Abstract
Columbia University
For Michael Hanchard, the spectre of race haunts western democracy. But unlike the spectre of communism to which Karl Marx famously alludes, the spectre of race is a ghost that has gone unacknowledged, at least by contemporary students of political science and of comparative politics in particular. A principal point of Hanchard’s book is to persuade fellow comparativists to recognize the apparition they have disavowed and to modify their inquiries accordingly. To that end, he defends three theses:
That historically, from the Greek polis to the present day, the practice of democracy, in most instances, “has combined inclusionary and exclusionary regimes and value judgments regarding the prospect of citizenship for differentiated populations” (14).
That properly to understand the situations of racialized and other populations excluded from the prospect of citizenship, it is helpful to consider those populations in comparative perspective.
That, therefore, political scientists should expand the “problem-space” presently characteristic of the subfield of comparative politics. I borrow the concept of a “problem-space”—the idea of an ensemble of “questions that seem worth asking and the kinds of answers that seem worth having”—from David Scott. 1 Hanchard never invokes Scott’s concept, but it is apt for my purposes, for it enables me to restate Hanchard’s third thesis as the proposition that recognizing that western democracy has typically been haunted by ethnonational and racial hierarchies should lead comparativists to widen the horizon of the questions and answers—the problem space—that orients their inquiries.
An important part of Hanchard’s book—mainly chapters 1 and 2—is the tale he tells of the history of the discipline of comparative politics, extending from the writings of Edward Augustus Freeman and Woodrow Wilson through the scholarship of Charles Merriam and Gabriel Almond, to the present day. On Hanchard’s view, the upshot of this history is the “contemporary iteration” of comparative politics, which is “the most neglectful of the legacies of colonialism, racism, and imperialism within Western nation-states, and their combined implications for how students of racial politics examine racial and ethno-national regimes” (17). This neglect, he suggests, involves a failure to recognize that “the racial and ethno-national regimes inherent not only in colonialism, but in the politics of the metropole, were not anomalous to political modernity, but one of political modernity’s constitutive institutional components” (64). 2
Hanchard ties his discussion of Freeman and, implicitly, his larger argument, to “the forms of comparative political analysis most often attributed to . . . Aristotle and Socrates for the ancients, [and] Montesquieu and Rousseau for the moderns” (35). Curiously, however, he neglects to connect his argument to thinkers belonging to what I have elsewhere described as the Afro-modern tradition of political thought. Considering Hanchard’s book in the perspective of that tradition expands and strengthens his argument, I argue, for comparativists’ neglect of the issues Hanchard highlights is part of a larger pattern within political science and political theory that similarly neglects much of Afro-modern political thought. Put otherwise, the questions and answers that comparative politics marginalizes in treating racial and ethnonational regimes as anomalies of political modernity centrally define the problem space that has engaged and shaped the thought of any number of academically marginalized Afro-modern political thinkers, if not the writings of Montesquieu or Rousseau.
To illustrate this last point, I turn briefly to the writings of Martin Delany (1812–1885), an Afro-modern political theorist who is frequently described as “the father of black nationalism.”
“Conditions of Many Classes of Europe Considered” is the title of chapter 1 of Delany’s 1852 magnum opus, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852). In it, Delany writes, That there have been in all ages and in all countries, in every quarter of the habitable globe, especially among those nations laying the greatest claim to civilization and enlightenment, classes of people who have been deprived of equal privileges, political, religious and social, cannot be denied, and that this deprivation on the part of the ruling classes is cruel and unjust, is also equally true . . . In past ages there were many such classes, as the Israelites in Egypt, the Gladiators in Rome, and similar classes in Greece; and in the present age, the Gipsies in Italy and Greece, the Cossacs in Russia and Turkey, the Sclaves and Croats in the Germanic States, and the Welsh and Irish among the British, to say nothing of various other classes among other nations. That there have in all ages, in almost every nation, existed a nation within a nation—a people who although forming a part and parcel of the population, yet were from force of circumstances, known by the peculiar position they occupied, forming in fact, by the deprivation of political equality with others, no part, and if any, but a restricted part of the body politic of such nations, is also true (emphasis mine).
Chapter 2 of Delany’s magnum opus is entitled, “Comparative Condition of the Colored People of the United States,” and in it, he writes, The United States, untrue to her trust and unfaithful to her professed principles of republican equality, has also pursued a policy of political degradation to a large portion of her native born countrymen, and that class is the Colored People. Denied an equality not only of political but of natural rights, in common with the rest of our fellow citizens, there is no species of degradation to which we are not subject. Reduced to abject slavery is not enough, the very thought of which should awaken every sensibility of our common nature; but those of their descendants who are freemen even in the non-slaveholding States, occupy the very same position politically, religiously, civilly and socially, (with but few exceptions,) as the bondman occupies in the slave States. In those States, the bondman is disfranchised, and for the most part so are we. He is denied all civil, religious, and social privileges, except such as he gets by mere sufferance, and so are we. They have no part nor lot in the government of the country, neither have we. What the unfortunate classes are in Europe, such are we in the United States, which is folly to deny, insanity not to understand, blindness not to see, and surely now full time that our eyes were opened to these startling truths, which for ages have stared us full in the face (emphasis mine).
Here, I have taken a moment to quote Delany at length because I am struck by the close affinity between his thinking and Hanchard’s. More exactly, and to the point, I want to suggest that Delany, in 1852, already endorses each of Hanchard’s first and second theses.
Anticipating the first thesis, he affirms that political modernity—for Delany, those nations laying the greatest claim to civilization and enlightenment (including, presumably, nominally democratic nations)—has always included peoples (nations within larger nations) that have been deprived of equal political standing with other peoples inhabiting those larger nations. Anticipating the second thesis, he affirms that to understand properly the situation of a politically excluded people—at least in the case of the colored people of the United States—it is helpful to consider their condition in comparative perspective.
By considering Hanchard in the perspective of Delany, and by suggesting that Delany anticipates Hanchard, I mean to justify the claim that The Spectre of Race can fruitfully be read as taking up and engaging a problem space that has oriented Afro-modern political thought from Delany through W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida Wells to C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Angela Davis, even as it has been ignored by Hanchard’s comparative politics colleagues, past and present. A question central to that problem space has been: what kind of politics should blacks conduct to counter racist and ethnonational regimes that, in practice, deny them citizenship, or, to borrow a word from Delany, “degrade” their standing as citizens? Hanchard declines directly to answer this question, though in his book’s postscript, “From Athens to Charlottesville,” he suggests that the wish “to eclipse the need for politics” underlies both the ethnonationalist’s desire to establish homogeneous political communities and the liberal pundit’s desire to establish democracy through the promotion of diversity. On Hanchard’s view these desires, no less than the wish that animates them, are folly.
Politics is inescapable, Hanchard believes, and the politics he seems to endorse would advance the ethos of democracy—for Hanchard, democracy “as a concept and ideal” (4)—at the expense of the racist and ethnonationalist tendencies of actually existing democracies. What is unclear, however, is what Hanchard thinks advancing that ideal could or should amount to in the wake of the “2017 events in Charlottesville” (211). Indeed, if the xenophobia and racism that white nationalists invoked in Charlottesville are integral to political modernity, as Hanchard proposes, then one might well conclude, as Delany did in some of his antebellum writings, that a politics meant to advance the ideal of democracy is itself folly.
Hanchard declines to draw Delany’s conclusion due, I suspect, to his faith in that ideal. To justify his faith, Hanchard would need to illuminate the possibilities that political modernity has harbored and still harbors for realizing the ethos of democracy, the constitutive ethnonational components of actually existing democracies notwithstanding. To illuminate these possibilities, he would need to foreground the agency of activists who have successfully contested race-based exclusions from citizenship. In effect, Hanchard would need to show how homogeneous, ethnonational political communities have been and can be rendered vulnerable to political movements that struggle to dismantle them. That, perhaps, would be an apt topic for a sequel to The Spectre of Race.