Justice and the return of imperialism

Alternatives

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 223-248

  Jenkins, Dominick ^a,b  

^a Greenpeace UK   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Homestead; Imperialism; Justice; United States; War

Indexed keywords

EID: 23244442840     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540503000205     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. This article has been inspired by two arguments about justice. The first is Jacques Rancière's trenchant attack in Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) on the way that political philosophy has conceptualized justice since Plato.
2. The second is the short but very provocative remarks on ethics and potential set out by Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993);
3. see his section 11, "Ethics." Other useful works include Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989);
4. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003);
5. Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001);
6. and Walter Benjamin. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in his Illuminations (New York: Shocken, 1968).
7. On democracy, I have been influenced by Sheldon Wolin's short but brilliant "Fugitive Democracy," in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996);
8. William Connolly, Identity /Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991);
9. Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002);
10. and Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000).
11. E. D. Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987);
12. William Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for American Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980);
13. Dominick Jenkins, The Final Frontier: America, Science, and Terror (London: Verso, 2002);
14. David Burton, Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist (Philadelphia, 1968);
15. Michael Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in the Progressive Era (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 1984).
16. Theodore Roosevelt, "Expansion and Peace," The Strenuous Life (London: Duckworth, 1911);
17. and his "The World Movement [1910]," in Herman Hagedorn, ed., The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 24 volumes (New York: Scribner, 1923-1926, volume 12);
18. and Elihu Root, The Yale Lectures on the Responsibility of Citizenship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1907).
19. Woodrow Wilson, "Democracy and Efficiency," in The Public Papers ofWoodrow Wilson (hereafter, PWW) 12 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 6-20;
20. and Wilson, "The Ideals of America," PWW 12: 208-227.
21. Wilson, "Education and Democracy," PWW 17:136.
22. Roosevelt, "World Movement," note 3, 12:75-81.
23. Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other Essays Social and Political (New York: AMS Press, 1969), pp. 6-7;
24. Root, note 3, pp. 12-13;
25. Wilson, PWW 16:365.
26. Theodore Roosevelt, "Expansion and Peace," in The Strenuous Life (London: Duckworth, 1911), p. 34.
27. Theodore Roosevelt, "The Radical Movement Under Conservative Direction," in Works, note 3, 16:89-99.
28. Wolin, note 1; and Rancière, note 1.
29. For the background to Debs's article, see Anthony Esposito's fine The Ideology of the Socialist Party of America, 1901-1917 (New York: Garland, 1997).
30. and James Weinstein's classic The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).
31. Weinstein, note 11, p. 27.
32. Eugene Debs, "Homestead and Ludlow," in Eugene V. Debs Speaks (London: Pathfinder, 1996), pp. 215-225.
33. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 346-349.
34. Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).
35. Debs's textual practice is close to that of Walter Benjamin in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (New York: Shocken, 1968);
36. For a brilliant exposition of Walter Benjamin's argument about time, memory, and politics, see Rebecca Comay, "Redeeming Revenge: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, and the Politics of Memory," in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990).
37. On the elevation of war into the paradigm for social relations, see Jean-Luc Nancy, "War, Law, Sovereignty - Techné," in Verena Andermatt Conley, ed., Rethinking Technologies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 28-58;
38. and Slavo Zizek, "Carl Schmitt in the Age of PostPolitics," in Chantal Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999).
39. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, part 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
40. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 137-182.
41. Krause, note 15, p. 361.
42. Kees Van Der Pilj, The Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984);
43. Mathew Coulter, The Senate Munitions Inquiry of the 1930s: Beyond the Merchants of Death (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997);
44. Jenkins, note 2, pp. 142-144.
45. International Socialist Review 16, no. 1 (1915);
46. and Stewart Halsey Ross, Propaganda for War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1996) pp. 158-160.
47. J. M. Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (London: Belknap Press, 1983), p. 277.
48. It is only now, I would argue, that World War I has been joined by a series of other "global contingencies" like climate change that the full force of its challenge to both the liberal-conservative and socialist internationalism can be felt. See Connolly, note 1, pp. 16-35, 198-222.
49. Roosevelt, Works, note 3, 18:290.
50. Burton, note 2, p. 192;
51. and Roosevelt, Works, note 3, 18:7.
52. Theodore Roosevelt, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. E. E. Morison, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 645.
53. Jenkins, note 2, pp. 115-128.
54. Roosevelt, "Our Peace Maker, the Navy," America and the World War, in Works, note 3, vol. 19.
55. and Autobiography, in Works, note 3, 20:535-546.
56. Roosevelt, America and the World War, in Works, note 3, 18:162;
57. Ross, note 21, pp. 27-90.
58. E. L. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 187-209.
59. Roosevelt, America and the World War, in Works, note 3, 18:199.
60. Ibid., 18:220.
61. Jenkins, note 2, pp. 132-137.
62. Charles DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform in American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 98.
63. Debs, "The Canton Speech," in Debs Speaks, note 13, pp. 248-249.
64. John Reed, "At the Throat of the Republic," The Masses 8, no. 1 (1916): 7;
65. John Finnegan, Against the Spectre of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914-1917 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975), p. 50;
66. and John Thompson, "The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition," Diplomatic History 16, no. 1 (1992): 23-28.
67. Wilson, "An Address at the Opening of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign," PWW 47:270.
68. See Jenkins, note 2, pp. 129-154;
69. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968);
70. Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1960), pp. 195-205;
71. Giovanni Arrighi, "The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism," in Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism, and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
72. Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998);
73. Van Der Pilj, note 20;
74. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 113-181.
75. On "superexploitation," see Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 142;
76. on "accumulation by dispossession," see Harvey, note 18, pp. 137-182.
77. John Gray, False Dawn: the Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta, 1998), p. 147.
78. See Maurizio Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996).
79. Stanley Cohen, "A Study in Nativism: The Red Scare of 1919-1921," Political Science Quarterly 79 (March 1964);
80. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy And the Politics of Identity (Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 141-144.
81. DeBenedetti, note 34, pp. 90-107;
82. John Thompson, Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): pp. 159-290;
83. C. Roland Marchland, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898-1918 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), pp. 248-322;
84. and Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914-1915 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), pp. 15-67.