By the twenty-first century, it is taken
for granted that the United States constitute a nation. That the Union could have been referred to as
the New Empire in its early days would strike us as nonsensical or
erroneous. That the constitutional
convention delegates could have differed on whether they were designing a national
government would strike us as untenable.
So we readily compare the US with European nations that are States in
the EU, taking for granted that we are comparing apples with apples. That our
default might be a category mistake—treating one Union as commensurate with a
State in another—is off our radar screens; we simply do not question the basis
of our quotidian comparisons because we presume that the attribute of
governmental sovereignty renders various polities equivalent and therefore
comparable.
Rather than evincing an encroaching decadence through
American history, the category mistake of treating an empire as akin to one of
its political units (and those units as through provinces or localities in a
kingdom rather than as members of an empire) can be found in the revolutionary
period. In this book, I go back to the
colonial period to argue that the United Colonies and subsequent United States
were (and are) properly regarded as being on the empire political level and
territorical scale, and that the colonies and subsequent individual States were
commensurate with European kingdoms of the time (and with European countries
today). In other words, I show that a
multi-level political framework can be gleamed from the historical sources and
that we can utilize it as an alternative.
Of course, as Thomas Kuhn suggests in The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions, replacing a default paradigm is apt to be
resisted by those who are personally invested in it.[i] The process of making transparent its errors and
improving upon it is likely to stretch well beyond a writer’s lifetime. Even
when errors are uncovered, the human proclivity to relish the familiar makes it
difficult to let go of the blanket and consider an alternative way of viewing
the world. So as much as this book is prima
facie about historical political theory, it is even more so about the
nature of the human being. As tempting
as it is to continue with this discussion of the subtext, I turn to a summary
of the individual chapters to complete this introduction.
Chapter one constructs a multi-level political
framework that can be used as an analytical tool to compare and contrast
various political territories. I utilize
Althusius’ political theory and two distinct meanings of the term province.
Specifically, its reference to a sub-unit of a kingdom can be distinguished
from the Roman use of provincia, which signifies a major sub-unit of the
empire. Because provinciae have
typically been occupied kingdoms, or dependencies, I argue that the provincia
scale at a given time and place is at whatever level is sufficient for
kingdom status. Furthermore, based on an
analysis of some provinces and kingdoms (as well as provincial kingdoms) in the
history of the British Isles, I show that the amounts of territory referred to
by the terms “province” and “kingdom” (or provincia) have changed over
time, even with respect to the same territory.
I relate their changing scales to Althusius’ level of political
(federal) association, which I maintain not only reflect the scales of his
time, but also are compromised by his incorporation of particular anomalies
pertaining to his political context.
In Chapter two, I contend that the British colonies in
North America that would go on to form the United States were provinciae in
the sense of being dominions, as if occupied kingdoms, in the British Empire.
They were not provinces akin to domestic British principalities such as duchies
and counties. In other words, they were
colonies in the Greek rather than Roman sense. I draw principally on Bancroft’s
History of the United States and Althusius’ Political Digest in
formulating this theory of the colonies’ classification.[ii]
Chapter three
considers the various attributions of empire that were applied to
British North America and the subsequent application to the alliance of sovereign
States. In spite of not having a government, the alliance was on the
empire-level and had an empire’s rudimentary structure. Having solved the complications in the
earlier attributions, the ex-colonists faced the repercussions of their
alliance’s empire-level commensurability with British imperial rule as
well as the obstacles inherent in the empire-level itself and the nature of
their respective sovereign nation-states. These challenges were aggravated by
the erroneous projection of qualities in the alliance’s members onto the
alliance itself. In general terms,
clearly distinguishing the empire-level as having unique properties can preempt
or dissipate such complications.
In Chapter four, I argue that the United States’
alliance was subject to category conflations and reversals antithetical to
nature, logic and political theory. In spite of its scale and basic
empire-level form, the alliance was treated by some as though it were a
kingdom-level nation-state. The sovereign States were misunderstood as being
province- rather than kingdom-level polities. The category mistake implies that
the alliance was equivalent to one of the nation-states, or countries, in
Europe at the time.
Finally, Chapter five focuses on the constitutional
convention in 1787. Using Madison’s Notes,
I argue that the traditional interpretation wherein the Union is taken as a
nation and its government as a national government enables the category
mistakes discussed in the previous chapter.[iii] These mistakes, in other words, were made in
the convention, rather than taking hold over time. I maintain that the “nationalist” delegates
tended to shirk the kingdom-level status of the individual States and
compromise the application of republican principles to the governance of the
New Empire.
[i] T.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1970).
[ii] G.
Bancroft, History of the United States
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1866); F. S. Carney, The Politics of
Johannes Althusius (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
[iii] J. Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal
Convention of 1787 (New York, W.W. Norton, 1966).
