Last time, I promised I would write a bit about Michael Rogin. Rogin was a leading figure in the Berkeley School of political theory, which also included the better-known Sheldon Wolin and Hannah Pitkin. Wolin and Pitkin are both important, and you should read them, but to my mind Rogin was the more insightful thinker, as well as a truly gifted expositor of penetrating and powerful ideas about liberalism in particular. Decades before young scholars started forming “Settler-Colonial Studies” programs, Rogin was writing about the bloody history of expropriation in America. His elaboration on the construction of the settler identity under Jackson (and its codification into what we now call whiteness) is unparalleled in part because it always remains tied to both material (i.e. economic) and ideological (i.e. political) analysis.
It’s from re-reading Rogin that I have come to what I think is an important understanding of markets, specifically their exculpatory function, or their power and capacity to remove blame, to symbolically wash the blood from settlers’ hands. I will talk more about this function below. I want to start by discussing about its origin, and maybe even its structural necessity.
To do so, it’s worth recalling the sheer demographic magnitude of white settlement in the first half of the 19th century. As Rogin points out, between 1790 and 1840, 4.5 million Americans “crossed the Appalachians, one of the great migrations in world history” (1975, 4).1 Bloody expropriation supported by both state and federal governments — animated as well by the neutral-sounding white “Land Hunger” as well as pure avarice and speculation — generated an equally powerful sense of moral guilt. Rogin reminds us of this: “How (to) reconcile the destruction of the Indians with the American self-image? This problem preoccupied statesmen of the period” (4). Figures like Secretary of War Lewis Cass, Indian agent and Indiana Senator John Tipton, and Jackson protégé Martin Van Buren are all cited as acknowledging the immense moral burden of what we would today call genocide:
Van Buren and the others felt the eyes of the world on America. They needed to demonstrate the our encounter with the Indians, ‘the most difficult of all our relations, foreign and domestic, has at last been justified to the world in its near approach to a happy and certain consummation.’ They needed to justify — the Puritan word means save for God — a society built on Indian graves. (5)
What all of this suggests is a problem that really emerges for the first time in modernity, or more specifically post-Enlightenment modernity, whereby ideological structures of exculpation become necessary for the sake of bridging the gap between the various promises of civilizational (or “modernizing”) projects, and the brutal and bloody reality of their application. With a few exceptions — Jackson in particular, and there are others — it doesn’t help us very much to ask the chicken-and-egg question about speculative avarice (on the one hand), and humanitarian impulse (on the other). The exculpatory power of liberalism here tells us that we can do both:2 demographic movements are impossible to resist anyway (this is the “Land Hunger” argument), so the most that a state or federal government can do is ameliorate the process, smooth down the rough edges of a project or bargain that will in the end benefit both Indians and whites. How will it benefit them, exactly? By integrating them as individuals — as property-owning, contracting individuals — into various iterations of markets. These are the ideological structures conferring blessings on the process of so-called primitive accumulation.
I will talk more next time about the way markets work as a kind of moral “washing machine,” both unrealistically elevating the power of individual will, and collectively absolving actors of any guilt for the consequences of their actions. My argument there will be that this function of markets has gone from a position of support or subsidiary importance, to perhaps its primary goal.
See you then!
Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. New York: Knopf, 1975.
As I write this, I cannot help but think that just as Rogin’s work is everywhere permeated and suffused by the experience of resistance to the Vietnam War, so my reflection on the settler-colonial state is unconsciously haunted by the 2003 Iraq Invasion. The ideological notion that the inheritors of settler-colonial logics (both white and non-white) can “subdue, liberate, and get rich at the same time” points out something almost timeless and yet painfully particular.