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Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors: the Pursuit of Recognition in the Biographical War of the Early Republic

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Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors: the Pursuit of Recognition in the Biographical War of the Early Republic Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors: The Pursuit of Recognition in the Biographical War of the Early Republic Hannah Spahn Abstract “All revolutions,” Alexis de Tocqueville claims in Democracy in America, “enlarge the am- bition of men.” This article takes a look at the complex relationship between two major Ameri- can discourses of recognition in the revolutionary and early republican periods, one focusing on ambition as a force potentially undermining the foundations of the commonwealth, the other on the pursuit of esteem as an anthropological universal that contributed to the progress of civilization. In a language partly reminiscent of David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s social mir- rors, John Adams’s architectural metaphor of a mirrored ‘boudoir’ captured the ambivalence of recognition in the late American Enlightenment, an ambivalence negotiated primarily in the period’s highly aestheticized approaches to history as a literary genre. The revolutionary generation eventually competed for a sublimated recognition on the battlegrounds of the ‘bio- graphical war’ of the early nineteenth century, in a genre including commissioned biographies, unsent letters, and clandestine memoirs. Trying to achieve the impossible aim of representing their hopes for recognition as self-sacrificing republicans in writing, the aging revolutionaries reached a moral and aesthetic impasse, thus ending up lost, or so this article claims, in their own historical boudoir of mirrors. “Abby, thou comprehendest not,” John Adams scribbled in the margins of De la legislation by his late French acquaintance, the Abbé de Mably. On other pages of his copy, Adams’s comments on the French critic of private property were hardly more favorable, ranging from “Abby, thou hast it not right” to “Stark mad.” A major fault in Mably’s argument was, as Adams complained in his mar- ginalia, that the “Abby has not Seen the true source of the passions. Ambition springs from the desire of Esteem, and from emulation, not from property.”1 For Adams, human behavior was intrinsically motivated by the aim to be perceived in a favorable light by others—a universal desire for social distinction that he called 1 For a more recent version of the Mably-Adams controversy, see Fraser and Honneth. John Adams’s marginalia into his copy of Mably’s De la legislation, pages 163, 148, 74, and 124 (pho- tography with transcriptions) can be viewed at www.johnadamslibrary.org. Elder brother to Eti- enne Bonnot de Condillac, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785) was a respected writer when Adams met him, but his political tracts reached a wider circulation only after his death, when they were widely quoted during the French Revolution (many developments of which they ap- peared to have anticipated); see Schleich. For Adams’s reaction to Mably, see Ellis 90-91, which transcribes “emulation” rather than “simulation,” the transcription by the Adams library. While both would make sense in the context of recognition in a neoclassical culture, the more general “emulation” might have been Adams’s more likely choice in this context. As will be discussed be- low, it is also a key term in Smith’s discussion of recognition in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 534 Hannah Spahn the spectemur agendo2—rather than by the striving for material goods as an end in itself. As he remarked in the margins of his copy of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, the human “love of Esteem” had begun as early as the moment when the “first two men or women […] met” and “felt an Affection for each other.”3 Thus understanding the pursuit of recognition as a foundational activity in the establishment of society, Adams felt that Mably’s argument for a more equal distribution of property missed the point, designed as it was to cure at best the symptoms of social inequality, but not its source. He differed from the abbé, less in his criticism of crass inequalities as such than in his views on the proposed remedy: Abolishing private property rights would not, as Adams saw it, go to the root of the social and political problem posed by destructive human passions such as ‘Ambition.’ Adams’s comments on Mably’s and Rousseau’s writings offer a glimpse into a wide-ranging discussion on the nature of human motivations and a just society in the late Enlightenment. As I will argue in this essay, the modern problem of recognition in a society of relative social equals, which became conspicuous in the democratic culture of Tocqueville’s America, was divided into two different discourses in the early American republic. On the one hand, many Anglo-Ameri- cans considered the striving for esteem, approbation, attention, honor, reputation, or fame (in their terminology) to be a central driving force of human behavior; Adams, for instance, went as far as to regard it as the original incentive for the procreation of the species. On the other hand, however, many contemporaries stressed the dangerous potential of this basic human motivation. In the Stoic and Christian tradition, they often criticized the pursuit of recognition as a habit that, if exaggerated, easily deteriorated into a dangerous vice or a sin.4 It could take the specific form of political ambition, for Adams and likeminded political thinkers a vice capable of destroying the very foundations of the republic. As I want to show, the conflict between these two discourses about recognition—between a produc- tive pursuit of esteem and a potentially destructive ambition—was negotiated in the domain of aesthetics, specifically in the literary historiography of the period. 2 On the role of spectemur agendo in Adams’s conception of politics, see C. Thompson, “John Adams and the Science of Politics” 237-65, especially 242-46. 3 Adams’s critical comments were made into his copy of this translation—Jean Jacques Rousseau, A discourse upon the origin and foundation of inequality among mankind (London, 1761): “Love of Esteem is much earlier than this. The first two men or women who met felt an Affection for each other” (114)—and can be found at www.johnAdamslibrary.org. For Adams, the “desire of Esteem” had originated in the state of nature, thus significantly earlier than for Rousseau (in whose pre-social natural state it did not yet exist). 4 See Taylor 25-73, especially 44-51. Taylor sees Rousseau as the eighteenth-century alter- native to the two traditional ways of thinking about esteem and recognition. According to him, Rousseau’s alternative of gaining esteem in a system “characterized by equality, reciprocity, and unity of purpose” in his ideal republic initiated a “new discourse about honor and dignity” in modernity (49). Adams’s ambivalence toward esteem overlaps with Rousseau’s third way in some particulars—as in the controlling force of republican visibility in his historical boudoir of mirrors, which will be discussed below—but due to the fact that, unlike Rousseau, Adams located property and esteem in the natural state, the political solutions he and other American revolutionaries proposed had little in common with the Contrat social. Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 535 Related to the moral and aesthetic problem of vanity, it became central to the rev- olutionaries’ efforts to achieve virtuous reputations on the historical record. The striving for the precarious balance between esteem and ambition thus came to play a crucial role in one of the earliest American culture wars: the ‘biographical war’5 about the power to define America’s national origins. The first skirmishes of this literary war, about the representation of the American Revolution, began even before its military action had ended. Its cultural battles intensified with the publication of John Marshall’s Life of George Washington and continued to be fought well into the third decade of the nineteenth century.6 In the first two sections of this essay I seek to present, briefly, an enlightened theory of recognition. I discuss its transatlantic origins, its political role in the American Revolution, and the complex ways in which the contemporaries came to terms with the relationship between recognition and aesthetics—that is, be- tween their Janus-faced combination of esteem and ambition, and their aestheti- cized conception of ‘history’ as a literary genre. The two final sections of the essay explore the literary dimension of recognition in the biographical war. Due to the two conflicting discourses in the transitional culture of the late Enlightenment, the biographical war left in its wake a series of rather odd pieces of writing. It produced the curious phenomenon of letters that were never sent, but were con- scientiously preserved among the papers of the founders—part of their collective attempt, it could be said, at turning the historical representation of their period into something like a gigantic epistolary novel. The biographical war has also left us with a strange collection of founding autobiographies and memoirs. Although most of these texts were written with highly literary expectations on the genre of history by men who desperately sought to instruct posterity, they are mostly remembered today (with the famous exception of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiog- raphy) as striking literary failures. Enlightened Recognition The British-American project of Enlightenment was closely linked to the in- centive of gaining the esteem of others. According to foundational texts such as John Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education—echoed, for instance, in Thomas Jefferson’s educational letters—the wish to be esteemed by one’s fellow men was the main goal of all individual improvement and self-discipline.7 Adam Smith de- scribed the hopes for “approbation” and “attention” as the dominant motivation 5 For the term the ‘biographical war,’ see Freeman 62-74, 274-88.
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