Citizens, Bodies, and the Redemption of American Political Thought

American political thought is the ugly duckling of political theory. Unlike continental theory, it lacks a canon (other than the Federalist Papers and perhaps Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). Unlike critical theory or postmodernism, its pedigree is liberal. And unlike democratic theory, research in it is tethered to the history of political thought rather than normative analysis. For these reasons and more, it is simply not as sexy as other areas or trends in the field. Or at least that’s what many political theorists and their graduate students say.

This disinterest is unfortunate. It reflects an inaccurate characterization of the field, which contrary to its liberal and pragmatic reputation has always teemed with zealotry, intrigue, innovation, and hubris — surely the raw materials of sexy political inquiry. But more importantly, the dismissal of American political thought undercuts the critical capacity of political theory as a whole. Set against a background of civil war, white supremacy, and numerous freedom struggles, American political thought is an obvious starting place for theoretical inquiry into the complex web of race, gender, and democratic citizenship. And yet with few exceptions (such as Kimberly Smith’s Dominion of Voice, Judith Shklar’s important American Citizenship and Rogers Smith’s Civic Ideals), political theorists have largely missed the potential of American political thought.

I hope Catherine Holland’s The Body Politic is a first step toward changing this situation. This is a sophisticated and interesting work of American political thought that analyzes race, gender, and citizenship in a way that goes beyond abstract theories of difference and recognition currently used by most democratic theorists and beyond the liberalism that limits the otherwise fine work of Shklar and Smith.

Holland’s book is about how the past gets used in political foundings. The founding of a new political order would seem to imply a distinct break with the past. This is true in some ways, Holland admits, nevertheless, “The backward glance is fundamental to foundings” (175). Rather than completely breaking with the past, foundings reinterpret and reuse it for contemporary purposes. As a result, “The past is neither banished nor overcome but is produced as an archaism within the present, a relic that is both origin and outcome” (174). She uses this insight to analyze the classic dilemma of the universal vs. the particular, which in American history takes the form of the question, how does the body persist in modern American democracy? That is, how do distinctions of race, gender, class, and social status continue to function in a public sphere that officially recognizes only abstract citizens? Holland’s answer is that the body is sometimes hidden and sometimes explicitly recognized in the discourse of American citizenship but that it is always already there. In particular it manifests itself during episodes of political crisis. “The body may be made invisible to or transparent within the modern public realm, but it is nonetheless held in reserve as a political force that becomes visible (or is made visible) in the very moments when order itself is at its most vulnerable” (xix). The gendered and racialized body is an archaism, a remnant of a feudal past, but it is reinterpreted and reused at “vulnerable” moments in American history. As such, it is fundamental to American citizenship.

The book explores the relationship between citizenship and the body through an analysis of the “languages of citizenship” employed during two crucial periods of American history, the Founding and Reconstruction. In Part I Holland takes on the myth of “pastlessness” in the American political imagination, or the belief that history has little bearing on the present or future of the nation. Holland argues that American democracy was created not by disregarding the past but by reinterpreting it in order to fit contemporary needs. “The past was not erased [by the Founders], nor was it abandoned. It was made a transparent component of the political present.... American democracy was established not through the forswearing of the past but by virtue of incorporating that past...