by Jeremy Bailey
The above title is perhaps strange, because in some ways the prospects for American political thought seem so bright. There are now post-doc’s at good schools for freshly minted scholars, and we now benefit from ongoing connections with a relatively new subfield in political science—American Political Development. More broadly, and compared to other traditions in political thought, American political thought will always benefit from cultural home field advantage: my colleagues seem interested to hear about the original understanding of the veto power or judicial review, and people on the street seem eager to talk about the Founders.
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But two problems suggest that the larger future does not look so good. First, as we all know, there are still very few jobs. In political science, I would guess that the average number of tenure-track job ads mentioning American political thought as a desired subfield has been between one and two, at least since 2002. Second, and much more important, there are very few senior scholars who specialize in American political thought. In political science, I probably could count those tenured in PhD granting departments on one hand. In history, the situation is probably worse. In both fields, these senior scholars will retire and likely not be replaced. Without jobs, the field will disappear. If good tenure track jobs at liberal arts colleges suddenly appear, but senior scholars in PhD granting departments are not replaced, American political thought will be taught for a generation to undergraduates and then disappear.
This problem regarding the coming absence of senior scholars in PhD granting departments could be related to what might be a third problem: American political thought has been unable to define itself. For many political theorists, American political thought is not true political theory. American political thought is too concerned with practical politics, and its principal texts are not as difficult – not as rewarding– as those by real philosophers. For most Americanists, American political thought belongs to weekends in Barnes and Noble but not in a quantitative social science. To a true theorist, American political thought is “American politics rightly understood,” yet to a true Americanist it is “political theory we can live with.”
It is true that other subfields have faced the dilemma, and some have survived by using this definitional slipperiness as an advantage. Even so, it is important for scholars of American political thought to think through its several possible approaches. Here are four:
1. American political thought is a series of case studies in democratic theory. This approach highlights the various “activist” strands in the American political tradition, often characterizing American political history as progress from injustice to justice.
2. American political thought should be treated in the same way that we would consider Roman political thought or British political thought. This approach would emphasize the central contribution of American political thought, that is, its development of toleration and pluralism. That is, American political thought is best understood as the grand synthesis of Madison and Rawls.
3. American political thought is important for its connection to constitutional law and should be used to enhance our understanding about current constitutional questions. Under this approach, American political thought is to be studied for its precedential value.
4. American political thought is best understood from the perspective of the contest between the ancients and the moderns. Under this framework, American political thought is an accessible way for students to consider larger questions such as the place of prudence, the relationship of the one and the many, or the necessity of virtue.
Each approach raises its own important – and very different– question about politics, and each offers its toehold to confused undergraduates, but each has a tendency to subjugate what it proposes to study to the larger question it seeks to answer. As a result, each seems to cycle over the same questions instead of looking deeper into American political thought to see what new questions might arise or to check whether what it claims is true about a particular figure or text is actually true. To put it somewhat differently, because none truly attempts to study a figure as he understood himself, each risks undermining the scholarly future of American political thought.
The good news is that what each approach assumes as a given can in turn serve as a theoretical backdrop for an actual question. For example:
- If Jefferson believed in human progress, why did he say over and over again that the people would lose their capacity for republican government in the future?
- Did Madison ever embrace the Bill of Rights as a positive good?
- To what extent did Madison and Lincoln have different views about the original understanding of the power of Congress to regulate slavery in the territories?
- What did Madison mean when he called the Convention of 1787 evidence of divine intervention?
The answers to these four questions would have consequences for the theoretical premise of each of the four approaches, and thus be of interest to political science. But questions like these sometime require departing from the premise of the approach in order to figure out the political situation under which the figure in question spoke or wrote. The problem, then, is this: if we depart from the theoretical premise, we in political science find ourselves being charged with doing history (mere history from the perspective of political scientists, and bad history from the perspective of historians). Yet if we refuse to ask new questions, and look the other way when confronted with historical complexity, we undermine the scholarly potential of our already hobbled subfield.
Jeremy Bailey teaches at the University of Houston and is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power.
The views expressed in this essay are not necessarily those of The Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History.