The Infant Imaginary

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. By Gillian Brown. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. 237 pages. $49.95 (cloth) The poignancy of Henry James's short novel, What Maisie Knew, lies in the ascription of liberal agency and powers of consent to a child: the young Maisie is repeatedly asked to choose between her divorced parents despite her circumscribed understanding of their adult lives and relationships. The limits of liberal consent thus appear, in James's book, to be succinctly embodied in the dependent figure of the child. 1 More broadly, James's novel points to a question that has long troubled concepts of consent: what kind of (informed, rational) subject must be presupposed for consent to function as the expression of unfettered individual choice and agency? In her book, The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture, Gillian Brown reverses the formula of James's novel, finding in the figure of the child the basis of consent theory rather than its limit case. As such, Brown offers a profound and challenging revision both of the concept of consent and of the Lockean liberal subject. Brown begins her book by considering John Locke's "remarkable--and oddly unremarked--alignment of consent with childhood, which thereby links consent with frailty and contingency"(10). How is it possible to envision consent occurring in situations of dependence, constraint, and lack of resources? For Brown, consent--or more [End Page 149] importantly the consenting subject--never operates in conditions of total autonomy, even as an adult. Rather than critiquing consent in general on this account (as many critics have before her), Brown redescribes consent in relation to constraint: "Consent in a liberal society such as the United States is the subjection that we acknowledge to our circumstances when we are not rebelling from or objecting to them. If consent marks our subjection, it nevertheless accents this subjection as a chosen state, or more precisely, as a state we can alter" (20). Such an account of consent, in its emphasis on subjection, seems strangely akin to Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation, or even a Foucauldian disciplinary model of the subject, rather than to more familiar descriptions of liberalism. Within Althusser's model, for instance, individuals become subjects at the moment they allow themselves to be recognized by forms of social hailing; once hailed, the subject consents to a set of constraints but also constitutes him or herself as a recognized social being. Agency is thus at once established and compromised in Althusser's moment of subjectification. Brown's description of consent is similar, then, insofar as she imagines individuals to be constrained by social contexts rather than able to act autonomously at every moment. Yet rather than resorting to Foucault or Althusser, Brown turns to Locke--albeit an unfamiliar Locke--to advance her claims concerning consent and subjection. While autonomy--the freedom to direct the self without constraint--has long been accounted the defining characteristic of the Lockean liberal subject, Brown makes it clear that she does not subscribe to this received wisdom. Rather, she explicitly takes to task critics who have seen the Lockean subject as ahistorical, disembodied, and unconstrained by social context and argues that such a view "completely misunderstands and misrepresents Locke" (185). The Lockean subject, according to Brown, is better characterized by the "continuous labor of crediting and discrediting ideas"(8): this labor bespeaks a constant engagement with historical circumstances. As such, the liberty of the liberal subject is determined less by any immunity to historical circumstances than by a thoughtful and, perhaps more importantly, judgmental engagement with them. Judgmental engagement is necessary to determine, at every minute, our consent to (or rebellion against) our present circumstances. Following Hannah Pitkin, then, Brown views political consent ("the consent of the governed" of the book's title) less as a foundational act occurring at [End Page 150] some

Agency (philosophy · Ascription · Autonomy · Citizenship · Epistemology · Informed consent · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Medicine · Philosophy

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