{"id":1565,"date":"2020-09-18T10:33:40","date_gmt":"2020-09-18T15:33:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1565"},"modified":"2020-09-18T10:33:40","modified_gmt":"2020-09-18T15:33:40","slug":"how-to-read-the-new-histories-of-empire-part-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/how-to-read-the-new-histories-of-empire-part-5\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Read the New Histories of Empire, Part 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

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7. The new histories of empire are theory-laden<\/em>.<\/p>\n

One of the more remarkable features of Richard White\u2019s writing is a certain idealist strain that breaks through irregularly. At one point, he informs readers that the middle ground was the site of certain \u201cbeliefs,\u201d a kind of doctrine: \u201cbeliefs not only that the boundaries between societies and cultures were permeable but also that identities were interchangeable.\u201d (389) It is important to register that the character of White\u2019s argument has just shifted, by assigning to the frontier a moment of reflection or norm-generating self-consciousness. He is now claiming something more than that social and ethnic roles were up-for-grabs on the borderlands. He has added the assertion that the frontier-dwellers also knew<\/em> this, or at least that they believed it, the suggestion being that they held cosmopolitan and anti-identitarian commitments. The Indians, he writes, were \u201cattempting to prove the boundaries permeable.\u201d (391) It\u2019s that last phrase, with its clear echoes of the seminar table, that gives one pause, tending as it does to transform the Delaware and Shawnee into bearers of Adornian or Butlerite positions, or, indeed, to cast eighteenth-century Native Americans as undergraduate Sartreans, the ones who got As on their existentialism mid-terms, while the Anglo-Americans sit there looking slightly abashed, the square students who just don\u2019t get it or who have read the wrong philosophers. The problem isn\u2019t that the Virginians and Pennsylvanians were colonists\u2014so, after all, were les<\/em> habitants <\/em>and les voyageurs<\/em>. The problem was their identitarianism and mauvaise foi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Sartre and Butler are a red herring, however, because White\u2019s real mentor in matters of political philosophy goes by a different name. Anyone reading The Middle Ground <\/em>for the first time might notice that White is hung up on a couple of phrases: \u201cThe common world of the pays d\u2019en haut\u201d (519); \u201cit succeeded in restoring, at least diplomatically, a common world and a common understanding.\u201d (270); \u201cThe common world was \u2026 becoming ragged\u201d (430); \u201cThe common world narrowed.\u201d (432) A person might even be puzzled by this. Nowhere does White sound more like a pop existentialist than on the opening page of The Middle Ground<\/em>, where he tells readers that his will be a book \u201cabout the search for \u2026 common meaning,\u201d a phrase that, by recalling Viktor Frankl, does nothing to make the American frontier seem more benign, since Frankl, we\u2019ll recall, was searching for meaning in a concentration camp. One of the worst things about \u201cIndian haters,\u201d at any rate, is that they \u201csought to terminate \u2026 more complicated searches for common meaning.\u201d (389) But we can leave the word \u201cmeaning\u201d to one side. For it is the word \u201ccommon\u201d that links the phrases \u201ccommon meaning\u201d and \u201ccommon world\u201d and thereby points us to a proper name. For \u201ccommon world\u201d is one of Hannah Arendt\u2019s signature terms. A quick search of recent literature on Arendt turns up an essay called \u201cHow Common Is Our Common World?\u201d (Kattago) and another called \u201cThe Idea of a Common World\u201d (Jones). Outfitted with that unmarked citation, the reader soon spots White borrowing other concepts and arguments from a beloved philosopher. First Arendt (1972: 142 \u2013 143): \u201cIt is, I think, a rather sad reflection on the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words as \u2018power,\u2019 \u2018strength,\u2019 \u2018force,\u2019 \u2018authority,\u2019 and, finally, \u2018violence\u2019\u2026. Power <\/em>corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.\u201d Then Richard White: George Rogers Clark, the head of the Kentucky militia, \u201cwas by temperament a war leader who thought that force was power\u201d\u2014though one notes that by \u201cforce,\u201d White seems to mean \u201cviolence\u201d and so becomes the target of Arendt\u2019s argument in the very act of restating it. (426) Or again: Anyone who has read around in Hannah Arendt will know that the \u201ccommon world\u201d takes as one of its near-synonyms \u201cthe in-between,\u201d which hereby joins those others as the fourth of the middle ground<\/em>\u2019s major connotations: the Midwest, the frontier, political moderation, and the Arendtian in-between. At this point, in order to collate these dispersed references, it becomes necessary to bring into view Hannah Arendt\u2019s Big Story. For Arendt, politics always takes place in that intermediary zone, the public space of the polis or its agora, which we must learn to cherish for its own sake, which we must take care to distinguish from private life and which we must commit ourselves to cultivate and protect. The public and in-between is the space where we can deliver speeches and undertake actions without\u2014and this is its signal advantage over home\u2014having to certify these as intimate or authentic. The in-between is also the place where differences between people can be put on display and to some degree adjudicated without any presumption of unanimity. If members of a society share a common world than they need share little else\u2014not attitudes or beliefs or ways of living. It doesn\u2019t matter that we maintain different perspectives on x<\/em>, provided we remain certain that we in some sense share x<\/em> or that x <\/em>is a public thing. Arendt\u2019s philosophy can thus be read as a therapeutic program, designed to strengthen its readers\u2019 flagging commitments to the public and active life, to remind them of all the reasons to love the common world, hence to combat the consoling lure of private life. But it is perhaps better read as a grand r\u00e9cit <\/em>about the collapse of that common world, about the overtaking of politics by mere household concerns\u2014what Arendt calls \u201cthe social\u201d but what we on etymological grounds might more tellingly call \u201cthe economic.\u201d Richard White\u2019s least remarked upon achievement is also his most wondrous\u2014a specimen to be admired by all collectors of recherc\u00e9 academic ingenuities. He is retelling Arendt\u2019s Big Story, her only story, the story about the death of politics, but has adapted it to a (somewhat) new location and a (sharply) new chronology, like Akira Kurosawa deciding to set King Lear <\/em>in Sengoku-period Japan. In the place of ancient Greece, which was always Arendt\u2019s paradigm of a Properly Political Place, we find Fort Detroit, as the vita activa<\/em>\u2019s womb and epitome. And the American Revolution, which Arendt took to have sponsored a temporary revival of genuine politics, translating Anglo-Americans into the active life, turns out instead to have brought about the fall of public man (because public man lives on the Midwestern frontier, and US Americans depoliticized that space via thick settlement and Indian removal). 1776, which we have been taught to see as the common world\u2019s second chance, was instead its betrayal and shutdown. That White is also adapting the arguments of Frederick Jackson Turner should be abundantly clear by now. The Middle Ground <\/em>works by superimposing upon a Turnerite story about the end of the frontier an Arendtian story about the end of the common world. \u201cThe Significance of the Frontier in American History\u201d rewrites itself as The Human Condition<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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7. The new histories of empire are theory-laden. One of the more remarkable features of Richard White\u2019s writing is a certain idealist strain that breaks through irregularly. At one point, he informs readers that the middle ground was the site … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23085,76,24270],"class_list":["post-1565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-eighteenth-century","tag-empire","tag-history-and-historians"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1567,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions\/1567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}