Melville beyond Marx: Democracy and Primitive Accumulation in Pierre

In 1851, leading antebellum political economist Henry Charles Carey, son of the more famous Matthew, published perhaps his most substantial work on political economy, The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial. While this volume chiefly champions American tariffs against what Carey sees as British laissez-faire policies, chapter twenty-seven, “How Protection Affects the Nation,” discusses a political crisis whose cause he believes is economic. A decade before, in 1840, he contends, “[d]emocracy had changed sides, and the people did not go with it” because of Martin Van Buren’s economic policies that “[tend] to the separation of the consumer from the producer, to the impoverishment of the land and its owner.”¹ According to Carey, this disjunction between “democracy” and “the people” whom the system purportedly represents provokes a crisis in the very meaning of democracy. Rather than ascribing the crisis to “minor causes,” which Carey claims is common, he contends that one “can scarcely fail to see that it was due to the fact that the party styled Democratic had espoused a course of policy that tended to diminish the value of labor, to degrade the laborer, to depress the democracy at home, and to maintain the aristocracy abroad.”² What began as a treatise on economy, “policy,” and “the value of labor” becomes nothing less than an indictment of American democracy, which as states endorse it tends toward strengthening “aristocracy abroad” and diminishing “democracy at home.” This short passage suggests that Carey’s political theory sees global antagonism between prior modes of social organization and contemporary democratic ones—aristocracy and democracy.

This antagonism between modes of production animates the whole of his thinking about politics, especially several chapters prior in “How Protection Affects the Political Condition of Man.” There Carey defines and contrasts the participants in these two political-economic systems: “The freeman chooses his employer, sells his labor, and disposes of the proceeds at his pleasure. The slave does none of these things. His master takes the produce of his labor, and returns him such portion as suits his pleasure.”³ The “freeman” of democratic—and quite obviously, capitalist— social organization becomes a foil to both the “slave” and the “master” of aristocracy. Freedom, for Carey, is the freedom for a man to “[sell] his labor” and “[choose] his employer,” nothing more.⁴

Against this particularly capitalist definition of (political) freedom, Carey places the slavery of feudalism: “India is poor, and the many are slaves to the few. So is it in Ireland. Freedom there is unknown. The poor Irishman, limited to the labors of agriculture, desires a bit of land, and he gives the chief part of the product of his year’s labor for permission to starve upon the balance, happy to be permitted to remain on the payment of this enormous rent.”⁵ Again Carey emphasizes the global, opting to highlight India and Ireland’s quasi-feudal slavery rather than, for instance, the American South’s. Further, he highlights that this unfreedom is not merely economic but also political. Not only must the tenant farmer give his lord “the chief part … of his year’s labor,” he also is “happy” to remain statically in slavery’s realm, outside the political sphere. These two passages indicate that Carey views history as a transition from aristocratic feudalism’s impoverished slavery to capitalist democracy’s wealth-generating freedom (though, as we have seen, he believes societies are always in danger of regression). Transition figures centrally in his thinking on how economics, politics, and modes of production connect; moving from feudalism to capitalism promotes democracy and increases humanity’s global wealth.

The next year, in his novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville addresses the same problem central to political economy.⁶ Depicting the downfall of his eponymous aristocrat, Pierre Glendinning, Melville explores a contemporarily important issue, the transition from feudalism to capitalism. However, where Carey’s theory often glorifies capitalist social relations, equating democracy, political freedom, and the economic freedom that wages generate, Melville expresses less optimism. While certainly no apologist for feudalist social relations or...