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. Like the of and the of a American state is the of a tendency to American history as the history of the of a the historical and of is of the of America as a place of American from a state of As John with almost in the the was The the of individualism, civil society, free labor, and a free in American it the more historical and role of collective law, government, and in American In this the state itself is as of a that never a place in a and The of a American state in and on individualism, associationalism, and to the power of the state in many of democratic and have his American state was in “the government of the United States is to get by it from its of it the of the tradition of in the American state not on perceived to be an from the United States was a at “The of the of this State is not and and the for a not for a State and a a of has the of the late nineteenth and were of commentators to the to is in the United in an American political a characteristic the for the of the of the American state was the the heart of In the of with American to between American and the a of on an national historical American in liberty, voluntarism, and a market, the role of the state in social and In political such as to a a and national that as the of a for over individual over collective and and over and state this the history of the American state its and almost and regulatory in the of national cultural of was the American it was a the of an to new for the of the of and free the most to the of the of the American state is the to this has been by with and an social in the and the state to the of American by historical such as and political such as the of the American state The tendency to the American state as of a to of a continues the of of American political As American has not been by it has on a new new form has a of that the as to and American state power with and for another and The modern American state is still as and the of historical and by social in the of the nineteenth The tendency to about the American state the of has never been more for most the of that an of still to be The American state in of the most historical and “a “a “a and “a a an of the modern American state is an and its in the has a historical This on the of an of Samuel Thomas and the and the actual power and of the American state in this have been for the new and into state by their and early to such as in American and the of this has on a life and of its a more of and political who have of in an era when state have and more the American form of legal and is the The obvious present reality of American state power in the early is a of the history of the rise of a global The most and of this is that the American state is and always has been more interventionist, and than was in of histories of the American state to one of the facts about modern American of a and is contemporary American to the of of the and of the American American history has the in the of one of the most powerful in world that American history of the construction of American state power from the of the to the past. for has the history of the American the creation of a that “the true of the American was not to to more power, to and an entirely new power was a state in the United it have been the of government in a most of has similarly the of a powerful and national to the of the the historical that a national and regulatory the of the John has almost of the of government in the nineteenth through his of the role of the state in the and of from the to the and has government power at the center of the new history of and and As the of a of social and cultural and and of and were not the of laissez-faire a to on the powers of the state a for people The of the state is over The powerful role of the American state in labor has been the of a of on “the state and the has on the role of in the creation of a national in the United States. power was present in the social from such as to more in and is in this that John examples of in came from the United not and the of the The powers of American and are new has the history of American state of has the history of national and disaster a of new histories from John and have to the powerful of social and social The growth of and in the has on new in the histories of and One the rise of American national and the role of the the and powers in American to a state The of American state is the past, and for the in present should not be into that the American state is the and the and to a more of and laissez-faire. the the power of the government to and its well as other never been As contemporary should be to the of in late is and In to the of the American the historical well to the and construction of new of state power American This story of state not into such as modern social it not the to about American voluntarism, it is the story of the creation of powerful modern mechanisms of American and the rule of were of this new state as 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