Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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“no longer favors the theory of spontaneous generation. Wherever organic life occurs there must have been some seed for that life,” and a Teutonic “germ” taking root in American soil was the seed of its democratic institutions.68 Scholars could illuminate the natural history of this process by “dissect[ing] government documents” and generally using “the laboratory method of work.”69
While both scholars operated within a Hegelian framework and both located sovereignty in an organic community with Teutonic roots, Burgess’s program was perhaps more ambitious than Adams’s. Burgess sought to understand and vouchsafe the future of liberty. To do so, he thought, required specifying its past and tracing its development. In Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, he compared the fundamental political institutions of the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and France, measuring each in terms of its contribution to the great problem of “reconciling government with liberty;” that is, of combining strong national sovereignty with the greatest measure of individual autonomy. This synthesis would be the chief characteristic of “the national State … the self-conscious democracy, the ultima Thule of political history.”70
The Teutonic state was nothing less than the developing self-consciousness toward which all political history was groping, and it was in this national consciousness that the truth of sovereignty could be found. It, and not any aggregate of individuals, was the “self” in “self-government”; true liberty arose not from “mere ideas” about “the things … called natural rights” but only “through the action of the national State inscribing these ideas of individual immunity against governmental power” in fundamental law.71
The United States and its institutions represented the apogee of the state thus far achieved, and continuing its development was the “prime” and special “mission of the ideal American commonwealth.”72 However, as recent history had so vividly demonstrated, success was not assured. A “correct and profound appreciation of the historical development of the state” was the “only protection” against the ever-present “danger of diverging from the true path” to its successful realization.73 In other words, since Burgess’s political science was devoted to explicating the historical development of the state, the discipline was charged with nothing less than stewarding the future of democracy and the possibility of liberty.
Fortunately, in the United States political scientists had good material to work with. The revolutionary basis of the American republic meant that with traditional encumbrances swept away, Americans had “seen the state organized” in its purest form in the Constitution, with its system of balanced, separated powers at once ensuring democracy and guarding against its excesses.74 This self-organization of the state—not any compact of preexisting subjects or commonwealths—produced the Constitution. The Constitution, in turn, provided the basis for the legal doctrines and institutions that emerged as the state evolved toward its most perfect realization.
We have seen that this account provided a strong argument for the Union: If the states (plural) were created by a preexisting, sovereign unity (“the state,” singular), secessionist demands based on claims of a prior independent existence were nonsensical. Burgess’s account also constructed democratic legitimacy on the basis of a distinctly limited democracy. If the development of the state was to be seen in laws and legal institutions, judges and legal scholars—those Burgess admiringly called “the aristocracy of the robe”—would be better suited to maintain it on its course than any mechanisms of popular democracy.75 That is, democratic legitimacy was grounded in the organic law produced by the nation’s historical development rather than in natural rights, social contracts, electoral processes, or any manifestation of popular politics whatsoever.76 From this perspective, the state itself, and not the people (in any mundane sense), was the subject of popular sovereignty.
The preeminence of state and “Teutonic germ” theory, however thorough in its moment, was relatively short-lived. As late as 1903, a young Charles E. Merriam, then a recent graduate of Burgess’s department, was still referring to Burgess’s version of state theory as “the new system” and the culmination of “a change from the rather haphazard style of discussing political theory in earlier days to a more scientific way of approaching the questions of politics.”77 Already by that point, however, Burgess no longer occupied a place at the center of the discipline—he was conspicuously absent from the leadership of the newly organizing American Political Science Association (see Chapters 2 and 3)—and many of Adams’s students were growing weary of laboriously researching foregone conclusions.78 Worse, two decades later, a report on the Second National Conference on the Science of Politics (in which the very same Merriam, by then having assumed a Burgess-esque place in the discipline, played a leading role), categorized Burgess’s work and Teutonism more generally as “Pre-Scientific Studies” based on “speculation.”79
How that happened, and what happened to Burgess-style race thinking in the process, is the subject of the rest of this book. For now, it is enough to imagine how maddening Burgess must have found this characterization, given that state theory was meant precisely as the antithesis of speculation. Burgess explicitly understood himself as engaged in a scientific revolt against what Elisha Mulford (something of a transitional figure between Lieber’s group of nationalist writers and Burgess’s contemporaries) called the “formulas and abstractions” that had seemingly dominated American political discourse since the Revolutionary generation. The condition of political science,” Mulford wrote, was the “apprehension of the nation as an organism”: “It involves the distinction of an art and a science; there may be, for instance, an art in building heaps of stones, but there is no science of stoneheaps. The unity and identity of structure in an organism, in which a law of action may be inferred, form the condition of positive science.”80
For Burgess, race (that is, “relations of birth and race-kinship”) was the basis of the “unity and identity of structure” in the “organism” that was the state. Social contracts and natural rights belonged to the realm of philosophy. “History and ethnology” offered “elevated ground,” a “standpoint” from which to make valid political judgments.81 For example, as we have seen, Burgess located both the source and limit of popular sovereignty in the state. The basis for this apparent anomaly Burgess found on precisely that “elevated ground.”
From this vantage point, it appeared clear to Burgess that it would not be safe for “the popular or democratic form” to “exert its greatest influence” until America had “perfected its nationality.” That is, a truly “national” state would “permit … the participation of the governed in the government” because in a Teutonic state the population would support only “the enactment and administration of laws … whose effect will be the realization of the truest liberty.”82 However, in the late nineteenth century, “the ethnic character” of the American population was “very cosmopolitan …, conglomerated, so to speak, with other elements, numerically quite strong,” such as “Celts,” “Mongols,” and “negroes.” To make matters worse, the United States was fairly “prodigal” with suffrage.83 Therefore, it remained necessary to limit legislative power and other instruments of popular control in favor of a strong federal judiciary.
Burgess worried that even in the heyday of his theory, its implications were never sufficiently appreciated by many readers. He lamented in his memoir that his work was misunderstood as “the ‘Leviathan’ of modern political science,” and that his critics never recognized that the state as it developed would limit government, not glorify it.84 Indeed, Burgess exhibited a clear antipathy to the emerging regulatory apparatus of government, which he saw as an unwarranted intrusion of mass whims on the sphere of liberty guaranteed by the state.85
This, too, was racialized, in that Burgess viewed those demanding economic regulation as “foreign” or corrupted by “foreign elements” and therefore as outside that protected sphere of liberty. In an 1895 essay titled “The Ideal of the American Commonwealth,” Burgess characterized