American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

1 Themes and Frameworks in American Political Thought

      Who gets to tell you what to do? Asking that question about a group of people comprising a political community – a polis, or polity – is the foundational question of the study of politics.

      The question can be considered in two senses: the positive and the normative. The first takes up the question of who gets to tell you what to do as a matter of real-world fact. As a real-world fact, it can be studied empirically by asking: “Who, in fact, has demonstrated the power to direct, or coerce, you into doing A rather than B?” Positive approaches to the exercise of political power bracket judgments about authorized or unauthorized, justified or unjustified, good and bad, right and wrong. They aspire only to accuracy: the facts of the world, as it actually works, and is. The second – the normative – sense of the question, by contrast, takes up the question of who gets to tell you what to do by asking if the person, official, or institution claiming that power has been authorized to do so, is justified in doing so, does so for good or for ill, rightly or wrongly. Normative approaches to the exercise of political power – arising out of what the sociologist Max Weber called the “fact–value” distinction in the social sciences – invite and require moral judgment either of the particular commandment issued by a political actor, or of the underlying foundations of the authorization of power to that superintending actor. Normative approaches to the exercise of political power ask questions about authority, legitimacy, legality, and justice.

      In studying political thought, we ask fundamental positive and normative questions about how power (positive) and authority (normative) has been wielded, exercised, and justified within politics generally – the more abstract study of “political theory” or “political philosophy” – and within particular political communities, that is, within a given polis or polity. The study of American political thought is the study of how political power and authority have been both wielded and justified within the United States over the length and breadth of its history. Undertaking such study invites both more general and abstract “universal” questions of political theory and thought, and more “particularistic” questions about the political power and authority within a single, delimited political community, in a world comprised of many, and diverse, political communities, with both overlapping and disparate approaches to the same foundational political questions.

While quotidian contention over who gets to tell whom what to do is as old as human society itself, the public raising of hard and sustained questions about the legitimacy of the social and political order was once rare. To do so (if it even occurred to people) was considered not only presumptuous and hubristic, but also potentially destabilizing, if not subversive: it was dangerous. In almost all human societies, longstanding, deeply rooted, and entrenched assumptions about who gets to tell you what to do pervaded the community. The question was rarely raised in part because, within the community, that answer – whatever it was – was taken to be obvious: what always had been, and what forever will be. Among the most common of these answers were God or the Gods; those chosen by the Gods as their earthly agents (clerics and an ecclesiastical hierarchy; monarchs chosen by divine right); tribal elders; parents; or your lord, master, or owner. The matter of who gets to tell you what to do was decided by presumptively eternal, natural, or divinely ordained hierarchies. In the western political tradition, the animating assumption of these hierarchies setting the relationship between rulers and ruled was that the higher and better rightfully commanded the lower and lesser. To subject these hierarchies to questioning, and to imagine a menu of alternative possibilities, was the beginning of political philosophy. One of the first men to devote his life to political philosophy and to teaching it to the young, the ancient Athenian Socrates, it is worth recalling, was put to death. The charge was the corruption of the city’s youth and the (dangerous and destabilizing) challenging of its Gods.

Do nations like the United States have shared and pervading political philosophies? My own view, as reflected in this book, is that – in complicated ways, to be sure – they do. But there is a pre-history, and context, even to that. Modern nation-states like the US are just one type of polity, and a relatively new one at that. Families, tribes, cities, city-states, and even churches set the rules of group life within a community long before modern “sovereign” nations were imagined. The modern nation first emerged as a distinctive type of polity in seventeenth-century Europe. By that time, under the pressures of economic transformation and a Renaissance humanism fueled in significant part by the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman political thought, the political authority structure of medieval Europe had decayed and declined. In medieval Europe, worldly political and religious ecclesiastical authority were extensively intertwined. While disputes sometimes arose, political authority, it was nevertheless said, ran from God to his Church – and, as such, to his appointed

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