Rehistoricizing the Power of Republicanism

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The historical study of early America has immediate urgency in a world where the US depends upon republican rhetoric and ideology to advance its imperial ambitions in the Middle East. In the days following the invasion of Iraq, having discovered no weapons of mass destruction and having lost their justification for preemptive war, US officials embraced the patriotic doctrine that a constitutional republic could be planted in Iraq and a new civil society be made to flower, inevitably tracing their reasons back to the American Revolution. Once passed through such a historical filter, armed militias, widespread terror, and the onset of civil war was said to be little different from America's own perilous passage through the Constitutional Convention. Judging by the many historians and political scientists who have enlisted in this war effort, such a rationale is not merely presidential agitprop. These soldier-scholars, many holding advanced degrees, and affiliated with universities, NGOs, the US military, and several branches of the federal government, have played key roles in writing the Iraqi Constitution, in brokering political compromises, and in disseminating official American messages about appropriate political behavior. Much has been written about the US failure to plan for the aftermath of Shock and Awe, considerably less—especially in academia—about scholars who rushed in to turn theory into practice. The lack of any comprehensive plan inadvertently opened a door for scholars who suddenly had the opportunity to implement "democratization" in the Middle East. In a region untouched by The Federalist Papers and seemingly uninterested in and even perhaps opposed to such political values, soldier-scholars were ready to put them to the ultimate test in building the Iraqi Republic.¹

Republican discourse generally splits along this line between the power of ideas or force, between those who stress either the ideological or the socioeconomic origin of America's political structures and practices. This dividing line has tangible geopolitical consequences. It creates a gulf between the rhetoric of republican liberty and social and political realities, making republican ideology partly to blame for the fiasco in Iraq.² Lacking a suitable argument for the war, the patriotic myth of the American Revolution became the template for the overthrow of tyranny and the birth of an Iraqi Republic. Moreover, once occupying Iraq with its military and bureaucratic forces, the US attempted to reconcile its republican rhetoric—in a shadow war of propaganda for the "hearts and minds" of the Muslim world—with the formidable task of building a government and shaping their brand of civil society. Over two centuries ago in the new US, ruling elites faced a similar problem. Their belief in the achievements of the Revolution and in their republican characters could not resolve the social and political ills of slavery and Indian dispossession (the ideology of white individualism with sacrosanct property interests actually exacerbated these ills). So, too, in the new Iraq, social and political tensions made a mockery of US officials and their attempts to reprise the Founders' roles as virtuous republican characters.

For over a century, an occasionally fractious debate between the power of ideas and the power of socioeconomic factors has dominated the historiography of republicanism.³ From the late 1950s through the 1990s, republican ideology triumphed, particularly among literary and cultural critics. Represented by the pioneering work of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and Jack P. Greene, the "republican school" focused on an intellectual heritage with deep roots in the Roman republic and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Scholars traced the trans-Atlantic migrations of the republican tradition, particularly the eighteenth-century strand of "libertarian thought" and the "dissenting tradition," from England to America during the colonial period. Reconstituting the political culture of the revolutionary generation, they explained how the specific evolutions of eighteenth-century intellectual life were the structural basis for an "American" government and republican society.

Historians were chiefly responsible for this body of work, and their "republican synthesis" exerted an enormous influence on the literary and cultural studies of early America, holding that a singular discourse of ruling elites (the original synthesizers) created a unified...