Abolition in American Thought

“Molten” by Mary puzzlement from Flickr CCBY

Studying for comps is bringing me into close contact with the history of American thought, a distinctly protean amalgamation of the personal, the political, the religious, and the philosophical. Reading “The Metaphysical Club” alongside “Stamped from the Beginning,” I’m reminded of that moment in college when I decided the Transcendentalists were too much for me, too myopic and self-absorbed to justify their expansive orientation and lasting cultural influence.

Of course, ideas do not stand apart from the contexts in which they are formed and expressed. And the ways in which they are understood form another layer of their power and their legacy all together. My desperation to assign a fixed and lasting meaning to terminology— like “liberalism” and “feminism,” and even “society,” is a weakness of my own subjectivity, I have no doubt. 

In the moment, people have always debated the propriety of terminology, even as the use of terms by some and demonization by others continuously morphs their meaning. Such is and was the case with “abolition.”

People who call for the abolition of ICE today are inevitably hearkening back to the cultural power of the terminology in its 19th century quest to end slavery, and in its reemergence in the quest to end mass incarceration beginning in the 1970s. Louis Menard’s insight in “The Metaphysical Club” that abolition has always claimed to transcend politics, even as it profoundly influenced politics, is as relevant to today’s calls for abolition as it was in the years before the Civil War. 

Looking backward to the ways in which ideas flowed from person to person and places bc to place in the past, I am reminded of the unique communications circumstances of the present that turn ideas into memes that can have orthogonally different meanings for different consumers. In the absence of centralized organization, political slogans can no more be contained than Internet memes. Ultimately, their power to spread or to repel is contingent, like everything by wise.

Yet, beneath it all is the reality of the circumstances described, the specific sources of outrage and motivation. The organizing principles, the people, the training culture and acquired knowledge, the checks and balances or lack thereof. Ultimately, the lasting impact of any given abolition movement will come out later in the analysis. Scholars may still disagree, but patterns that stand the test of time are harder to ignore.