The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of  Spiritual and Political Individualism — Part 2

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 Decentralized Politics of  Laissez-faire

 

The continuity of the imperial self  became evident only retrospectively, after the social breakthrough of this dynamic-expansive ego to the domi­nant type that attempted to reconstruct the lost reality in its own image.¹⁷ But even during the incubation phase of the spiritual, political, and eco­nomic dynamization of the person, this concentration on the individual under American conditions unleashed powerful energies: Jackson's so-called revolution perfected political democracy.¹⁸ Taney's decision in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) ¹⁹ ceded the order of the conditions of production to the liberal politics of laissez-faire.

 

This state­ment, however, should not be misunderstood in the sense of the doctrine of the "free enterprise" of a liberal "competitive capitalism" that hov­ers over the textbooks of liberal political economics (and its critics). It means, rather, that the psychosocial structural patterns of industrial eco­nomic society were accorded public status—that is, the original concep­tion of the political solution of economic problems was replaced by a laissez-faire attitude.

 

Although the circumstance that economic decisions remained in the medium of public government was unchanged, this trans­formation implied a shift of the level of decision making from the federal government to the political institutions under the immediate control of the common man in the community and the state, though traditionally, under the American system of the fathers, these had already been the centers of public economic policy.

 

The decentralized politics of laissez-faire meant aligning the patterns of decisions of all the representatives of society in the federation, the state, and the community according to that dynamic psychosocial structure of individualism whose plausibility must be seen in the clear victory of an expanding industrial economic society over hunger and disease.²⁰ The politics of laissez-faire, then, is deter­mined less by the elimination of economic decisions from the public sphere — they were omnipresent there — than by its increased domination through the reality picture of the libidinous ego. "Usually thought of as a philosophy of individualism, by which is meant the single human being, the competition and conflict of laissez faire actually occurred at many different levels. In addition to the individual, there were organized groups such as corporations, labour unions, and reformers; political subdivi­sions such as parties and the states; social and economic units which became self-conscious sections or regions; and, in the broadest sense, nations themselves in the world arena."²¹

 

William Appleton Williams described critically the intellectual, po­litical, and socioeconomic atomization of the "paradigmatic republic," which, granted, need not immediately attack its substance. But what was more serious was that this phenomenon concealed a decision that in the long run sanctioned the transformation of the socially dominant hierar­chy of goods in the public sector. Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge would once again elucidate this argument: Taney took his point of de­parture from the fathers' principles of order in arriving at his decision: "the object and end of all government is to promote the happiness and prosperity of the community by which it is established; and it can never be assumed that the government intended to diminish its power of ac­complishing the end for which it was intended. . . . While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the com­munity also have rights, and that the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation."

 

Laissez-faire, therefore, means not that economic affairs are no longer subject to the public sector and its order, but that the public regulation of production relations is to occur according to new standpoints, for Taney declared the mercantilist institution of the privileged company to be unconstitutional because it hindered the government in its pursuit of the public interest. In republi­canism, the "incorporated economic enterprise" was the expression of the public nature of private property, the instrument for increasing the national wealth through the promotion of private interests in agriculture, trade, and industry, including science, as well as the dominant form of public control of social relations insofar as these were not regulated by direct ordinances of the executive and legislative branches.

 

Material Prosperity to Serve Public Justice

 

Consequently the Founding Fathers viewed the economy — of whose pervasiveness of the social reality they needed to convince no one — in terms of the human condition. Thus, they strove to place material prosperity in the service of the overarching purpose of public justice and to prevent its potentially destructive effects on society through political order:

"the ideal of secular corporate justice . . . was . . . the kind of an internalized restraint that had to be developed if self-interest and private property were to function satisfactorily as means to the general welfare. Along with Adams, Jay, Jefferson, Monroe, and other mercantilists, Madison persistently emphasized the vital role of a strong sense of justice: the ideal had to be pursued with vigor if the constitution were to produce the good society — 'the national welfare' — that he sought."²²

Taney correctly concluded that "in­corporated property" with a claim to monopoly must lead to an inad­missible restriction of the aims of public rule if the property guarantees of the Constitution were claimed for the monopoly. In Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, however, Taney gave an entirely new interpre­tation to the "public benefit"²³ implied in incorporation. He understood it as the best possible use to be made of modern science, and of progress in general, to increase wealth and prosperity, the comfort and ease of life. The monopoly claim of the owners of the Charles River Bridge is a misuse of property and a restriction of public purposes, since property can be of use to the public goal of improvement only in competition; in this case progress lies in the establishment of technically advanced means of trans­portation and communication.

 

Taney's decision not only allowed the mercantilist institution of incorporated enterprise to disappear but also determined the imperative of technical-economic progress as the goal of political order in regard to economic decisions. Taney's interpretation of the constitutional order obligates public action, at least in this case, to submit to the organizational principles of industrial economic society. But in my view this was the substance of the liberal politics of laissez-faire. The indisputable success of the publicly legitimated competition of owners, with the goal of continuous production and productivity in­creases, more and more rooted the coordination of Americanism in the growth of economic production of goods in the dominant consciousness, symbolism, and behavior patterns of American society. John Kenneth Galbraith properly described this development:

The industrial system identifies itself with the goals of society, and it adapts these to its needs . . . . It is the genius of the industrial system that it makes the goals that reflects its needs — efficient production of goods, a steady expansion in their output, a steady expansion in their consumption, a pow­erful preference for goods and leisure, an unqualified commitment to tech­nological change, autonomy of the technistructure, an adequate surplus of trained and educated manpower — coordinate with social virtue and human enlightenment. These goals are not thought to be derived from our environment. They are assumed to be original with human personality. To believe this is to hold a sensibly material view of mankind.²⁴

This form of Americanism as economism created for itself a field of con­sciousness in the corporation, and in the twentieth century this social field finally spread beyond the borders of organized American society, though not without legitimating itself within society through recourse to civil theology. Galbraith, himself a victim of his concretized language, forgets that the transformation of Americanism originated with the grow­ing impact of pragmatic-functional rationality of the industrial system on the doctrine of the common man, insofar as this doctrine involved the idea of the "imperial self."

 

The Dynamics of the Expanding Self

 

But as early as the mid-nineteenth century, Emerson proved that turning the common man into a hero would turn back on him until he would have no choice but to call on society for protection against the dynamics of the expanding self. For in social prac­tice the liberated self only too quickly yielded to the pleonexia of the driving force of his behavior. The idea that "in a free and just common­wealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and preserving" was the final conclusion even of transcendentalist wisdom.²⁵ No rational model of human existence could be developed from the autonomy of the deified self; the dynamic of individualism transformed the paradigm of the common man into a Horatio Alger and produced the entrepreneur as the ideal type and a Rockefeller and Car­negie in the social sphere in which pleonexia was given its socially most powerful form.

 

At the end of the century the expectations of the common man had not been fulfilled. Instead of holding unrestricted sway over society's means of power, he saw himself exposed to bosses, political machines, and the spoils system. Instead of being a member of a democratic eco­nomic society of private capitalist entrepreneurs, he was confronted by an unavoidable process of economic concentration. From this situation corporate capitalism emerged as the prevailing organizational form of the means of production. Instead of an agrarian-republican idyll of free farmers — beneficiaries of a liberal distribution of land by the public hand—the "embattled farmer" experienced nothing but want; the num­ber of the dispossessed and of dependent tenant farmers rose. "The end of the frontier" meant, finally,  [not] only territorial satiation of the "paradigmatic republic"; but the dynamic of the spiritually, politically, and eco­nomically expanding self had found a power base in this continental em­pire.

 

This empire promised that the obvious insufficiency of one's own social existence could be overcome in the fulfillment of apocalyptic yearnings. Economic-social Darwinism and idealist power-political sym­bolism in American self-understanding made the episode of direct impe­rialism of 1898 and the long-range policy of indirect imperialism seem plausible, though even this plausibility threatened repeatedly to obstruct an evaluation of the power structure of the global civilized world corre­sponding to the Americans' situation.              

 

[This is part 2 of a multi-part article. Part 3 will appear next week.]

 

NOTES   

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

17. Compare also E. Voegelin, "The Eclipse of Reality," in Phenomenology and Social Reality, ed. M. Natanson (The Hague, 1970), 185-95.

18. In the Introduction to his United States Magazine and Democratic Review, I (Oc­tober, 1837), 1-15, John L. Sullivan formulated the policies of the Jacksonians better than Jackson ever could. Sullivan's Introduction was reprinted in J. Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (New York, 1954), 11-38, where there is also further material on the Jacksonians' self-interpretation. Compare also A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945); Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 45-67; Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 89-142; E. Pessen, Jacksonian America (Homewood, Ill., 1969); M. Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, CA, 1957); Dorfman, Eco­nomic Mind, II, 601-37.

19. II Peters, 410 (1837).

20. For the role of the public hand in the nation and individual states in the nineteenth century, see A. Shonfield, Geplanter Kapitalismus (Cologne, 1969), 356-66. For the mer­cantilist tradition of public intervention in the economy of the individual states, see L. Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776-1860 (Cam­bridge, MA, 1948); O. Handlin and M. Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy, Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (New York, 1947); J. N. Primm, Economic Policy in the Development of a Western State: Missouri 1820 to 1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1954); M. S. Heath, Constructive Liberalism (Cambridge, MA, 1954).

21. W. A. Williams, Contours of American History, 247.

22. Ibid., 158-59. Compare also J. J. Spengler, "Political Economy of Jefferson, Madison, and Adams," in American Studies in Honor of William K. Boyd (Durham, NC, 1940), 3-59; Dorfman, Economic Mind; Dauer, "Political Economy of John Adams."

23. See particularly Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1818.

24. J. K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York, 1967), 350-51. Compare also Heimann, Soziale Theorie der Wirtschaftssysteme; M. Hereth, Freiheit, Politik und Ökonomie (Munich, 1974).

25. R. W. Emerson, "The Conduct of Life," in Emerson, Works, VI, 106.