and a The “the American is as of an in a of and When at the American version of a state is as not to the that modern and tendency to the American state its history as continues to a with American power in the The and of this historical of the American The of the American state is to the history of American the is to American constitutional and laissez-faire is to American political economy. 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