Republican Democracy Research Articles

Reloading Civil Disobedience In India - A Gandhian Legacy

There are many factors which shape people’s compliance with laws. Through various studies it was established that the major factors shaping compliance with laws are morality, social pressure, deterrence and legitimacy. In different societies the factor shaping compliance with laws may vary. Early societies largely depend on morality and social pressure for compliance, whereas state centric societies depend on deterrence and modern Democratic Republican societies depend on legitimacy. In India, however, deterrence remains the dominant factor shaping compliance with laws despite India's long-standing democratic republican system. The people in India are often hesitant to follow their own government’s laws. The Gandhian legacy of freedom struggle, particularly the civil disobedience and non-cooperation movement might have legitimized civil disobedience. The civil disobedience movement later suppressed voluntary compliance with laws. This reflects a culture of lack of voluntary compliance with laws among the Indian people. This may be the reason why the state has to rely more on deterrence than legitimacy. If legitimacy shapes compliance with laws then people would have practiced voluntary compliance with laws

Adrien Rist (1841–1923), membre de la Société mdico-psychologique (1881) et fondateur d’une maison de santé privée à Versailles : « La Châtaigneraie » (1889) (Partie II)

A member of artistic, literary and scientific associations including the Société médico-psychologique (1881), A. Rist opened a private psychiatric clinic in Versailles in the years 1890–1891 called: La Châtaigneraie. This establishment will open its doors shortly before those of the old people's home (1892); they will complete the establishment opened in 1858: the civil hospital. In addition to his work as physician director of La Châtaigneraie, he was a medical expert at the court of Versailles. While practicing in Switzerland, he taught forensic medicine at the Law School of Lausanne. For example, A. Rist assessed Marie Christmann, a spiritualist masseuse, known as “the witch of Versailles”, who was denounced for the illegal practice of medicine and the mummified body of a woman was found in her house or Fernand-Théodore Charlatte, known as “the satyr of Saint-Cloud”, who simulated madness. Being an alienist was not without risk. He was threatened with death by an insane Arthur-Désiré Ferger who had twice escaped from the asylum; inspectors were assigned to protect him. A. Rist was a doctor fighting against alcohol abuse; the head office of the Versailles section of the French Anti-Alcohol Union was located at his home 11 rue des Deux Moulins. The National League against Alcoholism has founded “rooms of the soldier” in different cities of France (Cherbourg and Le Havre). A. Rist had one such room located at 29 rue de Béthune (Versailles). Author of “La philosophie naturelle intégrale les rudiments des sciences exacts” (1904), A. Rist shows us his pronounced taste for mathematics which inclined him more towards the physical sciences and their speculative aspect than towards biology, a discipline of observation and experimentation. In this second part, A. Rist appears to be a man of conviction and opinion. He was Dreyfusard and Republican. He was among the signatories of the “Appel à l’Union” (1899) like his friend Gabriel Monod (1844–1912), a member of the Institute. This founding document aimed to calm the political situation in the middle of the Dreyfus affair in order to save the parliamentary republican regime then in place. He does not hesitate to take up the pen to oppose Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906); director of the Revue des Deux Mondes, he was an antidreyfusard but not an antisemite. The latter had declared war on the scientific spirit and on Science which was not the point of view of A. Rist. In a national daily newpapers, he expressed his opposition to the reform of secondary education; this was a measure which had been advocated by the Minister of Public Instruction: Léon Bourgeois (1851–1925). At the end of the 19th century, A. Rist made a political commitment having being elected member of the municipal council of Versailles (1896–1900); he joined the Democratic Republican Alliance party (1901). During his career, A. Rist did not communicate or publish very much. In addition to his imposing work on “La philosophie naturelle intégrale”, we find among his works an article on phrenology published in the Dictionnaire de Dechambre, which he considered to be a science lacking a scientific basis; a case of idiopathic anorexia, which he said was a mental illness caused by a direct attack on the nerve center that regulates the need to eat; a case of forensic expertise on an anarchist sentenced to prison because he was not fit for internment. He was also supposed to publish a second volume of his natural philosophy, but it never saw the light of day. He died in November 1923, “La Châtaigneraie” closed its doors.

The Decline of Republican Democracy and Rise of the Techno-authoritarian State: Reading Dystopian Novels in Hindi Literature

The Decline of Republican Democracy and Rise of the Techno-authoritarian State: Reading Dystopian Novels in Hindi Literature

Democratic republicanism and political competence in treatments of radical Enlightenment

ABSTRACT This article argues that what was understood as democracy in the eighteenth century differs fundamentally from modern democracy. While modern democratic states take locally born or naturalized personhood as the criterion of citizenship, eighteenth-century advocates of democracy demanded proof of political competence to allow participation in politics. While the requirement of competence to engage in any activity is not unreasonable, if defined, as it was by most Enlightenment thinkers, as a combination of independence, cultural standing and wealth, it is clearly elitist. Enlightenment criticisms of birth and status as criteria of political standing should not be mistaken for demands for broadly inclusive, modern conceptions of equality and democracy. Rather, most Enlightenment thinkers and publicists, fully aware of the implications of widespread and debilitating poverty, expressed reservations about granting the ‘people’ an effective role in politics. Far from being ‘radical’, Enlightenment political theory called for the replacement of an elitism based on status and privilege with an elitism of ability and wealth.

Implication of Local Government Institutional Capacity Self-Assessment System at Municipal Governance

Local governments have a key role to play in ensuring that public services are provided close to the people under the federal governance system. Therefore, the success of federalism depends on effectiveness of public service delivery function. The constitution has provisioned legislative, executive, and judicial powers to local levels, Province and federation based on the principles of cooperation, coexistence, and coordination. In this context, local government institutional self-assessment (LISA) framework has been used by local government in Nepal after implementation of federal democratic republican constitution 2015.main objectives is to effectiveness of improve the quality. Acts and regulations related to these methods. The Practice of LISA by improving the Its the web-based LISA system has been introduced as an innovative instrument to track the performance of local governments in Nepal after the governance system was restructured from unitary to federal with significant power and resources to local level. The process of LISA creating capacity begins with a capacity evaluation. It presents a precise picture of the organization's strengths and weaknesses. The output of this approach unambiguously calls for the capacity-building initiatives needed and helps foster ownership to boost self-esteem. More specifically, LISA's primary goal is to investigate current practices in 10 local governance-related areas.

The Jeffersonian Republicans and the Democratic Movement

Abstract Against those who argue that the term democracy only became a broadly positive term in the 19th century, this article shows that it already had become a positive political term in the 1790s in the USA. With the Jeffersonian revolution, groups that used democracy positively triumphed over the anti-democratic Federalists. By transforming the connotation of the word democracy, however, Democratic Republicans also transformed the concept/theory associated with it – from radical direct democracy to a representative system.

A Prologue to apology and futurism: Projections of nineteenth-century American Historicism in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House”

Distracted by the contesting political debates between aristocratic republicanism of the Revolutionary era and democratic republicanism of the Antebellum; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrative tone in his prologue, “The CustomHouse” carries out the ideological assets of nineteenth-century American historicism in accord with which he laid ahistorical fictional elements failing to portray the entirety of early colonial New England in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter. In this respect, “The Custom-House” portrays Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Romantic projections aimed at consoling the contemporaneous polarization on the futurity of the nation as much as his redemptive quest for his ancestral past in colonial Salem. Thus, as the dean of American Renaissance authors and a fervent Romantic, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s concern for an absolute-oriented moral vision, his apologetic perspective of the past, and his affirmative tone for the futurity of American democracy are most out loud in his writing. This study aims to focus on Hawthorne’s apologetic and futurist projections of nineteenth-century American historicism in his prologue, “The Custom-House” for his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter, concerning his responses to the anxieties of Antebellum America.

Can we imagine a new telos for democracy in a non-teleological world?

ABSTRACT Many political and economic forces are driven by the desire to eliminate democratic plurality in today’s political juncture. Democratic republicanism itself in its contemporary forms has failed to address many of the daunting moral, political, economic, social, technological, and ecological challenges we face today. It is argued that to fulfill its essence of egalitarian freedom and social justice, democratic republicanism must first decouple from the global neoliberal capitalist regime and secondly embrace some form of postcapitalist and posthumanist orientation guided by a new attractor, a teleological approach anchored in a new telos of superhumanity. Democracy without a telos of superhumanity is a democracy in name only. It is time to lay our teleophobia aside and propose a strong teleological account in the vein of a Buddhist no-self doctrine at the heart of the onto-politico-economy.

Making Maine: Statehood and the War of 1812

Imagine an America where police and military officers are appointed solely on the basis of their political allegiances. Imagine an America so politically polarized that opponents are labeled as advocating for an “infidel philosophy” (206). Now, imagine an America that reacts to the invasion of its territory by a foreign power with indifference. Hard to imagine? Well, readers of Joshua M. Smith's fifth book, Making Maine, may be surprised to learn this is precisely what Mainers endured in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. This remarkable episode has been overlooked because it runs counter to the western trajectory of the nation and the “insistence on American success” as the theme of nineteenth-century U.S. history (237).Making Maine takes a chronological approach spanning from the Jefferson Administration through Maine's first years as a state in the 1820s. Although the book has several themes, it defies a clear narrative arc, which gives some sense to the chaos of those two decades. Before the War of 1812, the commonwealth of Massachusetts was a divided state. Long a Federalist stronghold, Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party were ascendant in the state, especially in its non-contiguous district of Maine. Its influence fading at home and nationally, Federalists jealously guarded their power and even discussed seceding from the Union to avoid what was, in their view, the apocalypse of Democratic-Republican rule. In turn, Democratic Republicans labeled their Federalist opponents as “aristocrats” and as enemies of principles won in the American Revolution (21). Growing religious divisions only further fanned these flames. Methodist and Baptist denominations gained popularity across Massachusetts, yet all citizens were required to pay taxes to support the stalwart Congregational Church. The theme of intense partisanship pervades the book and should help twenty-first-century readers put contemporary ideological divisions in perspective.Massachusetts was not in a suitable posture for war, yet it came in 1812. Chaos and disorder reigned on land and sea in Maine. Canadians and Americans frequently smuggled resources across the border and privateers waylaid ships regardless of the flag they flew. Mainers often saw their political opponents as a greater threat than the British with whom they were at war. Federalists who saw the war as the folly of the Democratic-Republican president, James Monroe, were particularly resistant. They refused to pay taxes, and even in one instance beating a recruiter “with the butt end of a whip handle” (111).Sensing the divisions in Maine and seeking to avenge the several American invasions of Upper Canada, the British invaded Maine in 1814 and met with indifference. Encountering little resistance, British forces successfully captured Downeast Maine. Most Mainers “preferred property to pride,” opting to take neutrality oaths and ride out the war rather than engage in a patriotic defiance (161). Mainers looked to Massachusetts to relieve them of the indignity of occupation—Boston's influence and resources, after all, were the reason many Mainers had curbed statehood efforts up to that point. Massachusetts’ response was uninspiring. Boston Federalists failed to muster the necessary funds or initiative to challenge the British occupation of Maine. Mainers accused Massachusetts’ Federalist governor of “tamely submitting to the invasion of his territory” (204). Massachusetts Federalists’ perceived apathy toward its Maine citizens and their bungling of the militia tipped the scales in favor of statehood, which was achieved in 1820. Smith notes that the separation was not necessarily as acrimonious as one would assume, since “the Massachusetts ideal of an orderly Boston-oriented society lingered in Maine” after independence—seen in the state's constitution and state house imitating the Bay State in both an ideological and physical sense (223).Making Maine will be of interest to scholars and lay readers of the state's history. The amount of research in Making Maine borders on encyclopedic, and the primary sources in the book are impressive, coming from an impressive number of archives. Making Maine seems written for Mainers with an intimate knowledge of the Pine Tree State's geography. Those interested in placing Maine's experience during the War of 1812 within the wider national experience may note that the encyclopedic coverage of the war and the events surrounding it do not lend itself to a narrative structure. Smith vividly describes exciting battles and confrontations but could have also spent more time convincing readers why those events mattered with greater context. As a native Mainer, I fear that those “from away” will have a hard time seeing the relevance or importance of this forgotten episode from a largely forgotten war. Overall, Making Maine brings long overdue attention to an important moment in American history. Unlike Maine's cries for help in 1814, one hopes that this book is heard by scholars beyond the state's borders, because it helps us understand a critical crossroads not just in Maine's history, but the nation's as well.

Informing a Nation: The Newspaper Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

Informing a Nation: The Newspaper Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

Sacred Socialism

Sacred Socialism

Cossacks, Empire, and the Enlightenment: From Orientalization to Republican Reappropriation

This article seeks to explore how Enlightenment narratives and categories framed the perception and image of the Zaporozhian Cossacks both in the imperial center and in the south-western periphery of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century. It demonstrates that Catherine II deployed the discourse of civilizational mission to justify the disbandment of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host and the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich. The historical works of Voltaire became an important source of inspiration for Catherine's orientalist image of the Ukrainian Cossacks, which gained wide currency in the Russian Empire and was accepted by some representatives of the Ukrainian Cossack elite. On the other hand, the Enlightenment allowed some Ukrainians to challenge imperial hegemony by going beyond traditional estate and regional particularism and by rethinking the Cossack tradition as a democratic republican one and setting it against the supposed despotism of Imperial Russia.

A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists by Keith Harper

Reviewed by: A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists by Keith Harper Nicholas Patrick Cox A Mere Kentucky of a Place: The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists. By Keith Harper. America's Baptists. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xxii, 197. $49.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-642-1.) Thousands of Americans moved into the trans-Appalachian West during and immediately after the American Revolution, settling in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Many of those who established frontier communities in Kentucky, understandably, relocated from neighboring Virginia. There established Anglicanism had provoked the emergence of a wide range of dissenting Protestant political movements that culminated in the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786. Baptists were often at the forefront of challenging the established church in Virginia, and many left for Kentucky and points westward. Kentucky offered migrants plenty of economic incentives in the form of inexpensive land, drawing a diverse mix of transplants, including Baptists who had fought in the Revolution, as well as those ministers who had challenged Anglican hegemony in Virginia. These churchmen formed the ranks of Kentucky Baptist leadership. Keith Harper examines these Baptist ministers who led the early churches in the Bluegrass State as it transformed into an affluent middle-class member of the Union. Historians of early Kentucky and religion in the early republic may recognize these prominent ministers, such as John Gano, James Garrard (who served as Kentucky's second governor), William Hickman, the Craig brothers, and John Taylor. One wishes there was more space in this volume to discuss the views of congregation members in addition to their clergy, or perhaps that there were more records that captured the perspectives of ordinary Kentucky Baptists. Although the ministers of frontier Kentucky Baptist churches may not quite meet anyone's definition of hegemonic elites in the early republic, it sure appears that they played that role locally. These fractious ministers left behind a large volume of manuscripts, pamphlets, and memoirs about their efforts to establish Baptist churches, to form the Elkhorn Association in 1785, and to maintain three essential but occasionally irreconcilable commitments: Baptist "doctrinal fidelity," Jeffersonian republicanism, and the widely observed but infinitely varied southern honor culture (p. xix). The Elkhorn Association is "widely regarded as the oldest Baptist association west of the Appalachian Mountains" (p. xiii). Its members largely replicated Virginia's Regular Baptist conformity to the Philadelphia Association's endorsement of the Second London Confession of 1689. Those in Virginia who dissented from this doctrinal imposition from London often founded rival Separate Baptist churches. Both Regular and Separate Baptists established congregations in Kentucky. Divisions over doctrine, authority and autonomy, revivalism, slavery, missionary efforts, and simple personality conflicts between ministers and landed elites reverberated through early republic Kentucky's Baptist communities, providing fruitful opportunities for Harper's close analysis of Baptist belief, practice, and behavior from the 1780s to the 1820s. Generally, the majority of Elkhorn Association ministers (and presumably the congregants who employed them) remained faithful to the Philadelphia [End Page 757] Association's doctrine, sought to avoid disruptions and to quash divisions in favor of order, and desired union with Virginia's Regular Baptists and other Kentucky Baptist associations. This emerging southern Baptist unification movement often found itself anxious about the emerging role of New England clergy, ecumenical benevolent reform, and the centralizing and authoritarian tendencies associated with Federalism. As mission work aimed at Native Americans and foreign nations increased in the early nineteenth century, Kentucky Baptists generally embraced mission societies in pursuit of a nondoctrinal common purpose that would paper over local Baptist divisions, achieve national recognition alongside the mainline Congregational, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches, and simply support the goals of missionizing. Dissenters among Kentucky Baptists––particularly John Taylor––worried that the Kentucky churches would lose local autonomy over doctrine and practice as the mission societies sought to bypass churches via direct appeals to Christian donors, formed national associations with non-church-based local branches, and paternalistically targeted white frontier communities deemed insufficiently redeemed for mission work. Missionary enthusiasm, however, subsumed local division. By the mid-1810s, Harper argues, missionary work became the foundation of a...

THE LANDS WERE NOT EMPTY

THE LANDS WERE NOT EMPTY

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

On the Evolution of Republican Democracy

The paper is devoted to the process of penetration of democratic ideas and principles of state building in Europe, that is considered using examples from the past. Various forms of democracy are presented in the composition of the aristocratic, bourgeois estates, as well as all citizens, and the stability of such democracies is considered. The reasons for the emergence of democracies, as well as the mechanisms of their destruction are discussed. Also, the paper discusses the principles of the state structure of modern developed democracies and countries of the developing world - imperfect democracies, where republican institutions to a greater extent imitate their democratic counterparts. Based on statistical data, assumptions about the nature of changes in the social structure of such states in the direction of their greater democratization are presented. To analyze the trends in the social development of countries, a fifteen-year period of crisis-free development of the world economy at the beginning of the 21st century was chosen. It is noted that in a number of imperfect democracies two economies are being formed, a modern one, where the owners of assets are oligarchs, and an archaic one, where the bulk of the poor are employed. In the final part of the work the nature of the destruction of oligarchic rule is considered. In particular, these are the processes of expansion of the modern innovative economy into marginal geographical areas and industries of countries. The growth in the capitalization of assets, the increase in the number and wealth of their owners and top managers leads to increased competition and to the suppression of the influence of individual oligarchic clans. New groups of the low-income population are being drawn into production. The number and wealth of the middle class is growing. Increases his ability to participate in political life. We can talk about the tendencies of strengthening democracy and development of republican institutions in many countries of the world. Particular attention is paid to the conditions for the transition of oligarchic imperfect democracies to authoritarian regimes.

Washington View: Must we stay divided over education?

Education became a major issue in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, when Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin clashed over how much say parents should have in their children’s education. Youngkin’s victory, fueled in part by parent outrage over school curricula, could lead other candidates to stoke fear and outrage over schools to score political points. Maria Ferguson discusses the power of schools to divide society and considers what lessons schools should take from the COVID-19 crisis.

From Jeffersonian Republicanism to Southern nationalism: faculty engagement with proslavery thought at the University of Virginia, 1825–1861

ABSTRACT During the antebellum period, the faculty of the University of Virginia (UVA) shifted from depending on slavery in private life to advocating for the institution as public intellectuals. When UVA opened in March 1825, Thomas Jefferson hoped that the University would bolster Virginia’s national standing and disseminate his vision of republican government. Although the institution depended on enslaved labour from its inception, Jefferson’s lingering influence contributed to some professors’ misgivings over slavery’s morality and a broader reticence to defend the system publicly. Academic currents and political sentiments began to shift in Virginia after Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831. Even as many of their peers openly advocated for slavery, establishing its defence as the defining feature of Southern education, UVA’s professors hesitated. Coming under increasing pressure from the public and its student body, the University changed tack after the Crisis of 1850, hiring a series of fiercely proslavery and pro-Southern professors. Sweeping away the vestiges of Jefferson’s republican ideology, and its comparative ambivalence towards slavery, these faculty members emphasized inequality and hierarchy, praising slavery as the central feature of a well-ordered society.

Living Law

Living Law Eugene Avrutin and Bruce Rosenstock (bio) Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt By Miguel Vatter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 348 pp. IN MEMORIAM Professor Bruce Rosenstock (1951–2023), passed away on the morning of January 5, 2023 after a long battle with cancer. A passionate activist for justice, equality, and pluralism, Professor Rosenstock taught at the University of California, Davis and at Stanford University before joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty in 2002. Professor Rosenstock was the author of numerous well-received books on political theology and modern Jewish philosophy, including New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile (2002), Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond (2010), and Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (2017). Most recently, Rosenstock was at work on a book titled "Hegel and the Holocaust," an exploration of four thinkers who have attempted to respond to the Holocaust in the terms of Hegel's philosophy. An inspiring teacher, Rosenstock was a longtime member of the Executive Committee in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society and served as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religion. [End Page 213] _______ Over the last couple of decades, miguel vatter has established him-self as one of the most original and penetrating scholars of Continental political thought working today. Since 2014, he has published three monographs that cover the most significant themes in the field, from biopolitics, the constitutional basis of state sovereignty and international law, to human rights and political theology (Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society, Fordham University Press, 2014; Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt, Oxford University Pres, 2020; and the volume under review). In his always illuminating and thought-provoking close readings of the major figures of modern political philosophy, Vatter returns again and again to a set of fundamental claims around which his argument is structured: the ontological grounding of human rights in the unique emergent property (my phrasing) of humanness; state sovereignty as the usurpation of the power residing in humanness; republican democracy as the political expression of humanness; and Jewish and Christian political theology as competing discourses about the divinity of humanness versus the divinity of sovereignty. I read Vatter's work as being squarely located within the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach and the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and their concern to liberate humanness (they call it the human "species being") from its political-theological alienation. For Vatter, the deification the human sovereign is the quintessential alienation of humanness, whereas the "living law" that vests humanity with inalienable dignity restores humanness to its rightful place in the scheme of creation. What makes Vatter's work so richly rewarding is that his engagement with his chosen themes is always mediated through deep and erudite readings of the primary sources of modern political thought. The book under review here is a tour de force exposition of the major Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, from Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig to Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, and Hannah Arendt (with [End Page 214] a brief discussion of Martin Buber and his influence on Arendt). Vatter's stress on the centrality of the category of Creation as the ground of human dignity makes his book a fitting complement to Benjamin Lazier's treatment of the anti-Gnostic tendency of these thinkers in God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton University Press, 2008). Each of Vatter's chapters builds toward a synthetic understanding of modern Jewish political theology as founded on the principle that divine sovereignty is revealed in the power of the human to freely form republican communal life under an egalitarian legal order grounded in dignity as a natal property of every human. In the book's epilogue, Vatter argues that, with the creation of the human, the "Throne of God" is emptied of its glory and transferred to the human being. Each new human birth inaugurates a new rights-bearing creature who is the only sovereign power on earth. In a synoptic statement near the conclusion of...

"Nothing beneath—all?": Rebecca Harding Davis' Critique of Possessive Individualism in "Life in the Iron-Mills"

"Nothing beneath—all?":Rebecca Harding Davis' Critique of Possessive Individualism in "Life in the Iron-Mills" Sean J. Kelly (bio) In The Lives and Deeds of Our Self-made Men, Vol.1 (1872), Harriet Beecher Stowe lauds men who, having "sprang from conditions of hard-working poverty," embody the promise of social mobility and, more importantly, the truth of American exceptionalism.1 Appraising Frederick Douglass, for example, she asserts that "if a man is a man, no matter in what rank of society he is born, no matter how tied down and weighted by poverty and all its attendant disadvantages, there is nothing in American institutions to prevent his rising to the very highest offices in the gift of the country" (LD, 2:380–81). According to Stowe's formulation, one's successful ability to make oneself by rising from poverty and disadvantage would seem to provide the retroactive evidence of one's status as a man with inalienable rights. Crucially, Stowe views Jeffersonian republicanism as a political representation of Christian morality, claiming that "the American government is the only permanent republic which has ever based itself upon the principles laid down by Jesus Christ, of the absolute equal brotherhood of man, and the rights of man on the simple ground of manhood" (LD,1:vi). Stowe's conception of rights is, in this instance, ontological rather than practical, spiritual rather than juridical. If man as such is defined by his [End Page 261] equality with other men, then his inherent rights are founded upon that absolute status. Like Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis links the notion of rights to something fundamental in humanity, an element associated with Christian grace that is essential to "solv[ing] the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong."2 Unlike Stowe, however, Davis suggests that a conception of inalienable rights requires that we focus on the subject's hidden cause rather than its social effects. First appearing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861 and revived by the Feminist Press in 1972, "Life in the Iron-Mills" ironically questions Hugh Wolfe's ability to scale the "ladder" of the "American system" and, exposing the hypocrisy of characters such as Doctor May (and even the narrator), promotes a conception of rights as humanity's spiritual and political foundation ("Life," 439). Davis' well-known short story distinguishes Hugh Wolfe from the benighted laborers around him by his artistic sensibility and his nascent talent as a sculptor. When Kirby, the mill owner's son, leads a group of wealthy men, including his brother-in-law, Mitchell, and Doctor May on a tour of the foundry, May appraises Wolfe's artwork as the evidence of a God-given power that endows Wolfe with the right to "make [himself] what he will" ("Life," 440). Inspired by the vague notion of his rights and the possibility that a better life awaits him outside the mill, Wolfe keeps Mitchell's wallet, which his cousin, Deborah, steals. Instead of building a new life and fulfilling his potential as an artist, Wolfe lands in prison and ultimately dies by suicide. Importantly, Davis' morally ambiguous narrative eschews the labor rights struggle's more realistic particularities in the early nineteenth century in order to promote a more fundamental vision of rights, namely what Mitchell, sarcastically invoking "Saint-Simonian doctrines," calls the "rights of the soul" ("Life," 440).3 While Stowe cites the self-made man's worldly accomplishments as incontestable evidence of the [End Page 262] subject's inalienable rights and the American system's ideal liberality, "Life" criticizes American self-making ideology and possessive individualism's empty promises. In so doing, Davis evinces a transcendental subject whose rights are guaranteed by its permanent non-inscription in the social. As the psychoanalytic theorist Joan Copjec argues, the ultimate guarantor of rights is a subject whose "very existence . . . is simultaneous with society's failure to integrate, to represent it."4 Consequently, we should not view the subject's cause simply as its identification with the numerous subject positions (regarding class, race, gender, etc.) available to it but instead with its "attachment to what language cannot say, to the unspeakable double that is the indestructible support of our freedom...