Speaking Like a State: Listening to Benjamin Franklin in Times of Terror

Abstract

This essay reconstitutes Benjamin Franklin's characteristic political style as a particular inflection of liberal irony, arguing for a way of speaking today that checks arrogance with humility and attempting to unlock the psychosocial economy of political enjoyment implicit in this rhetoric. To do so, the essay traverses four bodies of discourse (including recent political thinking about civic character, Franklin's oratory in 1787 at the constitutional convention, passages from his letters, and an excerpt from his autobiography) in order to extract strategies for managing situations in which democracy becomes prone to the enjoyments of terror and tyranny.

Keywords:

• Character
• Humility
• Irony
• Liberalism
• Terror

Notes

1. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Martin Secker, 1924), 19

2. Matthew Stevenson, “Minting Franklin: More Lives of the Quintessential American,” Harper's Magazine (February 2003): 76, 80.

3. See especially Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be (New York: Pocket Books, 1992).

4. George F. Will, “The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism,” in The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric (1997; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 102.

5. G. W. F. Hegel and A.V. Miller, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

6. Afterwords: Stories and Reports from 9/11 and Beyond (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002).

7. For commentary and the rich cultural context of such imagery, see Lester C. Olson, Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

8. Russell Hanson, The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations with our Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

9. “A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province,” in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), XI: 47–69.

10. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Alcott Parsons (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930), 98.

11. James Arnt Aune, “Lincoln and the American Sublime,” Communication Reports 1 (Winter 1988): 15.

12. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 90 (Bloom's italics).

13. Aune, “Lincoln and the American Sublime,” 15.

14. See Roger Rosenblatt, “The Age of Irony Comes to an End,” Time (24 September 2001).

15. “I don't see any shades of gray in the war against terror. It's either evil… [applause]. I also believe that we as a nation can overwhelm the evil ones by rising up and support a new culture of responsibility by volunteering.” George W. Bush, “Remarks to the Community in Atlanta, Georgia,” 31 January 2002, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 38, no. 5 (4 February 2002): 157. “The best way citizens in America can fight evil is through acts of kindness, is to do some good in your community. It doesn't have to be much. One can just walk across the street to a shut-in and say, ‘I care about you’” (“Remarks at a Fundraiser for Governor Scott McCallum of Wisconsin in Milwaukee,” 219). “The war against evil seems to require strong leaders and weak publics,” Robert Hariman remarks of these same quotations in “Speaking of Evil,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16 (2003): 517.

16. Stevenson, “Minting Franklin,” 76.

17. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 91.

18. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv.

19. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 146–49.

20. Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), xi.

21. Robert Hariman, “Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 282.

22. John Durham Peters, “Publicity and Pain: Self-Abstraction in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Public Culture 7 (1995): 659.

23. Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 146.

24. Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 387

25. Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).

26. Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 10 volumes, ed. Albert Henry Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1905), IX, 607, 609.

27. Washington and Madison, quoted by Ralph L. Ketcham, An American Primer, 2 volumes, ed. Daniel J. Boorstin (1966; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969), I: 81.

28. Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power, New Practices of Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.

29. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd edition revised (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 41: “The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.” Such could be a concise summary of the ethical stance of the liberal ironist, as I see it.

30. On Jesus, Gandhi, and some thoughts on their figural resonance for liberal irony, including a critique of Hariman on allegory, see James P. McDaniel, “Liberal Irony: A Program For Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002): 297–327.

31. For a funnier illustration of Franklin's self-sacrificial strategies, see James R. Andrews, “From Penn to Franklin: Rhetoric in Colonial Pennsylvania,” in A History of Public Speaking in Pennsylvania, ed. DeWitte Holland and Robert Oliver, a special edition of the Journal of the Pennsylvania Speech Association 27 (June 1971): 12.

32. These excerpts of Anti-Federalist resistance are cited in the commentary on Franklin's 1787 Convention address by colonial historian Ralph L. Ketcham, An American Primer, I: 81. My emphasis.

33. See Robert Hariman, Political Style, 51–94, for a full account of the courtly style's tropes.

34. On the “noblest synecdoche” of political representation, see Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 508.

35. Others too have employed bodily tropes to attack Franklin, most famously D.H. Lawrence, Classic Studies in American Literature (London: Martin Secker, 1924), 15–27. Neither Lawrence's nor the Anti-Federalist's strategy has ascended without strong challenges, however. See Robert Freeman Sayre, “The Worldly Franklin and his Provincial Critics,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 4 (1963): 512–24. Although dated, Sayre's criticism of Franklin's critics remains among the best sources for identifying modernism's characteristic discounting of Franklin's contribution to culture.

36. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 69–70.

37. Letter from Giambattista Beccaria of Turin to Franklin, 20 May 1771.

38. H. W. Brands, The First American and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 446 446.

39. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993). See also Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964).

40. Donna Harraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1992), 149–50, 152. Emphasis in original.

41. Benjamin Franklin, “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency” [microform] (Philadelphia: Printed and sold (by Franklin) at the new printing office, near the market, 3 April 1729), 2.

42. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 108.

43. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 119–25.

44. Brands, The First American, 135.

45. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 166.

46. Letter from Franklin to Jared Eliot (12 April 1753).

47. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 319.

48. The textual history of the Autobiography is complex. It was composed over several decades (1771–1790) and revised just before Franklin's death (17 April 1790). Hated or loved, it remains in many scholarly accounts not only the first important book in American letters but also the most socially significant because it set the conventions of political–personal autobiography, shaped the story of the self relative to that of the nation, and compared both to theological or spiritual development.

49. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ècrits: A Selection, 2.

50. Writings of Benjamin Franklin, I, 337–39.

51. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Allain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 80.

52. Brands, The First American, 206.

53. Kenneth Burke, “The Virtues and Limitations of Debunking,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action 3rd ed. rev. (1941; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 168–90. Burke argues this line of thinking about vice as the wiser choice for founding liberal democratic society includes Machiavelli, Bentham, Mill, and others.

54. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 205.

55. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 29.

56. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 37.

57. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, xiii.

58. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Allain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 220.

59. On the figural construction of time more generally, see Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. rev. (1971; Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228.

60. A. Leo Lemay, The Renaissance Man in the Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles, CA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1978), 21–33, 41–44.

61. Charles L. Sanford, “An American's Pilgrim's Progress,” American Quarterly 6 (1954): 297–310.

62. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 67–119.

63. Kenneth Burke, “The Four Master Tropes,” in A Grammar of Motives, 503–17.

64. James Arnt Aune, Rhetoric and Marxism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 20. Riposte: Do not “lower classes” enjoy irony as a symbolic mode of downsizing the pompous, successful, but “morally bankrupt upper classes” (so to speak)? Aune errs on this point, I believe, but otherwise he offers a brilliant version of irony's intricacies in Marxist thought and US politics. A more balanced account is offered in Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1995).