Ideas and Interest: or Why the Have-Nots Used to Come Out Ahead

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Emily Zackin and Chloe Thurston, The Political Development of American Debt Relief (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Stephan Stohler 

In his agenda-setting book Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter claimed that an ethical code had evolved alongside the yeoman farmers of the nineteenth century. That code made a promise. If farmers worked hard and conducted themselves honestly and frugally in their economic affairs, they could largely expect to live a life where their needs were met.   The interesting part of Hofstadter’s story occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century when industrialization ruptured the relationship between economic behavior and individual ethics. That rupture was driven in no small part by mechanical innovations and volatile market prices.  To overcome slight downturns in agricultural prices, farmers often transformed their farms into industrial projects, investing in land and machinery to increase their overall yield.  The problem, however, was that although their calculations were individually rational, the absence of coordination only exacerbated price declines as farmers collectively tended to overproduce, often leaving farmers in a position where they could not make good on their debts. 

The interesting piece of Hofstadter's work is not the economic story but rather the knock-on effects of such failures for a more general understanding of the relationship between economic behavior and collective morality.  Industrialization, especially agricultural industrialization, radically transformed an ethical system for which many Americans were unprepared. And Hofstadter's implicit thesis was that the politics of the Age of Reform could not be understood unless historians appreciated reformers’ dual efforts to shore up not just the economy but also to reimpose a moral order on American life.  While Hofstadter’s argument is interesting for understanding the politics of the era, the book never provided the kind of systematic defense of this argument.

Enter Zackin and Thurston. Their book examines the same economic and moral universe over a longer time horizon while simultaneously constraining their focus only to periods of legal reform surrounding debt.  They portray a world shaped by structural factors, while also paying attention to a discrete set of interrelated ideas about debt, race, and worthiness that not only have the potential to significantly alter the prospects for legal reform, but also help us understand how debtors made sense of their economic interests, and how they wished others to understand them. Zackin and Thurston share Hofstadter's conjecture that this story is more convincingly told not by rehearsing statistical evidence about the magnitude of debt, whether white, Black, farmer, or consumer. And, like Hofstadter, they focus on the interaction between structural factors and ideas that caused debtors, creditors, and others to understand their material interests in substantially different ways. 

But Zackin and Thurston go beyond Hofstadter by focusing in far greater detail on how political actors deploy these ideas in service of legal reform and for larger cultural understandings about who should be entitled to debt relief and who should not.  Zackin and Thurston test their ideas against the varied success that debtors had in seeking government relief: debtors prevailed sometimes, but not always, during periods of legal reform related to debt, first in the states and subsequently at the federal level. Zackin and Thurston largely, though not exclusively, attribute the changing fates of these groups to structural causes---in particularly a volatile nineteenth-century economy---and, in part, on ideas---about farmers' identities as debtors, whether individuals are themselves to blame for their insolvency, and whether their insolvency should more fairly be understood as the product of forces beyond their control. 

There is one story, however, which does not follow this pattern.  Zackin and Thurston make the compelling case that these 1978 pro-debtor congressional reforms were the product of an endogenous administrative state-building process, as quasi-judicial bankruptcy administrators, whose positions were created during earlier periods of legal reform, persuaded lawmakers to adopt pro-debtor regulations even though debtor organizations were themselves largely absent.  Their assessment is largely in line with other studies of debt reform, which conclude that the 1978 reforms flew “below the political horizon” (122).  But Zackin and Thurston add to this story by explaining why pro-debtor organizations failed to organize and mobilize for the occasion.  The only detail missing from this story, however, is an explanation as to why these administrators came down on the side of debtors.  Indeed, one of the compelling lessons of the book is that—at least since Shay’s rebellion—ideas had the potential to make insolvency appear to be the product of either individual or structural failures, with implications for debtor relief. Why did the administrators driving the 1978 reforms break in favor of debtors? I think the answer to that question would go a long way toward integrating the 1978 reforms into the larger thesis of the book. 

Although I am not an expert on the American history of debt, the brief review of existing literature suggests that Zackin and Thurston make a novel contribution here when they encourage us to think of nineteenth-century white farmers as adding a collective debtor identity to their repertoire. Once they understood themselves as debtors, these white nineteenth-century farmers understood credit to be as much a part of farming as plowing or harvesting, allowing them to overcome more traditional---and demobilizing---narratives of debtors' responsibilities. The most persuasive evidence that Zackin and Thurston provide on this front is a series of stories and quotations illustrating how white farmers organized and mobilized as debtors, articulating their political demands in those terms. Their Black contemporaneous counterparts, by contrast, failed to develop a debtor identity in part because they often failed to have the collateral necessary to borrow against, or in the relatively few circumstances when they did, Black farmers (and others) frequently found it in their interests not to highlight their status as debtors, instead emphasizing their responsible, frugal, and trustworthy individualized traits.  Neither was conducive to collective political organization and mobilization, interfering with collective identity formation. 

Although Zackin and Thurston do not make the concept of identity formation a core theoretical concern of the book, I will note that their argument about identity formation shares notable similarities with some of the scholarship on legal mobilization, and especially Stuart Scheingold's claims about how legal rights sometimes serve as powerful cultural symbols outside the courtroom.  These cultural symbols, Scheingold claimed, sometimes help political movements overcome the demobilizing rhetoric of individual responsibility and instead organize and mobilize in response to state failures according to a common identity.  In that sense, Zackin and Thurston are in good company.  What is interesting, however, is that Zackin and Thurston do not provide a single quotation of debtors making political demands in the language of legal rights, even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What this means for Scheingold’s thesis is not wholly clear. Likely, it may simply mean that there are other ways than “rights talk” that legal reformers can use to overcome the effects of demobilizing rhetoric. 

As I have tried to suggest here, Zackin and Thurston’s book contributes to the study of American political development because it takes ideas seriously, treating them as crucial explanatory factors that have the potential to alter how people understand material interests.  In that regard, the book fundamentally challenges our tendency to contrast ideas with material interests.  Zackin and Thurston show that money does not speak for itself. Rather, it is steeped in an array of cultural understandings and subject to change as those understandings change. Of course, the quotations marshaled in this book do not always allow us to conclude whether those ideas are deployed merely for strategic purposes, whether they are constitutive of identities, or whether they persuade lawmakers who participated in debt reform to behave in ways they would not have otherwise. Given the state of the discipline, that is too tall of an order.  That said, this book encourages us to take up this task and to think through more carefully how we might demonstrate the ways that ideas act as mediators in the political world. In my view, this line of inquiry is the most exciting of the many contributions that Zackin and Thurston make. And I suspect that we will be arguing about its implications for some time to come. 

Stephan Stohler is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. You can reach him by e-mail at sstohler@syr.edu.