Reconstructing America: the symbol of America in modern thought

Abstract

Reconstructing America: The Symbol of in Modern Thought. By James W. Ceaser. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. x + 292 pp. $30.00 (cloth). Professor James Ceaser teaches political science at Thomas Jefferson's university, the University of Virginia. His aim in this study is to defend the achievement of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin, and others, against the increasingly common use of America as a symbol. In the view of much of the modern academic and cultural elite-not only in Europe but increasingly in the U.S.-America has become a symbol for which is grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, deforming, rootless, uncultured, and-always in quotation marks- `free' (p. 1). Each of the words enumerated in this litany has actually been used to describe American culture, as Professor Ceaser points out. The book thus seems to belong to the genre of cultural commentary. Why was it written by a political scientist? In answering that question we come to the key insight in this excellent study, for Professor Ceaser links the symbolic distortion of to the distortions in our understanding which result from the abandonment of serious political science, the kind of practical political science so characteristic of the founding generation, for example. In the eighteenth century, where his story begins, the emerging discipline of scientific anthropology (linked to the great natural philosopher, Buffon) gave rise to theories linking varieties of animals and plants to specific geographical locales, and provided an explanation for the sparse population and relatively primitive human communities of the New World: they were inferior because the climate and geography of the New World could produce only degenerate forms of human beings. Professor Ceaser shows how the fascination with scientific explanations misled observers, and how the political science of at least some of the American founders produced a better understanding. He takes up the story next in its nineteenth-century version, when various racialist theories again supplanted prudential political science. This is a complex story, in which figured as a positive symbol for some, but more commonly stood for all the fears of racial mongrelization and degeneracy which preoccupied European aristocrats. Professor Ceaser carefully traces these notions, focussing especially on the thought of Arthur de Gobineau. He shows how pernicious views were widely disseminated, and how they were countered by the political science of Alexis de Tocqueville, Gobineau's contemporary (and sometime friend). …