Revolutionary Ideologies and American Modernities

[CRIT 13.1 (2012) 52-73] doi:10.1558/crit.v13i1.52 Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160 Revolutionary Doctrines and Political Imaginaries: American Modernities in the Republican Age Jeremy C. A. Smith University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia [email protected] Abstract: he social thought of Castoriadis and Lefort address Old World constellations. Yet both are positioned in a critical relationship to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and pose questions about power, the political and citizenship relevant to diferent civilizational settings. Two political philosophies that emerged in the era of revolutionary critique are examined in this paper alongside Castoriadis and Lefort. homas Jeferson’s philosophy of republic and empire and Simon Bolivar’s creed of independence were American visions that connected with the political imaginary. Each set down traditions open to interpretation and mythologization. Both invoked an older rivalry of two images of the New World, as American or as Colombian, which was really a rivalry of Spanish and British Empires and their civilizational inluences. Where earlier republican visions developed at the cusp of virtue and interest cultures had posed a particular range of questions about democracy, civic constitution and independence, American states now contained democratic and authoritarian potential. Even though Castoriadis and Lefort did not make these American contexts the centre of their work, each conceive the political and politics in ways that are relevant to American modernities. A key argument put in this paper with respect to Castoriadis and Lefort is that Castoriadis’s conception of creation is more salient to the republican revolutions more generally, while Lefort’s notion of political imaginary inds a strong case in the North American revolution. Keywords: Americas; Bolivar; Castoriadis; Jeferson; Lefort; Republicanism. Debate around the contingent foundations of politics and the political in philosophy and social theory has created an environment of discussion inviting a re-evaluation of the notion of political imaginaries.1 Along with Han1. O. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political hought: Political Diference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheield, S3 8AF. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 53 nah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort were at the starting point of the distinction between politics and the political which foreshadowed conception of the political imaginary. However, secondary debate around Castoriadis and Lefort’s work has not been grounded in national or civilizational contexts as much as it could have been. If there is a lack of scholarship around theories of the political in comparative and historical scholarship, then there is also an opportunity to develop a body of comparative analysis of diferent political doctrines and polities based on the theoretical work done by Castoriadis and Lefort. his essay is an outline of how such initiative could be taken with respect to the multiple modernities of the Americas. Philosophy and social theory in Castoriadis and Lefort cast problems of power, the political and citizenship in ways that can be applied to diferent civilizational settings. If the problems they pose are considered from the vantage-point of the Americas, then two distinctions between Old and New Worlds should be made. First of all, the political in the Americas coalesced in a zone of intercultural engagement involving Europeans with indigenous and African civilizational others. It is beyond dispute that the confrontation between colonizers and colonized was unceasingly conlictual. But it was also at one end of a spectrum of types of cultural exchange between three continents of people, language, goods, arts, science and ideas. In this respect, European and American modernities were created in the context of enlarging horizons brought on by the growth of Atlantic connections. Secondly, the American republics, as immigrant-settler societies, were formed in a particularly presentist crucible of modernity with a set of political myths emphasizing the novelty of their social worlds.2 As such, a high level of relexivity revolving around two core beliefs was highly prominent in the historical self-understanding of American societies.3 In the irst place, many Americans throughout the hemisphere understood that their histories commenced with a sharp distinction from Europe. Secondly, they acted in the belief that they were situated at a juncture of great transformations. hus they were able to generate cultures of reformation of power that, in many instances, avoided resort to a Jacobinism of radical reinvention. his essay focuses on the second distinction: that is, the deep-seated impression held by Americans that they were creating their own political worlds. One key argument put in this paper is that Castoriadis’ conception 2. P. Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 211–12. 3. S. N. Eisenstadt, “he Civilizations of the Americas: the Crystallizations of Distinct Modernities”, Comparative Sociology 1.1 (2003): 43–61. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 54 JEREMY C. A. SMITH of creation is more salient to the republican revolutions more generally, while Lefort’s notion of political imaginary inds a strong case in the North American revolution.4 After a short survey of the notion of the political imaginary and discussion of its relevance in American modernities, the essay proceeds in a brief interpretive exercise to identify fragments of the political imaginary in the works of homas Jeferson and Simon Bolivar. he Political in Lefort and Castoriadis Castoriadis and Lefort are theorists of the invention of new forms of the political out of existing conditions. he concept of the political has an especial meaning in Castoriadis’s work due to his project of autonomy.5 In Castoriadis’s conception, politics is critical and continuous reconditioning of society (la politique) distinct from intrigues of instituted power (le politique). he quality of la politique can be judged by the perspicacity of thought and the general location of the boundary of public and private spheres; that is, the space open to deliberative participation. A Castoriadian sense of a political imaginary should therefore recognize that collective lucidity in public deliberation, legislation and act is the sine qua non of politics. As democracy for Castoriadis is the explicit rule of the collectivity, decisions about where power starts and inishes become decisive. hey are political markers of self-determination. Democracy is necessarily self-limiting and consciously defers hubris. Democracy is therefore not possible without homo politicus. In other words, in the articulation of psyche to social-historical autonomy, authentic democracy can only be staged by autonomous beings creating autonomous worlds and an institutional setting instituted along autonomous lines. Constitutions and declarations neither found nor contain democracy.6 Can such a deliberative culture be found in actually-existing democracies? Even though modern democracy is seen by Castoriadis as a form emerging from the project of autonomy, it is still his long-standing belief that contemporary self-styled democracies are for the most part liberal 4. Dick Howard “he American Revolution and Revolutionary Ideology: Claude Lefort and the ‘Second Revolution’”, hesis Eleven 36 (1993), 168–80. 5. C. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy”, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, D. A. Curtis (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 143–74 and “Heritage and Revolution”, in Figures of the hinkable, H. Arnold (trans.) (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 105–17. 6. See the opening of “Present Issues for Democracy”, in A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997, H. Arnold (trans.) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 125–29. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 55 oligarchies.7 Certainly, there is democratization in the expansion of access to oligarchic centres of decision-making through enhanced delegation. However, a greater magnitude of representation does not itself generate democracy. Nor does greater access alter the privatized character of the regime in which the public sphere is relatively enclosed rather than dominant.8 More representation only serves to emphasize the permanent crisis of representation which results from the isolation of the political from the socials. Although Castoriadis does not bring democracy qua instituting imaginary into his frame of modernity in the manner that Lefort does,9 there are nonetheless illuminating points of contrast with Lefort’s political philosophy of democracy.10 Lefort and Castoriadis vary on the three spheres of the political imaginary: the relation between democracy and right, the nature of the imaginary institution, and conceptions of politics. For Lefort, democracy in early modernity dislodges the locus of power that existed in the ancien regime. Having dislodged the monarchical centre, democracy resituates the locus of power in the metaphysical realm of the purely symbolic.11 hus Lefort observes a symbolic rupture in the revolutionary demolition of the monarchical centre. Democracy is generated as an imaginary without deinitive institutional contours and therefore is no-less and no-more than a political form of society. his is so irrespective of whether its institutions embody direct democracy (as they must for Castoriadis if they are to qualify as authentically democratic) or representative decision-making. Moreover, human rights (not considered as components of an imaginary by Castoriadis but more as features of social struggle) are also in the realm of the symbolic. What secures speciic rights and the democratic condition of debate about all social questions is the general right to have rights.12 he expansion of 7. C. Castoriadis, “he Crisis of Culture and the State”, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 219– 42. 8. C. Castoriadis, “What Democracy?”, in Figures of the hinkable, 124–26. 9. N. Doyle, “Democracy as Socio-cultural Project of Individual and Collective Sovereignty: Claude Lefort, Marcel gauchet and the French Debate on Modern Autonomy”, hesis Eleven 75 (2003): 71–97. See also by the same author “he Sacred, Social Creativity and the State”, Critical Horizons 7:1 (2006): 207–38. On Lefort’s conception of the political particularly against the backdrop of Castoriadis’ work see A. E. guzman, “Ser, creacion, historia: El ilosofar de Claude Lefort en torno a lo politico”, Revista Casa del Tiempo 1, no. 10 (2008): 73–79. 10. C. Premat, “Castoriadis and the Modern Political Imaginary”, Critical Horizons 7:1 (2006): 251–75. 11. C. Lefort, “he Question of Democracy”, in Democracy and Political heory, D. Macey (trans.) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 9–20. See also B. Flynn, he Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). 12. C. Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights”, in he Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, J. B. hompson (ed.) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 239–72. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 56 JEREMY C. A. SMITH rights is possible because of this constituting right to rights and it is on this basis that democracy regenerates. he inclusion of more and more rightsclaimants in the political community also has the same efect and makes it more democratic in Lefort’s estimation. Lefort’s unique conception of democracy and rights relies on an appreciation that the political is a powerfully symbolic order and not an order of power. Institutions of power emerge distinctively through the political confrontation with indeterminacy. Castoriadis also insists on the recognition of indeterminacy as a condition of democracy. But for Lefort, the confrontation with indeterminacy leads to a strong sense of the political as the symbolic self-characterization by society of itself, which in turn cannot be reduced to a sub-system of a larger societal complex.13 In contrast, for Castoriadis, the political is a “dimension” of the social institution “pertaining to explicit power, that is, to the existence of agencies able to formulate explicitly sanctionable injunctions”.14 A distinct perspective is thus assumed by Lefort whereby the constitutive horizon is the political imaginary not the social imaginary as such.15 What place in Lefort’s political philosophy does this thereby leave for politics as purposive action? Politics is a species of particular social agency and an active expression of society’s inescapable division. Politics is, moreover, an expression of the possibility of change given by the political institution of the social. However, while power is uncoupled from any external foundation, the new transparency of the political institution of society is also accompanied by a kind of occlusion of division.16 he dramaturgical representation of the popular will condenses conlict into a single staged drama of the political community. his is so even though the centre of power is left unoccupied (though rarely un-administered). hus, with the democratic overthrow of the permanent seat of power held by monarchies, the seat of authority is periodically vacated and then occupied by newcomers. In an imagery of social order derived directly from his reading of Machiavelli, Lefort deems divisions in the social order permanent and the conlicts that emerge from 13. 14. 15. 16. See also “hinking Politics”, in he Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, C. Taylor and M. B. N. Hansen (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 352–79. D. Howard, he Marxian Legacy, Second Edition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 212–13. Rosavallon also situates Lefort in this context in “Towards a Philosophical History of the Political”, 60–62. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy”, 156 (emphasis in original). J. D. Ingram, “he Politics of Claude Lefort’s Political: Between Liberalism and Radical Democracy”, hesis Eleven 87 (2006): 33–50. Raf geenens, “Democracy, Human Rights and History”, European Journal of Political heory 7 no. 3: 269–86. Lefort, Democracy and Political heory, 226–27. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 57 those divisions as incessant, even though the drama of division takes on a condensed form. Politics for Lefort is thus conceived as the ceaseless reenactment of the political. Where Lefort casts politics as a rhythmic renewal of the symbolic institution of society, for Castoriadis politics means the interruption of the oligarchic stabilization of the instituting imaginary. Furthermore, it is not staged but embodied, not instituting but creating in the interstices of what is and what can be: Politics, as created by the greeks, amounts to explicitly putting into question, the established institution of society … a coming to light, certainly partial, of the instituting in person. A dramatic, though by no means exclusive, illustration of this is presented by the moments of revolution. he creation of politics takes place when the established institution of society is put into question as such and in its various aspects and dimensions, that is to say, when another relation, previously unknown, is created between the instituting and the instituted.17 Both Lefort and Castoriadis take as a starting point the distinction of the political from politics, and likewise refuse a conlation of the political and the social. However, on many other crucial points of philosophy of the political imaginary they diverge. A more extensive comparative political history of the Americas can illustrate how Castoriadis’s emphasis on the creativity of politics is more salient to an analysis of the political/anti-political movements outlined in the section below on Latin American and North American modernities.18 American Political Imaginaries For Lefort the institution of political modernity should be taken as the most complete instance of the dispersion of power in the United States.19 Against liberal constitutional histories, Lefort argues that what was revolutionary about the act of separation was the immediate distrust of representative institutions and the consequent institution of an ongoing principle of selfcritique. he Constitution was part of the principle of unending rejuvena17. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy”, 159–60 (emphasis in original). 18. D. Howard, he Primacy of the Political: A History of Political hought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolutions. New York: University of Colombia Press, 2010. 19. Howard, “he American Revolution and Revolutionary Ideology”. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 58 JEREMY C. A. SMITH tion of political space, but a part only. Politics was more broadly expressive and indeinite in this environment. his principle of self-critique was more powerful than the principle of representation for the taxed pinpointed by liberals as both the cause and beneit of the revolution. he revolution instituted democratic scope for the recognition that the republic could not exist in a wholly uniied state without divisions. here is no foundational moment as such in the emergence of this form. he character of this political imaginary is generative, stimulating constant activity and acting as an alternative to the liberal tendency to keep the social and the political apart. Contrary to Lefort, Castoriadis sees the US Constitution as a law-based document created to check rebellious components of the revolutionary movement, and not a continuation of lucid relexivity or an expression of the empty place of democracy.20 Emerging from the Republican Age, conditions of heteronomy further cramped the vestiges of creative radicalism that lourished in the revolution. Tocqueville’s deeply developed impression of the United States captures traces of the revolutionary era – its “imaginary institution, in my (i.e. Castoriadis’s – author) sense of the term”.21 Tocqueville was able to capture a picture of the equality of conditions culturally characteristic of the republican world. However, the quasi-classical “Jefersonian political imaginary” was already under strain when Tocqueville sojourned in the States. he beginnings of a long phase of industrialization in the North and oligarchization of the southern states were putting at risk the egalitarianism of petty producer cultures that had succeeded the ascriptive imperial order. Tocqueville’s notion of “democratic despotism” – that is, a depoliticization of the realm of the political, or a reduction of politics to procedural business – alluded to the dispossession of the citizenry of the conditions of self-determination. he result is underlying movement towards liberal oligarchy, conformism, and privatization of decision-making, which Castoriadis laments as the later emergence of closure in the USA. For Castoriadis what passes as “politics” in the US today is the most scandalous heteronomy. In what could be taken as an oblique criticism of Lefort, Castoriadis observes that power, rather than being an empty, unoccupied place, is privately possessed by legislative, judicial and executive oligarchies.22 Castoriadis’s position is therefore more sharply censorious. Where Castoriadis believes that the element of autonomy in the Revolution dissipated, Lefort believes it to be bigger than the forces of oligarchy (or any other threats). his incongruity of views is signiicant but will not be pursued 20. Castoriadis, “What Democracy?”, 118–50. 21. Castoriadis, “What Democracy?”, 120. 22. Castoriadis, “What Democracy?”, 129–30. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 59 here. I conine the current essay to the contents of the political core of the republican revolutions, on which there is less discord between Castoriadis and Lefort. he political doctrines of leaders of the Spanish-American and Anglo-American revolutions become relevant with this turn to the republican core. hose political doctrines did not herald the political imaginary as such. Instead republican political thought exempliied exceptional creativity by illuminating a horizon of possibility for the political institution of new societies. Looked at from this point of view, the doctrines of key thinkers can be an intriguing study in the articulation of creative revolutionary potential. Republican revolutionaries worked and thrived in a milieu of rapidly expanding domestic and international public spheres. heir works were expressions of a relexive condition in which the imperial heritage could be put into question and critically transformed. he principal result of the republican revolutions as such was not the removal of an alien power; it was the creation of a novel constitutional form of statehood. he political condition of the new states was the a priori impermanence of regime envisaged as a foundational principle. After an outline of the distinct modernities and trajectories of AngloAmerican and Hispanoamerican republics, the essay concentrates on the writings of Jeferson and Bolivar. Such an outline is important not only to the doctrines of Bolivar and Jeferson, but also to remarks made in the paper below about the consequences of the revolutionary era. hus, a sketch of the trans-Atlantic and civilizational contexts in which these modernities arose and spread paves the way for the next part of my argument.23 Latin America’s modernity lay to one side of technocratic models sourced from outside, as well as anti-modern essentialisms that resisted those models.24 Technocratic models were used by their advocates to champion an instrumental form of change based on historical experiences in Europe and North America. Defensive strategies enacted in resistance to foreign schemas were nationalistic and provincial in style imagining: (…) tradition to be a refuge from change (…) largely in reaction to the pro-foreign bias of the technocratic model. Examples include racial pessimists, some indigenistas and many hispanistas, cultural nationalists, among them the national character essayists, right-wing Catholic 23. I elaborate the distinctiveness of America’s modernities in J. C. A. Smith, “he Many Americas: Civilization and Modernity in the Atlantic World”, European Journal of Social heory 13(1) (2010): 117–33. 24. J. Larrain, Identity and Modernity in Latin America (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) and N. Miller, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future 1900–1930 (London: Palgrave, 2008). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 60 JEREMY C. A. SMITH nationalists and, most recently, Felipe Quinche’s revanchist movement seeking the recreation of the ‘Aymara nation’. he most persistent, and probably the most signiicant, of these is Catholic traditionalism.25 here was always a third alternative contained in the inter-civilizational and dynamic character of Latin American modernity. Intellectuals of the early twentieth century rejected the economism of nineteenth century nationalist leaders and the doubts shared by advocates of the technocratic model of the defensive essentials about Latin America’s prospects. hey were optimistic about the turn to an ethical politics which “led them to question the distinction between the traditional and the modern, arguing that things labelled traditional coexisted alongside of things labelled modern and that the two interacted in a constant process of reformulation”.26 Latin America’s revolutions began with a wave of transformation that swept the entire Hispanic world.27 he values of independence that coalesced with the collapse of the Spanish Empire have survived in two features. Firstly, an emancipatory conception of reason encompassed ethics and aesthetics and emphasized a particularly assertive conception of social justice. Secondly, Latin American modernity embraced participatory notions of popular sovereignty that take solidarity, rather than a contractual paradigm of sociality, as a basis of being-together. he emancipatory conception of reason built on colonial-era experiences of intercultural learning. Spanish liberalism, Spanish traditionalism, sentiments of Creole independence and even Indian perspectives were all inluences in the crystallization of emancipatory values. he impulse to declare new states responded to the historical ferocity of colonialism by incorporating a project of republican re-foundation. In the twentieth century, this current of modernity (with its internal notion of legitimacy) has struggled to survive populist authoritarianism, military dictatorships, uneven and unequal phases of capitalist industrialization and clientelistic modes of institutional formation. hese countervailing logics relate to strategies to introduce external models of modernization under the guise of liberalism or defensive, populist programs. he contestatory alternative of Latin American modernity is, in one way, suppressed by these complex dynamics. In another way, it surges forth, not only as “the existence of a new global system of references which combine the ideas, social imaginaries, values and behaviors”, but also as “(t)he radically new ( … ) creation of 25. Miller, Reinventing Modernity, 17–18. 26. Miller, Reinventing Modernity, 18. 27. F.-X. guerra, Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispanicas (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 61 a public stage where the new system of references leaves private circulation in which until then it had been shut away, in order to burst into the light of day”.28 In other words, the public presence of cultures of Latin American modernity is a sine qua non of the emergence of the republics. Yet it has always been confronted by powerful logics of authoritarianism. An open and lourishing public sphere creates conditions in which the sources of the imaginary institution are more visible. Repression forces, and has forced, the emancipatory currents of Latin American modernity underground and into the private realm. In this way, Latin America’s modernity is both less than and more than the political imaginary. Latin America’s modernity is less than the political imaginary inasmuch as the political imaginary is the very horizon of emancipation. Latin America’s modernity is more than the political imaginary in that this modernity speciically centres on elaboration of a combative conception of social justice which cannot be reduced to a simple contest of diferent forces within national societies. In the United States the myth of Puritan foundation emerged out of a current of the colonial endeavour and later metamorphosed into a redemptive paradigm able to encompass diferent variants of Christian belief.29 In the twentieth century the redemptive impulse took the form of providential world mission. Jeferson’s original “empire of liberty” acquired a diferent kind of universalism in this new global context of nations. An important shift had taken place after the Jackson Presidency which made this possible. Jeferson’s early ideal of a commonwealth of states in the service of its citizens – Jeferson’s Machiavellian Moment30 – was left behind for a territorial empire that spanned the continent on the back of the seizure of Native American lands. Contrary to much of the scholarship on the frontier, America’s modernity can be cast as one of constant rejuvenation from within its eastern centres, a “pure modernity” that generates a peculiarly high level of creativity (in both the Castoriadian and vernacular senses of the term).31 he inventiveness of the US was denoted by the foundational instruments which the republic also invented: the Declaration of Independence and a constitution for a break-away state. A constant tension in this American modernity exists between the political imaginary which had its inscription in these two documents and the political traditions created in interpretation of 28. guerra, Modernidad e independencias, 13. 29. g. McKenna, he Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007). 30. P. A. Rahe, “Jeferson’s Machiavellian Moment”, in gary L. McDowell and L. Sharon, Noble Reason and Republicanism: homas Jeferson’s Legacy of Liberty (London: Rowman and Littleield Publishers, 1997), 15–30. 31. P. Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 62 JEREMY C. A. SMITH social, economic and institutional conditions. It is not possible in this essay to take up the long and complex journey of US political traditions (some of which can be classed as political movements and some as anti-political movements). While there is considerable debate about forms of exclusion in American society and inclusive ideologies of liberalism, that key problem cannot be explored here.32 Instead, the next section concerns itself with the political imaginary and, in brief, the political visions derived from it (and to which those visions contributed) for Latin America and the United States. Between Federalism and Oligarchy Simon Bolivar (1783–1830) was the political and military giant of the Latin American revolutions of independence. He led campaigns in the northern Colombian zones of the sub-continent to achieve independence for Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. Whilst marginal to the wars in the southern cone of Latin America, his politics were inluential throughout the era of Spanish-America’s revolutions. Simon Bolivar’s political thought is often judged by the subsequent fragmentation and oligarchization of states in Latin America. Additionally, analysis of his life and works sufers from an inability to distinguish Bolivar’s military stratagem from his political thought.33 I approach his writings with the purpose of discerning the ambiguously democratic and centralist currents in his thinking and gleaning from his work a larger Creole civilizational vision. hree themes are evident in his political writings: the conditions and virtues of federalism as a democratic form; perspectives that can be singularized as Americanism; and slavery and citizenship.34 Bolivar’s politics was fused with threads of a classical education. His encyclopaedic writings are replete with ancient analogies which lend them poetic air rather than ideological force. Spanish theological inluences are 32. g. Wood, he Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1992), R. M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville: Myrdal and Harzt: he Multiple Traditions in America”, American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993): 549–66 and F. Furstenberg, “Freedom and Slavery in Early American Discourse”, Journal of American History (March 2003): 1295–1330. 33. S. Collier, “Simon Bolivar as a Political hinker”, in Simon Bolívar: Essays on the Life and Legacy of the Liberator, D. Bushnell and L. D. Langley (eds) (New York: Rowman & Littleield Publishers, 2008), 13-34 and J. H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 394–97. 34. Five essays and letters are salient including “he Cartagena Manifesto”, “he Jamaica Letter”, “Angostura Address”, “Address to the Constituent Congress in Bolivia”, “Decree for the Emancipation of Slaves”, in S. Bolivar, he Bolivarian Revolution, M. Brown (ed.) (London: Verso, 2009). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 63 scant in his thought as he tracked the French Enlightenment more closely, borrowing freely also from a range of British and german references. However, the ideological originality of his thinking should not be underestimated as decisive intellectual sources are far from straightforward.35 His ideas are pragmatic more than doctrinaire, and therefore diicult to classify in terms of orthodox ideological categories. Nonetheless, if they are “liberal”, then his was a “muddled” liberalism comparable to the 1812 Constitution framed by Spain’s cortes.36 Even if there is ambiguity, the case for judging his worldview as the closest thing to a representative Creole vision is strong.37 he “Jamaica Letter” is Bolivar’s most celebrated political statement. hough hardly an original colonial statement, it did put in a record a Latin American declaration of emancipation which would be repeated throughout his life.38 Republican movements took a long time to achieve independence. Creole elites pressed for greater autonomy throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. By century’s end, a strong sentiment for independence was evident. Yet it was not achieved until the 1820s. Bolivar’s “Jamaica Letter” appears at the mid-point of this period. In his view, America is striking out independently, and its futures (“policy”) are uncertain. Even so, he was profoundly ambiguous about the prospects for democratic federalism and believes it is not possible for the Colombian states, a view shared with fellow revolutionaries.39 Bolivar declares that: (…) purely representative institutions are not suited to our character, customs and understandings … Venezuela which has been the republic among us most advanced in its political establishments, afords us a striking example of the ineicacy of a democratic and federal system of government in our unsettled condition.40 I do not approve of the Federal system because it is too perfect. It requires virtues and political talents that we do not possess … we must 35. J. Lynch, Simon Bolivar: A Life (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 28–38. 36. Such is Anthony Pagden’s interpretation in Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990), chapter 6. 37. D. Brading, he First America: he Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 27. 38. Lynch, Simon Bolivar, 91–97. 39. Larrain, Identity and Modernity, 73–74. 40. Bolivar, “he Jamaica Letter”, he Bolivarian Revolution, 53. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 64 JEREMY C. A. SMITH content ourselves with avoiding demagoguery, anarchy and oppressive tyranny.41 A generous interpretation would suggest that pragmatism and not principle is the source of this view. His speculation about the future of diferent republics wishes success to experiments in federalism. Moreover, his writings are punctuated with admiration for US republicanism. Active citizenship is the means by which the virtues are realized in the United States and Bolivar believed Venezuela needed it. Formal citizenship itself was incomplete in Venezuela. Bolivar’s commitment on this point would result in his forestalled attempt to end slavery. hough necessary, civic emancipation was insuicient in his view. With Montesquieu’s principles of division of powers in mind, he was conirmed in the belief that the political culture in which institutional self-limitation occurred had not coalesced in Spanish-America as it did in eighteenth century British North America. he new Latin American republic may be simply incapable of the political cultures in which federalism could lourish. In the “Angostura Address” Bolivar enumerates the virtues of the United States’ and Venezuela’s federal Constitutions. he latter is characterized by its inoperability; the former is lived in the “absolute enjoyment” of its citizens. Venezuelans unable to assemble the mass of virtues have failed federalism. hey “were inluenced by the provincials and were carried away by the dazzling appearance of North America’s happiness, thinking that the blessings she enjoyed were owed exclusively to the form of government and not to the character of the people”.42 After trawling world history for models, in this speech Bolivar counsels adoption of a hereditary and educated Senate to provide virtuous guardianship of republican liberty. he Liberators should be permanent members. Executive power should be concentrated “in the igure of a president”,43 a constitutional feature he championed even more vigorously later in a more reactionary and illiberal phase of life, even while he advocated confederalism for a greater Colombian formation. Bolivar’s project of a greater Colombian confederation seems to critics – wise with the beneit of hindsight – as wildly fanciful and a product of his utopian mind.44 Its rapid breakdown suggests just that. However, the climate was far from unfavourable to suggestions of confederations or 41. Bolivar, “he Jamaica Letter”, he Bolivarian Revolution, 56. 42. Bolivar, “Angostura Address”, he Bolivarian Revolution, 86. 43. Bolivar, “Angostura Address”, he Bolivarian Revolution, 98. See also Lynch, Simon Bolivar, 144–45, 286–87. 44. Brading, he First America, 614–17. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 65 leagues of states especially ones taking the name of “Colombia” on the basis of Columbus’ intrusion into the New World. Bolivar’s project emerged as part of an independence-era debate involving the United States as well as southern leaders.45 In pro-independence writings the name “Colombia” connoted a larger unity rather than a particular model of polity. Bolivar’s Colombian vision can be interpreted in this context as civilizational with inter-civilizational overtones. His statements about a wider republic are geopolitical while at the same time alluding to the political contingencies of the Republican Age. In the “Jamaica Letter” he extols pan-Americanist sentiments of unity expressed also by Creole elitists Francisco Miranda, Francisco Bilbao and Andres Bello.46 he letter condenses a civilizational vision of Creole American distinction intended to persuade British opinion of the merits of neutrality in the independence wars with Spain (a course Britain adopted). Bolivar’s intention is to assert the international connections of future independent American states. A confederation or league of republics based on commonalities but constrained by diversity seemed to Bolivar the basis for an American civilization which could make its entry into World History. As a document, the “Jamaica Letter” resounds with the problem of the legacy of imperial rule. he “Angostura Address” also struggles with the Hispanic heritage. he task of future states will be law-making under the weight of a colonial legacy, including a pattern of economic reproduction. Yet, Bolivar believes that the institution of laws – a process embodied in the Constitution – is a priori unspoilt by this legacy of Spanish rule. It is in the institution of laws that Bolivar uncovers the ideal sphere in which conditions of political culture can be reformed. Formal, civic equality is a pretext to the exercise of reform, but the exercise of reform can only occur as a conditional freedom: Venezuela’s government … must be based on the sovereignty of the people, the division of powers, civil liberty, the prohibition of slavery and the abolition of the monarchy and privileges. We need equality in order to reform our men (sic), our political opinions and our customs … let us not attempt what is impossible; for if we climb too far into the regions of liberty, we will fall into the lands of tyranny. From absolute liberty there is always a descent to absolute power, and the medium between the two extremes is supreme social liberty. Abstract 45. O. C. Hincapie, Historia del nombre de Colombia (Bogota: Publicaciones del Instituto del Caro y Cuervo, 1998). 46. Lynch, Simon Bolivar, 213–15 and Larrain, Identity and Modernity, 76–77. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 66 JEREMY C. A. SMITH ideas give rise to the pernicious idea of unlimited liberty. Let us act so that the power of the people is restrained within the limits pointed out by reason and interest. Let the national will be curbed by just authority. Let civil and criminal legislation and the constitution rule imperiously over the judicial power. hen there will be balance.47 He emphasizes contingency at this precise point as well as advocating selflimitation. Whatever his provisional antagonism to federalism, at this exact moment, there exists for Bolivar a broad horizon of possibility for the institution of transformative forms of self-rule. In addition to his argument in the “Angostura Address” there is an international arena in which the “national will” of states encounters “balance”. Regional cooperation or unity will involve a compromise of powers and, in Bolivar’s vision, assumes no centre. Continental unity seems to be the theme which enjoins Bolivar to relect more closely than at any other point on a democratic imaginary, inasmuch as it emphasizes the conditional reformative nature of Creole republican thought. Where he baulks at federalism, he embraces and champions a confederal balance of republican powers. After his death Bolivar was soon victim of a “cult of Bolivar” which cast him as “the Liberator”. Diferent interpretations of his legacy pervaded the coalescence of oligarchic nationalism in the nineteenth century. he legend committed him to deiication and a consequent loss to historical memory of aspects of the era. he problem of slavery is a case in point. In the historiography of the discourses of citizenship during the revolutionary era preoccupation with Anglo-American radicalism has overshadowed the problematization of slavery and race that ran deeper at that time in anticolonial movements in Hispanic America.48 Where Jeferson tried to legislate against slavery and found few supporters, the undeniable growth of black elites (pardocracia) in greater Colombia rapidly made race and slavery “an integral part of the political imaginary of this period”.49 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the point had been reached where formal citizenship was no longer questioned on a racial basis but social equality was a question lost in growth of nationalist sentiments. During the revolutionary age, however, Americanism in the politics of Bolivar and some other Creole leaders had balanced on an aspiration to broad racial equality and an emerging iction of the existence of that very racial equality. he range of possibilities for the 47. Bolivar, “he Angostura Address”, 89, 98–99. 48. M. Lasso, “Race War and Nation in Caribbean gran Colombia, Cartegena 1810–32”, American Historical Review (April 2006): 336–61. 49. Lasso, “Race War and Nation”, 339. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 67 republics of greater Colombia to deine citizenship beyond liberal conception was more open at this juncture. Both the political and social dimensions of race were regarded as unsettled matters. However, in the subsequent nationalisms of unitary nation-states it was the iction which was ampliied, while the aspiration to equality was altogether suppressed. Virtue, Republic, Empire homas Jeferson (1743–1826) had met with Spanish-American leaders and actively encouraged movements of independence. Even so he echoed Bolivar’s expectation that republics in the southern continent would long in vain for stable self-government.50 His own leadership in the US revolution is well-known. Nonetheless, he lived in an environment and milieu of many leaders, especially if his circumstances are compared with those of Bolivar in Colombian America. Furthermore, the political environment in which Jefersonianism arose was quite diferent. At the heart of Atlantic-American thought was a paradigm of politics that included Locke and Machiavelli as well as James Harrington. he repudiation of the inherited Aristotelian conception of politics led the entire spectrum of American republican thought to important conclusions about the limits to power and the exercise of the passions. Whether this is characterized as Whig interpretation, the civic republic thesis, or the Jefersonian persuasion,51 there is clearly an uneasy accord in the historical literature on one point: the character of the revolutionary settlement. Self-limited government was the principle around which the political community had to order itself. A “politics of distrust” underlay the revolution. Jeferson embodies this more than any other igure. In Jeferson’s republican philosophy, democracy is believed to be sustained by the equilibrium between the passions. Republicanism, on his account, was not only a matter of the structure of government but one of the complexion of the political culture.52 he quality of restraint balances virtue and commerce, self-interest and public good. Egalitarianism in taste, civic 50. His correspondence with Alexander von Humboldt shows this well, T. Jeferson, Writings (New York: Library Classics of the United States Inc., 1984), 1247–248 and 1311–314. 51. J. Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); L. Banning, he Jefersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (New York: Cornell University Press, 1978) and J. g. A. Pocock, he Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political hought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 52. See John Rundell and Stephen Mennell’s interpretive comments in the “Notes on the States of Virginia”, in Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization (London: Routledge, 1998), 9, © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 68 JEREMY C. A. SMITH association, and participation in social life were the peculiar “manners” of the republic. Jeferson projected more about the character of the democratic ideal after status ascription than the outwardly visible signs of American society of the day. Even so, the new republic had indeed de-monarchized the order of power (to use terms consistent with Lefort). he revolutionary dissolution of centred power survived the War of Independence on the back of a democratic culture. here would be no further monopolies of power in the way that the monarchical British Empire had indeinitely maintained its rule. Awareness of the republic’s political invention remained. In this regard, the importance of the Declaration of Independence is underestimated in liberal histories that emphasize nationhood and territorial separation. In fact, the Declaration displayed to the rest of the world a new historicity.53 American republicans expressed the rights of statehood, an expression which gave birth to a genre with its own logic of political argumentation. According to Jeferson, the Declaration’s originality does not lie in its constituent ideas. Its originality is “as an expression of the American mind” that assembled those ideas and announced them to the world as the “common sense of the subject” of independence.54 Late in life Jeferson stood by the Declaration in even more emphatic terms, describing it as a herald of self-government which is a complete “form” requisite to the exercise of freedom.55 his form encompasses federalism which, in Jeferson’s creed, is a balance of states and “general government” that irmly favours the former. he balance should be thus to inhibit the “monarchising” of republican government and the loss of the “elective principle” to centralization.56 Whenever pressed on his opposition to the Federalist Party, Jeferson answered by directing attention to questions of checks and balances in the overall make-up and practices of state. In its form the intention was to bring concordant symmetry to the iguration of institutionalized forces. he Constitution departed from the Whig conception of a counter-balance of class power and removed class and estate from the structure and imaginary of the polity altogether.57 he 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 73. Compare with K. J. Hayes, he Road to Montecello: he Life and Mind of homas Jeferson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). D. Armitage, he Declaration of Independence: A Global History (London: Harvard University Press, 2007). homas Jeferson, “Letter to Henry Lee”, in Jeferson, Writings, 1501. “Letter to Roger C. Weightman”, in Jeferson, Writings, 1516–517. Query XIII in “Notes on the States of Virginia”, in Jeferson, Writings, 235–55. P. Murphy, Civic Justice: From Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (New York: Humanity Book, 2001), 269–73. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 69 “people” in this conception were not an indivisible popular sovereign; that would imply a new central power. Instead, it was the empty seat (such as Lefort describes) in which there could be no single representative of the people. he Constitution was forged in contrast to the British Empire and was thus anti-imperial. Yet, it gave rise to a continental empire. Commercial capitalism – a legacy of the imperial linkage of Africa, Europe and the Americas – was the intercontinental context that provided impetus to the expansion of the republic, an expansion in both territory and in the mind. For several reasons, Jeferson’s republic had to be an “empire of liberty” and not the examples of the city-centred republics of greece and Rome that had so inluenced him. Firstly, his preferred setting was neither the city (which he deplored) nor the yeoman’s farm. It was the cultivated villa of Monticello with its quasi-public sociability of conversation with friends, family and neighbours.58 Villa architecture nourished his Epicurean imagination of the republican world. At the same time Jeferson recognized that the villa republic could not be built extensively in an America of city and country where slavery coexisted with industrial capitalism.59 Much of Jeferson’s political philosophy would seem to square up with Lefort’s stated analysis of the American Revolution. Lefort, of course, goes further by positing the democratic form of the American Revolution as a generative imaginary that exceeds its constituent philosophical ideas and the sum of political arguments made in the British Parliament, the colonial assemblies and town meetings about corruption and the terms of ancient liberties. An exceptional creativity issues at this historical juncture in the singular focus on statehood. he terms of the political imaginary were foregrounded in public political discourse and debate. hose terms involved the character of the republic rather than the contours of a nation. It was later that nation and nationalism coalesced. Conclusion he political doctrines enunciated by Jeferson and Bolivar are fragments of a republican imaginary. In Jeferson’s case democracy is foregrounded as a political form of being-together. he institutions forged in each revolutionary process presume conlict as a permanent condition of politics, but take gentility as its mode of expression. For Bolivar such a political culture 58. Murphy, Civic Justice, 284–94. 59. Jeferson, Query XVIII, “Notes on the States of Virginia”. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. 70 JEREMY C. A. SMITH was not in sight. His sentiments could be construed as a communitarian yearning for virtues unattained. he inluence of Rousseau in his overall thought would help explain that. However, any tendency which in today’s terms could be interpreted as communitarian is counteracted by his partial awareness of the necessary constraints on power, his outward looking project of Pan-American unity and his airmation of equality as a precondition of citizenship (which was resisted by the Creole oligarchy). Both Jeferson and Bolivar were authors and agents in the enactment of politics as critical reconsideration and transformation of the conditions of human life (as Castoriadis emphasizes) and as a democratic space symbolically instituted by the defeat of monarchism (as Lefort would have it). Castoriadis’s stress on the creativity of the social imaginary is more relevant to New World formations where democratic politics were exceptionally inventive in two ways. Republicans invented new kinds of political institutions such as republican legislatures. hey also invented new symbolic forms of institution to frame politics – speciically democratizing constitutions and declarations – that would limit and constrain the political qua instituted power. he symbolic institution is thus more than merely an empty seat of power; it is a special kind of creation based on a historic recognition of indeterminacy. As a result, it is widely accepted that politics is permanently contestatory and rights are constantly fought for. New World democratic polities thus rest on an irreducible tension between critical politics and explicit power. As Castoriadis argues with respect to the United States, power counts in the continuous regeneration of this tension. For indeed the political institutions derived from the democratic forms created in the republican revolutions are deeply prone to the monopolies of private interest. Even so, the suppression of politics as “explicitly putting into question, the established institution of society” can never be total.60 Similarly in the works of both Jeferson and Bolivar, there are traces of this kind of conception of politics as an everpresent and contestatory horizon framing social and political activity. Both thinkers exhibit traces of the imaginary that institutes democracy as living experiment in statehood and institutional formation. he tension of the social and the political could be highlighted at this point, but cannot be addressed any further here. However, by way of a conclusive comment, we can observe in the work of Castoriadis and Lefort – and in a limited way in Jeferson and Bolivar – perspectives relevant to this problem of the diferentiation of the social and political. But more extensive exploration would go further than the current essay. 60. Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy”, 159–60. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012. REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINES AND POLITICAL IMAgINARIES 71 Jeremy C. A. Smith works in the School of Education and Arts at the University of Ballarat in Australia. He has published research in civilizational sociology on Europe, the Americas and Japan and its key theorists. He is the author of Europe and the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2006) and co-editor (with Alice Mills) of Utter Silence: Speaking the Unspeakable (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). References Appleby, J. 1992. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Armitage, D. 2007. he Declaration of Independence: A Global History. London: Harvard University Press. Banning, L. 1978. he Jefersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology. New York: Cornell University Press. Bolivar, S. 2009. he Bolivarian Revolution, M. Brown (ed.). 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