Empire All the Way Down: Thinking America Through Edward Said

This talk engages the concept of “imperial blowback,” the idea that great imperial powers eventually experience at home the same kinds of racist, authoritarian violence they use to conquer and contain peoples in the colonized world. The first half of the presentation both agrees with, and expands upon this idea, arguing that its most vocal proponent, Hannah Arendt, correctly linked empire to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe but wrongly concluded that imperialism was “the one great crime in which America was never involved.” The second half of the talk explores Edward Said’s notion of “counterpoint” as an alternative to “blowback’ and suggests that it both engages American imperial violence, draws upon the enduring intellectual and political resources generated through anti-colonial resistances in the Global South and North, and provides us with a humanist vision of the future that opens our horizons to a more expansively just politics. About the Lecturer: Jeanne Morefield is Professor of Politics at Whitman College and a Professorial Fellow at Australian Catholic University whose work engages the historical and contemporary intersection of political theory and international relations with a particular focus on British and American imperialism. Her books include Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford, 2014) and Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, 2005). She has published articles in Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Theory and Event, and other journals as well as numerous chapters for edited volumes on the history of international and imperial thought. She is engaged in a long-term project on the historiography of human trafficking and is writing a book, Empire as Method: Edward Said and Political Theory. Jeanne is currently Co-President of the Association for Political Theory

"In the Beginning All the World Was . . .": Political Vision, Critical History, and the Possibilities of the Present

Herman Lebovics begins chapter 5 of Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies by noting that “John Locke was the greatest insurance agent in the history of capitalism” (p. 87). While scholars such as C. B. Macpherson and Uday Mehta have tied Locke’s understanding of human nature to a particularly capitalist “anthropology” and while David Armitage has demonstrated in great historical detail that Locke was preoccupied with, and invested in, the Carolinas as he wrote the property chapter of the Second Treatise, Lebovics’s “insurance agent” approach combines these insights.1 When Locke argued, “in the beginning all the World was America,” Lebovics observes, he was offering “Europe’s new colonial possessions as the guarantee of the future stability of the social system back home.” By Lebovics’s lights, Locke was selling security to a generation still rattled by the potential social effects of a theory of property that promised unlimited accumulation for the “industrious and the rational” with minimal outcry from the “quarrelsome and the contentious.” In other words, America’s vast tracts of “wasted” land would always provide opportunities for those whose ambitions outpaced the flows of property distribution back home. Thus, Lebovics contends that placing Locke in the context of his relationship to the American colonies deepens our understanding of the ideological complexities and tensions implicit in his political vision as well as demonstrating its intellectual dependence on the idea of “an empty new world”(p. 99)

'An education to Greece': The round table, imperial theory and the uses of history

This article examines the relationship between the pro-imperial Round Table Society's political vision and the omnipresent historical narrative of commonwealth that characterized the group's major publications during the First World War. It pays particular attention to the way the primary author of these publications, Lionel Curtis, interpolated Alfred Zimmern's 1911 book, The Greek Commonwealth, into this historical narrative in an attempt to reconcile the contradictions inherent in the Round Table's political project. These contradictions centred on the group's desire to democratize imperial politics while excluding non-European subjects from this democracy and their belief in an imperial state that demanded the ultimate loyalty of its citizens but was not 'Prussianist'. Examining the way Curtis used the Athenian polis to address this fraught political puzzle offers us insight into both the ideological power wielded by the Round Table during this transitional era and the power of historical narrative in imperial justification more generally

Harold Laski on the habits of imperialism

Since his death in the 1950s, most of the narratives of Harold Laski's anti-imperialism have been mostly biographical rather than scholarly. Chroniclers and historians alike often found his genius and contribution amongst his protégés such as Krishna Menon, H.O. Davies, and other post-colonial leaders. In addition, explorations of his political theories paid little attention to his contributions to critiques on imperialism; in fact, his critics often interpreted Laski's stand on imperialism as unoriginal. This chapter analyses two of Laski's works on imperialism: a 1932 chapter entitled 'Nationalism and the Future of Civilisation' and a 1933 chapter called 'The Economic Foundations of Peace'. The first section of the chapter analyses his theory of sovereignty and his critique of the ideological 'habits' that condition liberal society. The second section contends that Laski's theory of sovereignty resulted in his framing of imperialism within Leninist terms as a dialectical relationship between the habits of sovereignty and the habits of imperialism. The chapter suggests that Laski's thinking on imperialism resembles less a truncated Leninism than it does a critical analysis of the way ideology can obscure domination and disciple subjects. It also reveals Laski's contradictions due to his political activism and commitment to democracy

Political theory as historical counterpoint: the case of Schmitt and Sovereignty

This essay argues for a broad, reconceptualization of the “history of political thought” as it is currently configured. It suggests that reintegrating the insights of influential, non-canonical thinkers into contemporary theory can open up our political horizons to new possibilities and challenge received wisdom regarding key concepts like “sovereignty.” It makes a methodological case for drawing upon Edward Said’s “contrapuntal” approach to history and offers a rereading of Carl Schmitt’s distorted characterization of Harold Laski and G.D.H. Cole as an example of what such an approach might look like