governmentality and Political economy in American nationalism, 1880-1912

 

This research-in-progress examines the younger generation of professional American political economists grouped loosely around the American Economic Association whose explicit aim was to overturn the hegemony of laissez-faire thinking in American economics. One of their first aims was to conceive of the United States as a single economic unit—a nation—by which the correct object of a self-conscious national economic policy was conceiving of the population as a biological mass with productive capabilities that needed to be fostered by disinterested expert intervention through the capacities of the federal state. But because the U.S. federal state was compartively weak—Marx once referred to it as "fictive"—the immediate task was to develop a conception of nationalism to justify its greater administrative reach. Drawing on Foucault's concepts of governmentality and biopolitics—while contrasting them with other theories of the state—the paper provisionally suggests how the institution-building of these economists helped create a concept of national cultural wholeness that was a precondition for America's emergence as a modern imperial state at the beginning of the 20th century. This national culture was thus not the source of American behaviour, but one of the consequences of a specific mobilization of economic interests.