Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Imagine Self-Government 1776– 1865. By Luigi Marco Bassani. Abbeville Institute Press, 2021. Vii + 356 pages.
Marco Bassani is a historian of European political idea and it is from the point of view of his discipline that he takes a look at the American political system that concerned an end in 1865. As he sees matters, the United States from its beginning as an independent country resisted the dominant trend of nineteenth-century Europe, the increase of the all-powerful state. Before the Civil War, the United States, as its plural name recommends, was federal and not main in type, and sovereignty lived ultimately in the people of the numerous states, taken individually, instead of in a combined entity. Bassani’s book is abundant and complicated, and, rather than attempt of a summary of its many important ideas, I’ll talk about just a few of them.
The state, he informs, us is a contemporary innovation. “In reality, the state is contemporary. Certainly, the term ‘modernity’ itself makes really little sense politically other than in relation to the state … The state is European in the sense that it originated and established in Europe (believed it then ended up being highly exportable). It is modern-day because it started its history during a period which more or less accompanies the modern-day age. And it is an ‘creation,’ not a discovery.” (pp. 12-13)
This puts him at odds with Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, and Bassani is specific about this argument, however I do not believe admirers of these authors need be too disrupted by this. Bassani does not reject that predatory bands that completely settled in an area drawn out resources through the “political means” from the subject population. What he argues is new is the state taken in the Weberian sense, an entity that declares to be the sole source of genuine authority. “Simply put, the very first item on the agenda of the modern state was the centralization of power. At the dawn of the modern-day era the state started its long journey when absolute monarchs created a single decision-making center of command, which gradually enforced itself on all other decision makers. The centers that made up the ‘middle ages cosmos’ were obliterated. The state asserted itself as the sole, overriding and exclusive focus: In due time no other political power stayed.”(p. 24)
America took another course, though centralizers, most notably Alexander Hamilton, would have enjoyed to follow the European pattern. However though the Constitution increased the power of the central federal government over the weak arrangements provided for in the Articles of Confederation, it did not enact the plans of the centralizers. Furthermore, the Constitution was ratified only after a bitter struggle. Bassani stresses the continuing influence of Antifederalist opposition to the Constitution on the Jeffersonian party, the principal opposition to the Federalist centralizers whose greatest figure was Hamilton. “The Antifederalists absolutely did not vanish from the American political scene; rather they simply became less visible for a few years … The divergent views of society– essentially, whether it directs itself or should be directed by the paternal iron fist of a nationwide government– were at the heart of the departments over power in between the newly emerged Jeffersonian party and the Federalists in power. And these in turn were however the additional advancement and the ideological condensation of the political concerns raised throughout the ratification dispute. “(p. 119)
Bassani dedicates a good deal of attention to Jefferson and Calhoun as leaders of the opposition to the centralizers. Calhoun, in particular, he considers the best American political theorist since the Constitutional arguments, a viewpoint likewise shared by John Stuart Mill. “John Stuart Mill’s judgment reserved for the Disquisition [by Calhoun] is much better understood. Calhoun, he composed, ‘has displayed sharper powers as a speculative political thinker exceptional to any who has appeared in American politics since the authors of the “Federalist”‘”. (p. 233, note 111) But I will leave it to readers to examine what he says about them, in order to focus on something else.
This is the function of Abraham Lincoln as a supporter of the European main state. “Lincoln’s deep political convictions emerged with excellent clearness and marked the decrease of all the conceptions that had presided over the advancement of the Republic to that point. Lincoln specified that he held the Constitution to be an ‘natural law,’ thus introducing a European concept that had little precedent in America … Within the area of a couple of phrases we experience all the constitutive elements of the theory of the modern-day state, revealed by a guy who had actually probably never ever become aware of Machiavelli, Bodin, or Hobbes, but who nevertheless was following in their steps.” (p. 278)
Lincoln related to the American national union as a matter of world historic value. “As evidence of Lincoln’s idea of the Union and its objectives, there disappears essential file than his message to Congress of December 1, 1862. His impassioned description of the United States as a living being, as our ‘nationwide homestead,’ is the property on which the President erected his argument for union. ‘In all its adjustments and aptitudes it demands Union and hates separation. In truth, it would ere long force reunion, nevertheless much of blood and treasure the separation might have cost.’ Simply put, the Union, being a post of faith and exempt from logical cost-benefit analysis, has no price.” (pp.284-285)
Bassani sees in the states’ rights custom the main focus of resistance in the American context to the Leviathan state. “Whatever else may be said about the states’ rights custom, something is certain: Over the course of the modern-day age it has shown itself to be the most potent intellectual restraint on the growth of Leviathan … The Constitution is inadequate: The contemporary state, due to the fact that it is self-regulating and judge of the degree of its own power, undoubtedly produces an absolute monopoly. On the other hand, in an authentic federal system the government is subject to controls by other governmental powers. The institutional history of America, at least in the time frame we talked about, can be clearly viewed as a big laboratory in which Calhoun’s refrain is clearly substantiated: Power can be examined just by power.” (p. 311, focus in initial)
Marco Bassani has composed an impressive book, based upon an extensive understanding of political theory and American history. I kept in mind only a few errors. It is not true that “the powerful indictment in the Declaration of Independence targets only George III.” (p. 66) The shift in the Declaration from the clauses that begin “He has” to those that start “For” mark a movement from indictment of the king to an indictment of parliament. The 10th Modification does not utilize the expression “specifically delegated.” I would have chosen also a greater emphasis on the importance of individual rights. But all students of political theory and American history will learn a great deal from Bassani’s excellent work.