Abstract
Reed’s intervention in theories of political power is considered, critiqued and continued: we may understand chains of authorization as stretching from sovereign to agent and back again, chains whose links may be called into question and repaired only via Goffmanian performance.
How to think of the book
First, I think it behooves us to consider what sort of a book this is, as it appears somewhat unusual and also, I believe, signals a transition in Reed’s identity as a scholar. Reed was one of the very few young sociologists to appear first and foremost as a theorist, with an influential book on interpretation and social knowledge focusing on the role of theory in social science (Reed, 2011), but also some articles using cases in American colonial history to advance a cultural theory of the importance of interpretation. Then, the theory was leading the data; one might take this to be the case here. Indeed, the first part of the book is a detailed discussion of general approaches to power, to agency, to performance, to projects, even to the Other. Such a ‘reading’-heavy approach might suggest that Reed has developed a theory by combining and critiquing work of others, and then found a case for the illustration of the theory. This approach was famously taken to very similar work by perhaps the closest predecessor of Reed, Kai Erikson, the guiding thinker of Yale cultural sociology in his time, in his analysis of the Salem Witch trials (a subject of some work of Reed’s as well). Erikson (1966) noted that he could have picked many cases to illustrate the ideas he had; he just picked this one.
This might seem worrisome, as one might imagine that many theories can find an example, perhaps deviant, to support it (in Erikson’s case, a theory of deviance!). But such study-as-illustration is really no less worrisome than what might perhaps be a more common way of linking historical data and theory, which is to use the case for the generation of a theory which is little more than the case abstracted. Indeed, this is often how sociologists are taught to work: advisors famously say, ‘now tell it to me again, but this time, with no proper nouns’; ‘now tell it to me again, but without saying the words doctor, hospital, or patient’; and so on. Just as in many bureaucracies, employees are continually promoted until they reach the position for which they are unsuited, their incompetence then blocking further promotion, leading to a poorly performing organization, so every theory is abstracted and generalized just to the point where it is vague enough for no one to realize that it is wrong.
There is, however, a third possibility, which is that this is not so much a ‘strategic site’ for the analysis of modern power in the conventional sense, namely, that of being a good place to test a theory, but rather, that is a good place for observation. For this reason, I think we now see an emerging balance between the theory and the data, such that one could not develop the theory without the data. That the edge of empire is fruitful in allowing us to see is, I believe, Reed’s view: ‘Liminality reveals regime’ (p. 99 1 ). This is because such conditions force actors into working, saying, claiming, and so on – making a great deal of data for a cultural historian. I believe, however, that there may be a different justification for this choice: this is a good place for theory-work, for that sort of analytic separation that is the mark of theoretical progress. Just as the difference between 0 and 1, despite being the same as the difference between 237 and 238, is generally more theoretically significant to us, so, too, we may really only be able to understand power where we see it peter out. Think of Foucault’s (1979) Discipline and Punish – to understand the nature of power, Foucault let himself to be drawn to the most extreme and gratuitous examples (even where they are more or less fictional, as in the panopticon). Reed’s reversal, to study power not at its center and source, but in its extremities, seems to me extremely promising, and, even, perhaps related to a different reversal that I don’t think Reed makes enough use of.
If we think about the great success of the followers of George Herbert Mead such as Erving Goffman or Howard Becker, we understand that they were able to follow a flow of logic in the reverse direction from folk theory: to Goffman (1959), following Mead, communication appears not as an externalization from one interiority trying to reach another, but an attempt to comport ourselves so that another’s examination of us fits our own goals. Goffman’s work was so successful and vivid because he could analyze failures and find that the repair work done was consonant with this sort of Meadean approach.
So, too, by focusing on liminality, Reed is able to reverse conventional ways of thinking about agency and to tie it – necessarily – with performance. This is not, I hasten to add, the way that Reed derives his approach. But it seems to me that what Reed does is similar – to reverse the way we think of chains of principal–agent relations: rather than start with the principal, we start with actors who claim to be agents. Thus, I am going to argue that the importance of Reed’s work comes in finding the place to conduct such a rethinking of the nature of power and performance.
State formation and agency theory
Center and periphery
The central questions in historical sociology have long been three: first, the rise of capitalism; second, revolutions and regime change; third, the problem of state formation. This last issue turns on the question of how a system of sometimes loosely joined and relatively weak states and principalities in post-Roman Europe so quickly turned into a historically unusual configuration of many relatively strong and centralized states (though there is now work on similar processes in other contexts, such as Warring States China, and more attention to the continuity between empire-building and state building). Max Weber (1978) gave one of the clearest and most appealing general theoretical frameworks for this study: if we posit personal ‘patriarchal’ domination as the simplest and least organizationally elaborated version of rule, then we find that although it initially seems strong (a man having personal authority over all), patriarchal rule turns out to be quite weak, because the patriarch lacks a staff to carry out his orders and is therefore basically beholden to the favor of his underlings. Getting a staff, however, contains its own risks: the staff may ‘usurp its prerogatives’ and use the powers they are delegated to make not only increased claims on revenue streams for themselves, but even attempt to direct the decisions of the putative superordinate.
The same situation can arise differently, most importantly, via empire-building – one prince subordinates another to him, perhaps only requiring ceremonial tribute, but perhaps requiring regular payments in cash. Or, in the middle of the continuum (and this is what was foremost in Weber’s mind), a rising prince who claims primacy over others may still attempt to use those others as something like a staff by recognizing their rights to (most forms of) control within their areas, and, furthermore, their rights to transmit these to their descendants or whom else they choose, in return for their recognition of his primacy. 2
The archetypical situation confronting the queen or king in a position to build a state, then, is one fraught with dangers: the very act of strengthening her control over subjects threatens to reduce her control over an intervening noble stratum. In many cases, this is formalized as a transition from indirect to direct rule, and this has proven a fruitful ground for the deployment of agency theory.
Agency theory, most loosely, is simply attention to a kind of ‘cooperative’ 3 game played by two different types of actors, principal and agent. The principal tries to strike a bargain with the agent so that the agent will carry out the principal’s wishes; if the agent is assumed, however, to be attempting to maximize his own interests, he may prefer to do something different, and it may be difficult for the principal to (1) give reasonable instructions to the agent to cope with unforeseen circumstances; (2) know if the agent is faithfully doing as promised; and (3) sanction the agent for noncompliance. For this reason, agents who are moved by certain ideal interests of service (thus Weber) may be preferred by the principal: they are cheaper and can be expected to adjust their actions as circumstances require because of the great alignment between interests of the two. 4
Agency theory has proven an enlightening way of framing, and sometimes formalizing, this process (Hechter, 2000; Kiser, 1999). Beginning from Julia Adams’ (1996) cultural reinterpretation of agency theory, Reed reformulates the core relation as triadic, involving an Other. (Reed also speaks of the Rector as opposed to the Principal, which I think is also a welcome shift, as it highlights that what is distinctive about this position is the right to rule, as opposed to the ‘topness’, the root of the word principal being first and that of rector, right.) It makes sense that the Other must be included for the case of political action, which is, as Reed accepts from Arendt, fundamentally about the establishment of relationships. Most important, an actor A claims to some other O to represent rector R. 5
The most direct interpretation of agency theory – the concern with how the principal binds the agent to her will – however, breaks down at the edge of empire, where (to take Reed’s (p. 91) gloss on Matthew Norton’s (2014) excellent study of piracy) ‘there was much sending. . . but little binding. Only via signs, technologies, and regimes were the wild actors and would-be rectors. . . turned into consistent agents of various state rectors’. Hence, Reed’s reformulation requires attention to agency and performance.
Reed’s reformulation
The practice of indirect rule, exacerbated by the limits of pre-modern communication technology, often led to long cascaded chains of principal–agent relationships. It could be quite difficult for those confronting one link to determine whether the purported chain currently existed (or if it ever had). How much easier if the chain was interpreted as actually transferring the rectorship itself! And this is what, argues Reed (p. 178), we see in some of the actors (in this case, Anthony Wayne): the ‘edge warrior’ treats himself as carrying sovereignty: ‘which is to say the agent at the end of a long chain of power and its representation. . . acts as if he carries the “central zone” within himself’. Such assumptions as to the transference were common for routine matters – colonial appointments and commissions might be written as if the King were himself deciding that such and such a person should do such and such (‘We, George the Third, by Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the faith and so forth, to our trusty and well-beloved Whitehead Hicks Esquire, being apprised of your loyalty, learning and integrity, do by these presents assign, constitute and appoint you. . . .’ and so on and so forth), even though the chances were good that no one in England, and certainly not George himself, had any idea what was going on or who this appointed person was. An agent, then, frequently acts with what might appear a surprising amount of discretion, treating himself as if he were the principal, until challenged. Moving such an unremarkable practice to the edge, however, had explosive implications.
This is because challenges could be difficult to resolve – the principal, like God, was far away. Consider the question of rebellion carried out in the name of the King. We may have two persons, A and B, both claiming to be actors authorized by rector R, the central situation for Reed’s analyses. There may be many factors that could be relevant for our explanation of why the Other O decides to treat A and not B as the true actor, but if this decision is in the moment, there are two things to note. The first is that such decisions may often be self-fulfilling prophecies. The ill-informed crown at great remove may find it generally advantageous to side with whatever faction has the favor of the people whenever possible. The second is that the decision may also turn on A’s capacity to enact a credible performance.
This brings us to another of Reed’s central notions – the importance of performance. I want to argue here that Reed’s analysis is only strengthened by taking a more Goffmanian approach to performance. This would make the interpretation of the data more difficult, but avoid attributing too much to the capacity of the performer. Here is what I mean: when he promises to go to daughter’s concert, Reed (p. 77) says, ‘I perform into existence a vast array of emotions, obligations, and meanings’. I find this implausible if interpreted literally: it implies not only that the obligations and meanings are not already there in those who hear the statement and interpret it as a promise, but that making a promise is something that, when done with felicity (in Austin’s (1975 [1962]) sense), has an atomic and unambiguous nature. Perhaps Reed’s daughter is different from my children, but I remember many scenarios in which there was heated and, I believe, sincere debate over whether statement S made at a previous time had been a promise, a wish, a prediction, or a joke and whether actions made by children between that time and the time of dispute would be sufficient to negate the right of the child to hold the parent to a promise, had a promise in fact been duly made at the time.
I do not deny that there is likely to be what Reed (p. 118) calls ‘a vast set of habits of interpretation spread across the population’, but I find it harder to accept that as a result of such a set, ‘a certain person just “is” [accorded] rector-ness’. I think that Swidler (2001) has persuasively argued that this vast set – or even a moderately sized one – is likely to contain elements that are contradictory. After Reed fails to show up for his daughter’s concert (or so we may imagine), the negotiations begin, and the most common outcome is an eventual establishment of what Goffman called ‘the illusion of reality’ – an agreement as to the nature of the present and the past, even if a grumbling sort of agreement. The problem for explanatory accounts that recognize this sort of ambiguity is that they can easily be read as implying – and sometimes may even imply – that everything is up-for-grabs, and that anything can happen. It certainly is the case that the person without a medical degree who truly successfully carries out a doctor-performance may end up slicing you open on a table – and the person, even if a member of the enemy army, who is successful at the Brigadier General performance may countermand an important order in battle. Still, such performances are deucedly hard for most of us, and if nearly all who succeed at the doctor-performance are doctors, it is not always clear whether it is worth the increased technical accuracy coming from the Goffmanian approach if it comes at the cost of analytic confusion.
But where there is slippage – when wandering con men are posing as doctors – Goffman’s way of understanding roles comes into its own. In such cases, where there is not a simple, one-to-one mapping between (on the one hand) the nature of a performance-in-the-moment and (on the other hand) where it eventually settles in the grid of this-is-a-case-of-what, our understanding of the role of performance in these chains will be more complicated. 6 But building theory at the edge of empire suggests that this is not an unwanted confusion, but a critical clarification. Just as those making local legal claims – police telling people to move along, neighbors threatening to sue, and so on – in a way may be understood as implicitly containing a claim ‘and this action will be judged valid all the way up to the Supreme Court, if necessary’, so Reed’s actors continually act as if they are confident that the chain reaching back to the king will hold, although a challenge to a performance might suddenly cast doubt on this. Making such a challenge, however, is risky, as the costs of failure are high. Even when a challenge and counter-performance seem to have been successful (B has convinced most Os to treat him as the true actor in place of A), once the ships finally make their way back and forth to the center, B may end up hanged. And, just as (according to Dr Johnson) there is something about knowing that one is shortly to be hanged that remarkably clears the mind, and there is something about bankruptcy that clarifies the nature of credit, so there is something about the failed performance of the Actor that tells us something about the nature of state power. But what?
The king’s two bodies
What body?
Reed is quite attached to the notion of the king’s two bodies, as famously discussed by Kantorowicz (1997 [1957]). Even leaving aside debates as to how central the political theology reproduced by Kantorowicz was for the case of England, I was never able to reproduce the logic whereby this notion was particularly helpful for the American case – despite Reed’s focus on chains of agency starting (or, as I will suggest, ending) in the King. Reed (p. 118) argues for the relevance as follows: In the dirty world of the vicious, starving Scotch-Irish frontier farmer and his Indian enemies and allies, the second body of the King provides an excess interpretation of the world, one that goes beyond the immediate accounting for action and reaction in the moment to moment of survival and attack.
But as far as I could see, this was not an interpretation that was foremost in the minds of the protagonists that Reed studied, nor is it the only way of noting that the King as distinct human individual is not the same thing as the Sovereign. (In particular, the idea of the sovereign being the ‘king-in-parliament’, and not the person who wears the crown, seems different from the ‘two bodies’ way of thinking; the body politic is not quite actually the king’s second body, any more than the two senses of ‘constitution’ are the quite the same, even in eighteenth-century England.)
Given that the first body of the king is wholly absent in this story of America, the focus on the twoness of the body seems to be a roundabout way of simply speaking of the fact that the British system treated the kingship as an office with rights and duties. In that sense, everyone in government had two bodies. Furthermore, one part of Reed’s study concentrates on post-independence America, where there is no King at all. This does not seem to unduly bother Reed, who assures us (p. 182) that ‘the King’s Two Bodies did not disappear but recurred in hidden ways as a trope of rule throughout culture and society’. Recurring in a ‘hidden way’ makes it sound like it did disappear, but perhaps the point is that when the king disappeared, claims to legitimacy, visions of the body politic, and the notion of office did not. There is still something fascinating that Reed is pointing us to, something which allows an unmoored authority to begin a process of claiming a chain of authorization. I am not, however, sure that it is clarified by the use of the notion of the King’s Two Bodies.
The people and the sovereign
Perhaps there is a different way of thinking about this, one just as difficult to impute to the minds of actors as Kantorowicz’s political theology, but at least as appropriate for the development of a theoretical account. Let us consider Hobbes’ understanding of the fundamental principal–agent relation underlying sovereignty. It goes precisely the opposite way. To Hobbes, the nature of the social contract is each and all agreeing to give up his rights (save that of self-preservation) to the sovereign. In so doing, Hobbes insists, we authorize the sovereign. This authorization is somewhat different from a principal–agent relation in that the authorizer acknowledges that the authorized can ‘re-start’ the process of setting goals. If you authorize someone to use your credit card, the shopkeeper taking the credit card does not need to worry if this someone is actually doing what she said she would when she borrowed it. There may be a principal–agent relation here – certainly, there can be principal–agent dynamics – but these would need to be put on top of the authorizer–authorized relation. 7
When it comes to sovereignty, however, Hobbes argues, the nature of the case is such that we do not attempt to put such a principal–agent relation on top of the relation of authorization. Once we authorize the sovereign – once we create the sovereign through such authorization (i.e. a performative moment, again in Austin’s sense) – we must give up all rights to try to control the sovereign. We cannot criticize any of the sovereign’s acts because we ourselves have authorized them (Hobbes, 1909 [1651]: 136). However, the sovereign may default on the implicit duties of a sovereign (precisely because he is not a party to the social contract, he is still technically in the state of nature and hence the law of nature is valid for him), and he would do this simply by being a bad sovereign, which means a weak one, releasing us from our social contract by abnegating his position (dropping the rights we have transferred). At this point, criticizing the sovereign’s acts is a moot point, for the sovereign is no sovereign.
In this view (though to what extent it covered the case of colonists would become a matter of great debate in eighteenth-century America, provoking the independence movement), the power comes from the people to the sovereign, who then sends it back. The ‘body’ of the sovereign (famously illustrated in the frontispiece of Leviathan) is composed of this power, and the ‘agents’ of the king (e.g. ministers) are akin to organs (‘systemes’, in Hobbes’ terms) of a body. Such a view seems close to that held by Reed’s chief example, the wonderfully wacky Herman Husband (one of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion). Beginning with the mapping King:Minister:: Head:Heart, Husband had worked out an elaborate scheme based on his conviction that to ensure its stability, the ‘Body politic’, ‘when it comes to its full Stature of Growth . . . is to have all the Parts and Proportions of the Body natural’ (p. 140).
The body politic, though, is not the same thing as the king’s other body, and if it has been demonstrated that thinkers can only come to the first by way of the second, this has not been proven to my satisfaction. That is not to deny that the notion of a body politic may indeed presuppose the sovereign, but that is not the same thing as to say that the body politic is a de-monarchized version of the king’s other body.
Now consider cases of competing claims to represent the Rector – and thereby to claim a sort of legitimacy, indeed, sacredness. Reed (p. 180) proposes that Wayne and the earlier Governor William Berkeley possessed totally different ways of representing the sacred, as one is the agent of the public (authorized by President Washington, of course), the other, the agent of the king. All certainly would recognize that Washington’s own whatever-it-is that is seen as sacred comes from the body politic, but the Hobbesian version suggests that the same is true of the King. Even more important, it may be that the key is that, at the edge of empire, people make performances that are floating free from the ultimate root in legitimate sovereignty. There is an odd parallel between the ends of the chain – the Actor and the Rector. Both want the legitimation that comes from receiving their authorization from the other end (the King/President from the body politic, the agent from the principal), but each wants his authorization to come with as little control as possible. Perhaps the Sovereign, too, is an ‘edge warrior’ in such circumstances, and perhaps the body politic is no more the king’s body than the Actor is the Rector. The symbolic resources they use to reinforce such positions can become unmoored and can be hijacked by others.
Certainly, as one left the seaboard cities behind, it became difficult for citizens to have official currencies, and so other things not strictly convertible into legal tender might instead be used. 8 There is an old joke about the importer who calls the distributor to tip him off on a real bargain on cases of tunafish he has brought in; the distributor, accepting the goods, makes a similar call to the wholesaler, and then the wholesaler to the retailer, the retailer to the restauranteur, who finally sells the contents of the first can to a customer, who angrily rejects it as rotten. Placating the customer, the restauranteur calls the retailer, the retailer calls the wholesaler, the wholesaler the distributor, the distributor the importer, the chain pursued in reverse direction. ‘What’s with this garbage tunafish you sold me?’ demands the irate distributor to the importer. ‘The stuff is rotten!’ ‘Oh, you tried eating it. Listen, this isn’t eating tunafish. This is buying and selling tunafish!’ And indeed it is. So long as the cans go unopened, they function – so long as debt papers are not turned in for repayment, they work as currency, and so long as no one challenges authorities, no one needs to find out whether or not the Actor is really authorized by the Rector.
Here, however, we again hit upon the problem of apparently proposing a very superficial understanding of power – it is generated by the claims to power at every particular instant. This, as noted above, can make it seem like we are proposing that ‘to be is to be perceived’, and nothing more. In this light, kings and governments are like Tinkerbell – if you stop believing in them, they will die. As the colonists knew, it ain’t always that easy – breaking away from the king took more than a collective act of forgetting that he existed.
And yet, this so-called ‘idealistic’ model is far more true at the edge of empire than elsewhere. People did wander away into lands perhaps claimed by the crown but wholly out of its effective governance, and did what they wanted. There can be times, Reed shows, when people believed themselves to be living under the legitimate rule authorized by the King and only later found they had been rebels all along (a bit like those who found that their priest had been appointed by a bishop appointed by a cardinal appointed by someone who has now been determined to have been the antipope, and hence they have been unwittingly following none other than Satan himself).
The reason that Reed’s work is so important for our understanding of the nature of state and politics, then, is that by focusing on where sovereignty is actually in danger of running out, we more clearly understand the emergence of power not so much as the alignment of the incentives of principal and agent, or the capacity of the principal to break the spirit and apply bridle and bit to the agent, but the success of attempted connections going in both directions. The credit of the sovereign was not inexhaustible, and although it might be degrading to admit that the King was seeking, continually though not constantly, authorization in the form of re-charges of his credit via bestowing his ‘approval’ of the ‘agents’ who were already approved by the locals he claimed to govern (perhaps then able to strategically use the accumulated credit when necessary to go against local forces), still, the notion that the king received legitimacy not by having a second body but in functioning for the body politic (to be its ‘head’, as Husband saw it, and not its double) is quite plausible. Indeed, the notion that the King’s right to rule came because of his capacity to protect the rights of his subjects, to defend the English constitution, was taken seriously enough that when enough elites became convinced that the King was not doing this, America quickly moved to reject the King’s rule over them as illegitimate – the authorization was withdrawn.
The King did not simply disappear, as if he were a nightmare vanishing when the afflicted awakes. Still, disappear he did. We learn something about statebuilding when we study state-unbuilding, and even better is to focus right on the juncture where things can go either way. Reed shows us that we understand power not simply as chains of relations, nor even as chains of relations connecting principals and agents, but key performances that bring together Rector, Actor, and Other. Performances require interpretation, and the alignment of performance and the interpretive habits of the others (an issue I have been unable to give sufficient attention to here, but one where Reed has already made notable inroads 9 ) is as important as the alignment of the interests of Principal and Agent. Even if the second body of the King proves not to be the key to understanding these interpretive habits, we are, after Reed’s work, well on the way to knowing how to proceed.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.