The forthcoming article “Abolishing structural domination: US Reconstruction and the double bind of emancipation” by Michael Gorup is summarized by the author below.
What does it take to abolish structurally entrenched domination? In recent years, political theorists have developed increasingly sophisticated accounts of the structural bases and dimensions of dominating power. However, little has yet been written about what a structural conception of domination might mean for emancipatory politics. This article argues that if domination is rooted in social structures (e.g., laws, property relations, institutions), then it can only be eliminated by the transformation or abolition of such structures. For this to happen, agents advantaged by prevailing structures—i.e., dominators—will often have to be brought under a form of power that lays beyond their control and is indifferent to their interests. Defeating domination therefore seems to require the embrace of dominating power. I call this dilemma the double bind of emancipation.
To develop the notion of the double bind of emancipation, and to begin to think constructively about how it might be addressed, I turn to debates regarding land confiscation during the Reconstruction era in the United States (1865-1877). The social dominance of the antebellum planter class had an important structural basis, rooted above all in land ownership. Even after slavery’s end, control of land enabled planters to continue to wield dominating power over persons they formerly enslaved. In response, Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens proposed land confiscation and redistribution as an emancipatory form of counter-domination. Confiscation would simultaneously destroy the material bases of planter power and grant formerly enslaved people economic independence. However, it would also entail subjecting planters to a form of state imperium that could be—and, at the time, was—plausibly described as dominating.
Drawing on Stevens’s thought, I argue that the double bind can be addressed if emancipatory politics is guided by a social theoretic account of domination’s structural predicates. Emancipation from structural domination requires identifying and eliminating the conditions that reproduce domination over time. This may entail temporarily abridging the status quo freedoms of dominators. Such is the cost of counter-domination. But there may yet be good reason to judge this cost bearable—above all, because the status quo itself is not cost-free. The choice faced during Reconstruction was not between a non-dominating status quo of constitutional responsibility and a highly risky, if potentially rewarding, strategy of revolutionary rupture. It was between a deeply dominating status quo and an emancipated future that could only be achieved through the episodic embrace of uncontrolled—i.e., dominating—state power. In such a situation, there is no royal road to freedom.
About the Author: Michael Gorup is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New College of Florida. Their research “Abolishing structural domination: US Reconstruction and the double bind of emancipation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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