The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of  Spiritual and Political Individualism —Part 1

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

"The decade of the nineties is the watershed of American history. As with all watersheds the topography is blurred, but in the perspective of half a century the grand outlines emerge clearly."

(Henry Steele Commager)¹            

On the level of pragmatic ex­istence, the watershed results from the civilizing process. Self-contained, autonomous, independent agrarian America is transformed into urban­ized, industrialized America, and this new entity was, by force of its stage of development, inevitably drawn into the tension field of world econom­ics and world politics. The apocalyptically motivated idea of the nation of 1776 had, by the time of the Civil War, been realized in the continental American empire that not only had freed itself from the threat posed by the competing imperial enterprises of the European powers, but had also risen to be the hegemonic power in the Western hemisphere.

The internal consolidation of this empire had progressed to the point at which the mechanism, inherent in American society, of solving con­flicts through avoidance, the principle of separatism or secession, had become ineffective. The Civil War proved that any antagonism taken to the extreme between two types of social organizations could no longer be solved in this empire through the collective secession of one, so that one had to fall back on the instrument for solving conflicts employed in such cases in the Old World—armed confrontation.

The End of the Frontier

In 1890 the "frontier of settlement" first disappeared from the federal census. It was with this consideration in mind that Frederick Jackson Turner published his fa­mous essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893), in which he announced the end of the frontier. The westward movement had come to a standstill; an American civilized world now existed from which no one could any longer separate himself. After the collective secession, therefore, individual secession from society as an al­ternative had also ceased to exist. We see secession as a viable substitute for revolution and intensive social conflicts in the first founding of the seventeenth century, which was an exodus from seventeenth-century En­glish society; in the second founding of 1776, the separation from the English empire; and in the mass emigrations from nineteenth-century Eu­rope. Under the geographic conditions of the vast and seemingly inex­haustible continent, separatism became the fundamental social experi­ence. From Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams to the mass migration of the southern African-Americans into the slums of the North, it marked social behavior in cases of conflict.²

The epochal understanding of the events of 1826 [the deaths of both Adams and Jefferson on July 4th, etc., — ed] finds its correspon­dence in the interpretation of the break of the 1890s: "The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American His­tory."³  Even if in no case the symbols of self-interpretation furnish an adequate medium for dividing the structure of the historical process into periods, epochal consciousness and the fact of such division in themselves point to the shape of American history: the period between 1830 and 1890 emerges as a specifically structured phenomenal unit.⁴

The govern­mental machinery established by the founders for the federation and the states, an adequate local administration, and safe borders, together with Americanism, served as the main field of consciousness of society, under the presupposition of the social mechanism of separatism sufficiently integrative to be able to keep the divergent social forces in balance; further, they created a frame for an explosive development of the nation's physi­cal, material, and spiritual potential. Only the evolutionary achievements of the American system ⁵ furnished the conditions for the repudiation of its representatives Adams and Clay in 1828. This event strengthened the position of liberalism that fed on the traditions of the classical agrarian republicanism of the founding period and which now, in view of the do­mestic and international stabilization and the enormous material re­sources, eclipsed the public sphere of society in favor of a prevailing no­tion of human individuality.

The Nexus of Founding and Order

Our recapitulation of these events at this point in our investigation is not focused on the structural changes in the American civil theology in which the spiritual, political, and economic mobilization of the libidinous ego is reflected. Rather, here a brief over­view of this phenomenon will explore its long-range destructive conse­quences for the psychic order of society.

With the sociopolitical realization of the paradigms of the zoon politikon in the republic of the founders, the membership of society down to the last individual had articulated itself politically (with the obvious ex­ceptions!), and society had become its own representative. To that extent the rise of the Common Man under Jackson was the historically neces­sary sociopolitical substratum of Americanism. But this movement al­ready made manifest those elements of a deformation of consciousness implied by the destruction of the form given to consciousness and sym­bolism by the founders; that is, it could not help but dissolve the content of the nexus of founding and order. The collectivity of "public happi­ness" is based on a balance of the psychological forces in consciousness that is maintained by the ordering function of the authentically reasoning self of the citizen. The crisis of a civil theology is announced in the ex­plicit and implicit erosion of the ordering force of reason and the ad­vancement of the libidinous ego as the guiding principle of political existence.

As early as the first half of the nineteenth century we find exemplary evidence of elements of the libidinous ego in reductionist designs for ex­istence. De Tocqueville analyzed their destructive consequences, subsum­ing these designs for existence under the concept of individualism. Unlike egoism, selfishness, a vice shared by all forms of society in equal measure, individualism grows out of man's isolation under the social conditions of democratic society. Individualism is the specific form of amour-propre, self-love, in such a society. It even expresses the negative phenomenon of a domination of the "private world" of man's emotional nature in a democratic society that the fathers — even de Tocqueville is still firmly convinced of this — successfully fought against by establishing the "public happiness" of shared action in political life. For de Tocqueville, the effec­tive remedy for the evils of individualism consisted of political liberty.⁶

De Tocqueville's picture of the "Age of the Common Man" in the United States appeared so plausible to American self-understanding to the present day—regardless of the fact that it was not, of course, possible to consider socioeconomic equality throughout the Republic — that, like him, Americans did not recognize that the psycho-social syndrome of in­dividualism might have a greater significance for America; in the Anglo-Saxon world, the relevance of de Tocqueville's generalization was not understood at all. Americanism continued to discuss amour-propre in the language of John Adams, that is, of the anglicized ethos of philosophical-Christian provenance.⁷

De Tocqueville diagnosed the manifestation of the privatist existence of individualism under the conditions of democratic civilization in its ba­sic structure with extraordinary caution:

Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself . . . . As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellows, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe noth­ing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.

This acute social-psychological description of the common man led him to the crucial existential-analytic conclusion: thus democracy affects every man and "throws him back forever upon himself alone and threat­ens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart." But this means nothing other than the destructive reduction of man to his libidinous self, which, as it were, endangers the order of the individual psyche as well as the order of republican society: "Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness."⁸

This turn of the paradigm from the common man to absolutizing the American bourgeois is already marked at an early stage. James Fenimore Cooper spoke for many when he wrote in 1828: "The secret of all enterprise and energy exists in the principle of individuality. Wealth does not more infallibly beget wealth, than the right to the exercise of our faculties begets the desire to use them. The slave is everywhere indolent, vicious and abject; the freeman active, moral and bold. It would seem that is the best and safest, and, consequently, the wisest government, which is content rather to protect than direct the national prosperity, since the latter system never fails to impede the efforts of that individuality which makes men industrious and enterprising."⁹ Thomas Skidmore, a spokesman for the New Yorker Workingmen's Party at the same time, radicalized this property-individual position: "Title to property exists for all; . . . because they are: be­cause THEY EXIST! I AM; THEREFORE IS PROPERTY MINE." ¹⁰

Eruption of Man  from Society

Once again it speaks for the intellectual power of New England that it ranked among the transcendentalists those thinkers who speculatively articulated the intellectual core of this eruption of man from society. Emerson determined it as the deification of the self in mystic union with the universe.¹¹ He gave to the American apocalypse the form of a vision of the collective existence of the individual who has been rendered divine, freed from the problems of social existence. Of course this in turn is backed by the principle of separatism, as was proven by the exodus from society practiced by the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.

Quentin Anderson calls this phenomenon "imaginative desocialization." ¹²  He analyzes the deification of the self as a "secular incarnation," "the act not of identifying oneself with the fathers, but of catching up all their powers into the self, asserting that there need be no more genera­tions, no more history, but simply the swelling diapason of the expanding self." ¹³ This emergence of the "imperial self" was the answer to the latent identity crisis suffered by sensitive psyches in response to the uncertainty of an order without its original guarantors, the fathers. "If on the wider public scene it was an age of political parties, of revivalism, of utopian­ism, and the growth of associations for benevolent purposes, it was likewise on every man's inner stage an age of revolt against earlier cer­tainties."

The younger generation of the 1820s still grew up with the immediate accessibility of the nexus of founding and order in the form of living fathers; this same generation was of necessity thrown into an iden­tity crisis by experiencing the death of the fathers. The crisis was to be overcome in the imperial self as the origin of all order: "I am saying no more than that we have not taken quite literally and naively enough the crucial fact that the generations of the founding fathers was gone or go­ing." ¹⁴  "Americans appear to have suffered a punishing psychic blow in the generation of Emerson's youth, to have lost the assurance provided by their sense of the presence of leaders and an instituted order." The imperial self reconstructed order from within itself: it is "a self which assumed psychic burdens because outer supportive structures of custom and institutions had disappeared or lost imaginative authority."¹⁵ The shock of fatherlessness is resolved in the libidinous ego's claim to com­mand reality:

Many Americans were more or less attempting the emotional task Emerson had undertaken: that of incorporating the powers of the fathers who no longer seemed to be present, qua father, or minister, or state. There came a moment when the loose texture of developing American life made it im­possible to credit the authority of those filling these roles. At the outset this drift in the direction of an imperial separateness made itself felt only as a symptom, not a central fact about the life of the masses of Americans. . . . We must be clear about the kind of effect we attribute to Emerson and Emersonianism before 1850; it was a highly important symptom, and what it portended was centrally exhibited later, in industrial America following the Civil War.¹⁶

[This is  part 1 of a multi-part article. Part 2 will appear next week.]

NOTES   

(for fuller citations see the bibliography in Professor Gebhardt's book)