The American Liberal Colonial Tradition
Settler Colonial Studies, Special Edition, Patrick Wolfe, ed., Summer/Fall 2013
22 Pages Posted: 1 Jun 2013
Date Written: May 31, 2013
Abstract
In the late 17th Century, John Locke wrote, “in the beginning, all the world was America.” In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of Americans being “born equal.” In the mid-20th century, American political scientist Louis Hartz asked, “can a people ‘born equal’ ever understand peoples elsewhere that have to become so? Can it ever understand itself?” In different ways, these theorists reproduce and reflect the myth of America’s seemingly exceptional founding and posture towards the world. They also, implicitly, tell a story of an American liberal tradition that sees and disavows indigenous people, indigenous territorial presence, and settler colonialism. The American liberal myths of the self-made man, of the liberal individual, and of American exceptionalism all rely upon a disavowed relationship to the constitutive role of settler colonization in the foundation, development and structure of the United States. On closer reading, I find in Hartz’s ultimately failed critique of American liberalism an awareness, if not quite an avowal, of the role of settler colonialism in the production of America’s central myths. I place Hartz’s work at the center of this essay because his argument re-animates while posing as a critique of the narrative of American exceptionalism. We see in Hartz someone struggling, and not quite succeeding, to challenge the constraints of American political discourse. In this effort, Hartz implicitly suggests the presence of an American liberal colonial tradition, one that upsets the story of America’s exceptionalist founding by seeing liberalism and settler colonialism as mutually constitutive logics. In the end, Hartz sees but cannot fully grasp the explanatory power that comes with placing settler colonial logic at the center of a critique of the foundational myths of America. Through my reading of Hartz I hope that readers can find a different way to intervene in the powerful discourses of American liberalism and exceptionalism without re-animating them, and this involves avowing the constitutive role of settler colonialism in American political development.
Keywords: Colonialism, Collective Memory, Indigenous Politics, U.S. Politics
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