Empire as a Way of Life: Introducing William Appleman Williams

My current book project on American empire lacks a title (suggestions welcome!) But it has a number of sources of inspiration which I’ll be featuring here in the coming months. One significant muse has been the work of William Appleman Williams, and in particular, Williams’s final, quirky book, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative.

Williams was one of the essential thinkers in the field of US diplomatic history. His critical approach opened up new strains of thought in US diplomatic history, giving rise to what we now call “the Wisconsin School,” or, alternatively, the “revisionist” school of US history. Williams and his followers took issue with prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, charging that American power, far from being a source of liberation in the world, was often a sinister force, serving the vested interests of the exploiting classes. Revisionists blamed the US for the Cold War, blasted American officials for military horrors wrought in the global south, and in general condemned the US as a source of international instability, greed, and grotesque brutality. This was a bold, and undoubtedly courageous, position to take at the height of the Cold War, to suggest an underlying perniciousness in American conduct. Reaching an apogee in the New Left of the 1960s, the revisionists gave voice to a new generation of highly critical historians and thinkers. While their own work has been the subject of at-times intense criticism, the influence of the revisionists remains steady.
 
Williams’s first book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is a founding document in revisionist scholarship, and it is certainly worth a read. But it is his last book, Empire as a Way of Life, that continues to haunt. This imperfect and frustrating book is less about American militarism abroad and rather more about the ways in which American society and American culture itself is constructed of empire.
 
Williams argues that the very essence of American life, our history, culture, politics, our economic systems and social structures, all of it, are all essentially imperial. There is no America without empire. Hence, empire “as a way of life.” It was, and remains, a stark indictment. Williams wrote plainly that “empire as a way of life involves taking wealth and freedom away from others to provide for your own welfare, pleasure, and power.” (30) It is this basic determination for “more” that drives empire. “Empire as a way of life is predicated upon having more than one needs.” (34) It is not a comforting read.
 
Williams shows that what drives empire is not simply that we want more goods, though that is part of it. Rather, what really drives empire is that there are problems and divisions at home which we would prefer not to address. So ever-expanding empire is a strategy to evade persistent problems at home. This is the more damning part of Williams’s critique. Williams argues that American empire seeks to reconstruct the world beyond its frontiers so that it can avoid having to address the realities within its frontiers. Rather than deal with the persistence of poverty, racism, or sexism at home, Americans seek expansion and economic growth abroad; with enough growth, we can avoid having to fix problems at home. And foreign adventures give the rubes something on which to fixate other than their own miserable circumstances.
 
For Williams, empire is hard baked into the structural essence of American history. And it has taken hard intellectual work to get it there. Take the Constitution itself, for example. What the Articles of Confederation could not do is to regulate trade or provide effective defense. These are not necessarily mortal defects, unless one makes trade or encounter with potentially hostile powers a primary goal. This, in fact, as Williams argues, is what Americans had intended all along. The nation was not to be merely a republic, it was to be an expanding republic, whose commerce was to be exported and whose agriculture expanded. The founders explicitly intended that the United States should expand: Franklin foresaw it, Washington invested in it, and Jefferson and Madison's agricultural utopia required it. 
 
So not only would a new Constitution have to be brought into being that more effectively consolidated powers necessary to imperial expansion, and providing for that expansion itself in Article IV, section 3 (more on that later). Americans’ very idea of liberty would have to be revised. Most of the founders had read the great enlightenment thinkers, notably Montesquieu, who took it as a matter of course that only small states could be republics. Large territories, so the conventional wisdom went, necessarily required tyranny. Williams shows, very shrewdly, that Madison “boldly argued the opposite: that empire was essential for freedom.” Only in expansion could millions of yeoman farmers find the land necessary on which to build independent homesteads. Expansion would bring not tyranny, as Montesquieu had it, but individual freedom.
 
The problem, of course, as the anti-Federalists tried to argue, is that any constitution that had power to deploy against the non-citizen could also deploy power against the citizen. Imperial control cut both ways. “Hence Madison had to persuade his compatriots to accept a system that exercised more control over them as well as other peoples,” Williams writes. “It was an extremely difficult problem, and thus Madison had to make an intellectual revolution before he could make an empire. He had, in short, to change people's minds—their way of thinking—about the relationship of empire and freedom.” (45) Madison made a pluralistic argument in this regard, that the bigger the US got, the more it would foster various groups, each one having its power therefore diluted and less able to interfere with the wants and desires of another group. More size, more diversity, more pluralism, meant less prospect of concentrating political power within one particular group, hence more liberty. I’ll leave it for readers to decide whether Madison’s analysis holds today.
 
Williams insisted that we’ve never had a durable anti-imperial tradition, though there have been some effusions now and then. Rather, we have two versions of pro-imperialism, the “hard” and the “soft.” The distinction is not merely between military forms of conquest on the one hand, and other forms of expansion through culture, religion, or commerce. That is true enough, but at its heart, Williams proposed a more fundamental, and more difficult separation. Hard expansionists were “hard” precisely because they were also racist. It is racism, a durable belief that some groups are inherently superior to others, and some are so inferior as to require the constant disciplining force of perennial brutality. “It all comes to the question of whether one conquers to transform the heathen into lower-class members of the empire,” he wrote in one especially bitter passage, “or simply works them to death for the benefit of the imperial metropolis.” (34)
 
Another of the domestic evasions of empire as a way of life has to do with democracy itself. No person can establish expertise in all of the issues that impact his or her life--Lippmann taught us that. But in empire, the citizenry tends to surrender its prerogatives to an “establishment” of experts who administer the empire, whose expertise channels circuits of information, and who deploy political power on our behalf. Empire lets the individual citizen off the hook, in other words, from taking responsibility, from understanding issues, and exercising political power ourselves. Many people want to be led, and empire, insofar as it calls forth perpetual emergencies and international crises which it must confront, offers a succession of ready-made excuses for that surrender of autonomy.
 
In truth this is a thinly argued book. Williams seems to write in haste, offering too many generalizations, and too little deep analysis. Despite the fact that he understands that empire is anti-democratic, there is no sustained discussion, for example, about Woodrow Wilson’s famous support for democracy, nor the New Deal’s even more famous commitment to it. Other historians, such as Tony Smith or Frank Ninkovich, have done better with the paradox of American imperial democracy. There is a way, a necessary way, to weave together American support for empire with American support for democracy, but Williams doesn’t give it to us.
 
Nevertheless, Williams shows that empire is not (merely) a foreign policy, it is a psychology. We cannot turn it on or off. There is no anti-imperial politics to which we may cling. As Williams so well understood, empire is a strategy of evasion, “a way of avoiding the fundamental challenge of creating a humane and equitable community or culture.” (91) Or as Andrew Bacevich put it in his introduction to a new edition of Williams’s book, “Americans look abroad to avoid looking within.” There are historians who illustrate this theme better, I think: Richard Slotkin, Amy Kaplan, Kristin Hoganson, among others, and I will be featuring this work regularly in this space. But few historians wrote with more urgency about how Americans practice empire as an elision of those challenges and dilemmas with which we would prefer not to deal. Understanding how those evasions occur, and why, is one of the central aims of my own writing on the subject.
 
I remember not long ago, during the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, a profusion of books appeared decrying American empire. It was a polemic wave that echoed Williams’s own Vietnam era when he and other revisionist historians provided an analysis and a vocabulary that condemned an earlier form of American imperial violence. If the incoming Trump administration carries through on its current rhetoric and makes moves against Panama, Greenland, or Canada, I predict another wave of learned books and articles again condemning American empire. It would certainly raise the traffic on this blog.

But this is why Williams is important, for all his shortcomings: If empire is indeed a way of life, then empire is not a suit of clothes that some administrations trot out of the closet every now and then, and then put away. We are not only an empire when Republicans are in office and not Democrats. And vice versa. We are therefore not only an empire when we deploy military force and not when we don’t. Williams insists that empire is part of our national and historic DNA.
 
I hope to show how imperial understanding, imperial conceptions, and imperial outlooks are woven deeply into our culture. Even some of our most allegedly innocent cultural expressions, such as Captain America’s shield which I discussed previously in this space, reify and reiterate the basic logics of empire. In our imperial culture, empire as a way of life appears naturalized, essential, and inevitable. Empire is not something that happens “out there” beyond the frontiers. Empire is something that we cultivate inside ourselves. Empire is our way of life, as Williams knew perhaps better than anyone.
 
Further reading: William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, with an introduction by Andrew Bacevich (Brooklyn, Ig Publishing, 2007).
 
And check out the extended unpacking of Williams’s broader intellectual contributing by the inestimable Greg Grandin: Off Dead Center: William Appleman Williams | The Nation

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