It represented “the gradual and continuous development of human society … [and] of the universal principles of human nature” but was at the same time rooted in the “ethnologic concept” of the “nation” and “relations of birth and race-kinship.” Only the Teutonic (or Aryan) nations inherited the capacity to realize the highest form of the state. Latin and Greek civilizations had more limited political genius; Asia and Africa were home to only “unpolitical nations.”61
There was little that was original or idiosyncratic in the basic outlines of Teutonist state theory. Anglo-Saxonist history was well established, and the Gilded Age “saw Anglo-Saxon chauvinism pervade the upper reaches of American scholarly and political life.”62 Burgess’s achievement, which he shared to an extent with the Johns Hopkins University historian Herbert Baxter Adams, was to modernize this tradition, pursuing it with the zeal for rigorous, empirical methodology that was the hallmark of German historiography and embedding it in a newly professionalizing discipline.63
The German approach involved above all commitment to a Rankean reconstruction of the past “as it really was” through painstaking work with primary sources as well as archaeological, geographic, philological, and other scientific investigation.64 And, indeed, both Burgess and Adams grounded their work in voluminous, careful, legal and historical research. They were also affected by the excitement that a progressionist version of Darwinism, along with Herbert Spencer’s application of it to the social world, generated among late nineteenth-century scholars, who were evolutionists “almost to a man.”65 As a result, Adams and Burgess produced versions of Teutonism that differed from their predecessors’ in being more pronouncedly laced with metaphors and assertions from ethnology and biology.66 And of course the fact that they operated within universities where they were able to establish graduate programs meant that their Teutonism became the basis for training a generation of younger American scholars.
In Adams’s case, scientific history translated into minute excavations of the evolution of this or that New England tradition (town forms, traditional offices, etc.) from early Germanic prototypes, an enterprise that came to be known as “Teutonic germ theory.”67 Proud to have established his history seminar in a converted biology lab, Adams likened his library of legal and historical documents to a natural history museum and argued that his methods extended the insights of evolutionary biology into the field of history. The “science of Biology,” he wrote, “no longer favors the theory of spontaneous generation. Wherever organic life occurs there must have been some seed for that life,” and a Teutonic “germ” taking root in American soil was the seed of its democratic institutions.68 Scholars could illuminate the natural history of this process by “dissect[ing] government documents” and generally using “the laboratory method of work.”69
While both scholars operated within a Hegelian framework and both located sovereignty in an organic community with Teutonic roots, Burgess’s program was perhaps more ambitious than Adams’s. Burgess sought to understand and vouchsafe the future of liberty. To do so, he thought, required specifying its past and tracing its development. In Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, he compared the fundamental political institutions of the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and France, measuring each in terms of its contribution to the great problem of “reconciling government with liberty;” that is, of combining strong national sovereignty with the greatest measure of individual autonomy. This synthesis would be the chief characteristic of “the national State … the self-conscious democracy, the ultima Thule of political history.”70
The Teutonic state was nothing less than the developing self-consciousness toward which all political history was groping, and it was in this national consciousness that the truth of sovereignty could be found. It, and not any aggregate of individuals, was the “self” in “self-government”; true liberty arose not from “mere ideas” about “the things … called natural rights” but only “through the action of the national State inscribing these ideas of individual immunity against governmental power” in fundamental law.71
The United States and its institutions represented the apogee of the state thus far achieved, and continuing its development was the “prime” and special “mission of the ideal American commonwealth.”72 However, as recent history had so vividly demonstrated, success was not assured. A “correct and profound appreciation of the historical development of the state” was the “only protection” against the ever-present “danger of diverging from the true path” to its successful realization.73 In other words, since Burgess’s political science was devoted to explicating the historical development of the state, the discipline was charged with nothing less than stewarding the future of democracy and the possibility of liberty.
Fortunately, in the United States political scientists had good material to work with. The revolutionary basis of the American republic meant that with traditional encumbrances swept away, Americans had “seen the state organized” in its purest form in the Constitution, with its system of balanced, separated powers at once ensuring democracy and guarding against its excesses.74 This self-organization of the state—not any compact of preexisting subjects or commonwealths—produced the Constitution. The Constitution, in turn, provided the basis for the legal doctrines and institutions that emerged as the state evolved toward its most perfect realization.
We have seen that this account provided a strong argument for the Union: If the states (plural) were created by a preexisting, sovereign unity (“the state,” singular), secessionist demands based on claims of a prior independent existence were nonsensical. Burgess’s account also constructed democratic legitimacy on the basis of a distinctly limited democracy. If the development of the state was to be seen in laws and legal institutions, judges and legal scholars—those Burgess admiringly called “the aristocracy of the robe”—would be better suited to maintain it on its course than any mechanisms of popular democracy.75 That is, democratic legitimacy was grounded in the organic law produced by the nation’s historical development rather than in natural rights, social contracts, electoral processes, or any manifestation of popular politics whatsoever.76 From this perspective, the state itself, and not the people (in any mundane sense), was the subject of popular sovereignty.
The preeminence of state and “Teutonic germ” theory, however thorough in its moment, was relatively short-lived. As late as 1903, a young Charles E. Merriam, then a recent graduate of Burgess’s department, was still referring to Burgess’s version of state theory as “the new system” and the culmination of “a change from the rather haphazard style of discussing political theory in earlier days to a more scientific way of approaching the questions of politics.”77 Already by that point, however, Burgess no longer occupied a place at the center of the discipline—he was conspicuously absent from the leadership of the newly organizing American Political Science Association (see Chapters 2 and 3)—and many of Adams’s students were growing weary of laboriously researching foregone conclusions.78 Worse, two decades later, a report on the Second National Conference on the Science of Politics (in which the very same Merriam, by then having assumed a Burgess-esque place in the discipline, played a leading role), categorized Burgess’s work and Teutonism more generally as “Pre-Scientific Studies” based on “speculation.”79
How that happened, and what happened to Burgess-style race thinking in the process, is the subject of the rest of this book. For now, it is enough to imagine how maddening Burgess must have found this characterization, given that state theory was meant precisely as the antithesis of speculation. Burgess explicitly understood himself as engaged in a scientific revolt against what Elisha Mulford (something of a transitional figure between Lieber’s group of nationalist writers and Burgess’s contemporaries) called the “formulas and abstractions” that had seemingly dominated American political discourse since the
