Overview
My research investigates the transition from ‘subject to citizen’ in the context of the political development of the United States between 1865 and 1932. In European political history, this transition is understood in the context of the halting transformation of monarchical and aristocratic states into increasingly democratic constitutional ones. Ordinary members of the body politic change from being understood solely as subjects of the law to being understood as (however imperfectly) also its authors. In the context of the United States, which was established as a constitutional republic, this transition might be thought to have occurred at the founding, but of course one of the largest such transitions was initiated by the emancipation of slaves in the South through the Civil War. One might also consider the extension of the franchise to women through ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920 as effecting such a transition. My current research investigates the incorporation of new immigrants as citizens as another (one might suggest, with R.G. Collingwood, that every transition to legal adult citizen be considered in the same light). Across the body of my work, I have tried to investigate two dimensions of this transition: first, the ways in which it is constrained and partially thwarted by what Rogers Smith has called ideologies of “ascriptive hierarchy” (race, gender, and so on); second, the context of cities, of urban life in the United States, as the site for contestation over who counts as full citizen.
My book project, and several of my early publications, took up the first theme. I tried to clarify what role race played in the political ideas of nineteenth century Americans. I argued that the concept of dependence, present in both liberalism and republicanism as a criterion for the denial of full citizenship, provided an entry point for “ascriptive hierarchies” to make themselves compatible with these more facially egalitarian ideologies. When racialized, I suggested, the status of dependence could serve as criteria of ascription by which those racially marked were consigned to second-class citizenship. The argument was intended to demonstrate that liberalism and republicanism need not be inherently racist, as some have argued, but neither are they as racially innocent as much scholarship on the liberal and republican traditions presumed.
Methodologically, I have adopted a strategy whose philosophical basis can be traced to Wittgenstein, and that is that the meaning of our concepts (the rules for application and scope, for example) are revealed through their use. I have therefore mined archival sources more familiar to historians than political theorists: congressional testimony, newspapers, periodicals, letters, and so on.
My research is of interest to historians as well as political theorists, but comes closer to work of historical institutionalists, particularly those in American political development. Though I have not used this concept explicitly, my work is sympathetic to discursive institutionalism, and my explorations of the politics of citizenship in Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York use a variety of methodological techniques (in collaboration with others where my own skills are lacking) to reveal the discursive structure shaping political practice. In a recent book chapter, for example, I explore how ideas about race, sexuality, and alcohol shaped the development of prohibition in Atlanta in the early twentieth century, tracing ideas across political and civil society institutions
Current Research
Since 2012 I have worked on a number of smaller projects, mostly related to the legacy of the Jim Crow period—its impact on Prohibition politics, for example, or the role of race in political development more broadly. A more recent project engages controversies over Confederate monuments and the memorialization of white supremacy in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I have also increasingly collaborated with more empirically-minded colleagues in political science and other disciplines, in particular on a project examining Black politics in the wake of the 2010 mayoral election in New Orleans.
While slow, I continue to make progress on two larger research projects:
The first continues my interest in race as a constraint on the realization of full citizenship. Here I engage the renewed debate over the relation between racist imperatives and capitalism. Some scholars understand capitalism (racial capitalism, on this account) as itself generative of racial distinctions, as part of the mechanisms by which exploitation is carried out. On this account, racism cannot be overcome except in some non-capitalist economic system. Others, however, like for example Adolph Reed and Charles Mills, sharply distinguish the two, either (as Reed) thinking that racism is mere ideology and distraction; or (as Mills) that racism is the more tractable problem, and can be adequately address short of revolution. My intervention in this debate builds on the work of Mills and Carole Pateman, to advance a novel political theory of race, as a necessary prelude for understanding its relation to capitalism (however conceived).
A second project takes up the transition from subject to citizen from an entirely different angle, examining the processes by which new migrants to New York City, as well as newly enfranchised women, became voting citizens in the 1920s. Again, my interest is in the ways discursive and other institutions both constrained and enabled this transition, and the substantive focus is on the role political parties may have played, despite Progressive reforms, in orienting new migrants to the practices of citizenship. Here I hope to add to a growing re-appreciation of political parties in political theory (represented by the work of, for example, Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead; Lea Ypi and Jonathan White; Matteo Bonotti; Ian Shapiro, and others).