“Perplexities of State”: Melville, Democracy, Regulation

Abstract Israel Potter, Melville’s 1854 sardonic account of the Revolutionary War, has been interpreted as a shaggy counter-history of the national plot, an inquiry into the beginnings of a transnational democracy caught between a callous global capitalism and the cosmopolitan dream of a universal brotherhood, or the tale of a non-citizen or unwanted migrant, victim of the blind violence of state apparatuses. Melville’s story of poor Israel’s adventures from wall-builder to bricklayer is no doubt a satirical, bitter critique of the democratic dream in the age of the construction of empires. Reconsidering Israel Potter from the perspective of new developments in critical state studies and in the larger context of Melville’s oeuvre, however, this chapter complicates our reading of Melville’s relation to statecraft. Melville’s critique, it argues, is that of the irresponsibility of the state: of the failure of government to secure the conditions of possibility of a democratic public power.