Exceptionally Backward

by Richard De Prospo

The title of the fifth book by Richard De Prospo, the Ernest A. Howard Professor of English and American Studies, is a humorous and slightly provocative play on “American exceptionalism” and the notion that America is a special country destined to lead the world to a better form of society. According to De Prospo, “the most exceptional thing about America, especially 19th-century American culture, is that it’s backward, that it harkens all the way back to antiquity.”

In this rigorously researched study, De Prospo argues that many of the persistent inequalities in American society—economic, racial, gender, and generational—can be traced back to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. Rather than trying to invent a new democratic and egalitarian society, the documents from the Revolutionary period show that the Founding Fathers believed in a “justified hierarchy,” contradicting a popular depiction of America as a democratic pioneer and the American Constitution as paving the way to a progressive modernity.

De Prospo argues that the American Revolution was “restorative” not radical, even for the time. When he compares the American and French revolutions, he finds that the French revolutionaries wrote equality of all human beings into their constitution and considered it central to what they were setting out to achieve. On the other hand, the American revolutionaries did not regard equality as a central tenet of their new society. De Prospo argues that “the king was the rebel” in their view because he had become tyrannical. What they wanted was to “restore” a society run by a class of people—white men, middle-aged or older, with a degree of wealth and education—not to create a new society based on all being equal.

That the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions could all be argued to have failed to different degrees or for different reasons, and the American Revolution might be considered a success based on metrics like increased income and life expectancies of its people, does not affect the argument De Prospo is making. He is not arguing for or against success or failure; he is shining a spotlight on the origins of the American experiment in terms of intentions and context and the consequences for today’s society.

The inspiration for the book began during the COVID shutdown when De Prospo read all three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. He was surprised to discover how much Marx referred to America, the Civil War, and the slavery-reliant cotton industry as examples of the contradictions within capitalism. De Prospo thought it interesting and surprising that when Marx was writing, a century after American independence and the establishment of the Republic, there was still a sense that America was a “backward” society.

This led De Prospo to reflect on the country’s founding and undertake the research that culminated in this book. He reviewed original materials, closely reading the founding documents and papers, and contextualized them by reading critical works by contemporary and contemporaneous historians, literary critics, and philosophers to develop a comprehensive critique of the country’s founding, the intentions of the founders, and the consequences for America.

What he came upon again and again was that “if you read closely the founding documents, and particularly the Federalist Papers, you’re going to see that human inequality is taken absolutely for granted, as ineradicable and based on creationist notions of hierarchy.” 

“It is extremely tendentious and even a little bit fraudulent to make the case that the founders were founding a democracy,” he said. “What they inherited from classical antiquity is that democracies will eventually yield chaos and anarchy and that, unless you have a very tiny group of people, [democracy is] impracticable.” He argues that “what they wanted to do was go back to something like the Empire before it had been corrupted by a single, tyrannical, idiosyncratic king.”

He shows that “there was a cultural lag in the United States that enabled people to tolerate mass chattel slavery long past its historical moment.” The Founding Fathers, many of whom held enslaved people, struggled to justify slavery in their writings, could see the inherent logical and ethical flaws in classifying people as property, yet were not willing to condemn it out of hand, let alone ban it. De Prospo recognizes the complexity of the issue for leaders during this time period. There were certainly those who were abolitionists and found slavery repugnant but who compromised for the political integrity of the nascent country. 

“The revelation that Jefferson was having sexual relations and having out-of-wedlock children with [an enslaved woman] who was also the half-sister of his dead wife, I don’t think actually would have shocked,” he said. 

While American tolerance of mass chattel slavery was an outlier in the western world, it points to a more common acceptance of social hierarchies, with one class of people being viewed as superior to another. This belief in societal hierarchy persisted in the U.S. when it was being openly questioned or rejected in Europe. He is not saying that Europe was a utopia; it’s that the concept of inequality being immutable or a natural order was coming under more scrutiny and pressure there.

Furthermore, De Prospo argues that some of the democratic structures and elements of the Constitution that came from the founders’ fear of the anarchy they thought a true democracy might bring to the social order have had consequences that are with us still. He points to the Electoral College and the structure of the Senate (with seats distributed by state rather than based on population) as examples of undemocratic structures the Founding Fathers gave us that are more to do with maintaining privilege in certain hands than sharing it across society.

Similarly, De Prospo demonstrates that the structural foundations of American democracy were not set up to prevent authoritarianism. “The Constitution is not going to save you, the Declaration [of Independence] is not going to save you, the Supreme Court’s not going to save you,” De Prospo said. 

The book is timely and thorough. It is more a scholarly read than a book for the general reader, replete with extensive citations and references to other thinkers and observers. But given the extensive research and the range of insights, it has a lot to say that is relevant to today. 

— Darrach Dolan