Order Out of the Mud: Deadwood and the State of Nature
Deadwood is a show about how order arises out of the mud. That’s what you see in the opening credits, and that’s what you see as the story moves forward: men coming together out of the most limited motives to create something larger than themselves. Order is provisional and mysterious. It requires a temporary suspension of immediate concerns in the interest of an agreed-upon fiction about a better tomorrow.
--David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills
You cannot do political philosophy on television.
--Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The Western, with its setting on the frontier between civilization and barbarism, has, throughout its history, provided a vehicle for exploring a fundamental American problem—the difficult choice between freedom and law. Do we want to live free of the shackles of the law, even at the risk of society descending into anarchy and violence—everything we fear when we speak of “lawlessness”? Or, are we willing to give up our freedom so that law and order will prevail in society, under the aegis of a strong government? The abstract dilemma of freedom versus law is concretely embodied in many of the standard Western plots, which typically pit a lone individual against the combined forces of society. Some Westerns celebrate the rugged individualism of the gunfighter and his freedom to chart his own course. Others show how problematic the free-ranging and free-wheeling outlaw can become and champion imposing law and order on the frontier community. Sometimes, as we saw in The Searchers, a Western presents the tension between the individual and the community as tragic. Sometimes, as we saw in Have Gun-Will Travel, a Western offers a single strong man as the only way of imposing order on a community incapable of governing itself properly. One reason that the Western has played a central role in American popular culture is that it takes us straight to the heart of the great American experiment—to found a nation on the basis of the principle of the freedom of the individual. American democracy rests on the hope that there is a way out of the freedom/law dilemma, that freedom and order might be made compatible under the rule of law.
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau
The Western thus in effect investigates a fundamental question of political philosophy, the issue of the state of nature (a state of freedom) and its relation to civil society (a state of law). We do not usually associate the Wild West with European political philosophy. Yet in his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke, one of the most important state of nature theorists, speaks of “the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America.”[1] In fact, he makes over a dozen references in this book to America, many of them specifically to Indians (if not cowboys), even going so far as to claim: “In the beginning all the world was America.”[2] Locke is carrying on a debate with the first modern state of nature thinker, Thomas Hobbes, who, in his Leviathan, also speaks of “the savage people in many places of America.”[3] The third most famous figure in the state of nature debate, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tells “the story of a chief of some North Americans” in his Second Discourse.[4] Evidently America was very much on the mind of the European thinkers who contemplated the issue of the state of nature.
These inquiries into the state of nature attempted to conceptualize the pre-political existence of humanity, life without codified laws, public officials, or other manifestations of government power. Imagining human life without political institutions offers a way of analyzing the need for and value of such contrivances. One can truly say: “Tell me a philosopher’s evaluation of the state of nature, and I will tell you his evaluation of the nation-state.” In Leviathan, Hobbes presents such a horrific portrait of the state of nature as a war of all against all that he ends up endorsing any form of government, no matter how absolute, as better than none. Hobbes prefers law over freedom. By contrast, in creating an attractive portrait of the state of nature as idyllic, peaceful, and noncompetitive, Rousseau in his Second Discourse raises serious doubts about the legitimacy of civil society as an alternative, especially given its economic, social, and political inequalities. Rousseau prefers freedom over law.[5] In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke crafts an image of the state of nature roughly midway between the extremes of Hobbes and Rousseau—less warlike than in Hobbes but more competitive and conflicted than in Rousseau. As a result, Locke’s version of the state of nature allows him to legitimate political authority while still reserving the right to criticize the specific forms it takes. Locke hopes to combine freedom with law, offering a law-abiding state as the guarantor of the freedom of its citizens.
If the existence of America influenced state of nature thinking in Europe, the writings of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau in turn influenced the political development of America. All three philosophers have had an impact on American political thinking, specifically that of the Founding Fathers. Locke is generally credited with being the chief theorist behind the principles embodied in the United States Constitution, such as the separation of powers.[6] Accordingly, it is not surprising that American popular culture has sometimes shown the influence of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, especially in the Western.[7] This influence, whether direct or indirect, is particularly evident in the HBO television series Deadwood (2004-2006), created by writer-producer David Milch.[8] Widely recognized as one of the most sophisticated and artistic shows in the history of television, Deadwood is thoughtful, intelligent, and as close to philosophical as popular culture ever gets.[9] In interviews, DVD commentaries, and his book about the series, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, Milch has been unusually forthright and forthcoming in discussing the show. As a result, we have a rare opportunity—to study the philosophical underpinnings and implications of a television show as explicitly formulated by its creator.[10] At the same time, analyzing Deadwood helps clarify the issues at stake in the debate among Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau about the state of nature.
Milch was attracted to the story of Deadwood, a mining camp in the late 1870s in what is now South Dakota, by a unique set of circumstances. In 1875, rumors began to spread of gold finds on Indian land in the Black Hills. Because of the U.S. government’s treaty with the Sioux, this land belonged to them and was outside federal jurisdiction (as for the state of South Dakota, it did not even exist at the time). Thus the people who poured into the Deadwood camp in search of gold and other ways to make their fortune were there illegally to begin with, and were not subject to any government authority, municipal, state, or federal. Almost the first words we hear in the first episode of the series come from a jailed criminal in Montana saying wistfully: “No law at all in Deadwood?”[11]
The situation in Deadwood thus allowed Milch to explore a subject that came to fascinate him during years of working on television police dramas such as Hill Street Blues (1981-87) and NYPD Blue (1993-2005)—the potential disjunction between law and order:
A misapprehension that can distort one’s understanding of Deadwood—and the world in which we live today—arises from the way that law and order are commonly conjoined. The phrase “law and order” can easily create the impression that these two very different social phenomena arise from a common human impulse, or that they are somehow one and the same. Law and order are not the same. It is common for us to try to retrospectively apply the sanction of law to the things we do to maintain order. Our desire for order comes first, and law comes afterward.[12]
In short, what intrigued Milch about Deadwood is the way a motley group of human beings, pursuing—sometimes viciously—their own self-interest could--in the absence of any legal institutions or established government--nevertheless manage to organize themselves into a community and pursue some form of common good. One of the actors in the series, W. Earle Brown, perhaps formulates most clearly its central question: “The whole show is about the need for community, and in that community that’s built in complete chaos, how does order form, how does law form?”[13] Or to formulate the issue another way: Can human beings spontaneously arrive at rules that make possible and facilitate their productive social interaction, or are they dependent on the central authority of the state to create and enforce law and only thereby to make life in society feasible?
Thus the way Milch creates in Deadwood “an environment where,” in his words, “there was order and no law whatsoever,” allows him to raise the same question that is at the heart of state of nature thinking: how does the pre-political existence of humanity define the parameters of political life?[14] If there can be order without law--if human beings can find ways of organizing their social life safely and productively in the absence of the state--then the state cannot claim to be the sole source of human order and must respect the independently evolved order of society. In short, the idea of order without law sets limits on state authority, and creates room for freedom. On the other hand, if there can be no order without law, then the state, as the sole source of social order, can lay claim to unlimited authority and absolute power, leaving freedom in jeopardy.[15]
Al Swearengen: Nasty, British, and Short
The latter alternative is the core of Hobbes’s state of nature teaching and his doctrine of absolute sovereignty. Hobbes espouses the position Milch rejects. He identifies law and order, arguing that all social order, all lawfulness in society, is ultimately the result of positive law, law made and maintained by the state. To be sure, Hobbes talks about “natural law” and the “laws of nature,” devoting chapters XIV and XV of Leviathan to the subject, and thus seems to allow for some kind of pre-political social order. But “natural law” quickly turns out to be a fiction in Hobbes’s account:
For the Laws of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy. . .) of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. Therefore notwithstanding the Laws of Nature, . . . if there be no Power erected, or not great enough for our security; every man will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art, for caution against all other men.[16]
In short, in Hobbes, natural law is revealed to be unnatural (“contrary to our naturall Passions”) and wholly ineffectual on its own. In his view, only by creating the Leviathan State are human beings able to achieve any kind of reliable social order, and for Hobbes an unreliable order is no order at all. Hobbes’s blanket endorsement of a centralized political authority, and his basic indifference to the distinctions among the different forms authority might take, are exactly the results Milch is trying to avoid when he insists that order is separable from law and pre-exists it.[17]
Thus we need to resist the strong temptation to describe the vision of Deadwood as simply Hobbesian, even though several commentators have evoked just that adjective.[18] To be sure, Deadwood is filled with violence, and one aspect that sets it apart from most television series is the fact that from its very first episode, it conditions us to believe that any character might be suddenly killed at any moment. Under these circumstances, it seems at first apt to apply to the show the words with which Hobbes famously describes the state of nature—as a state of “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”[19] People who frequent the Gem Saloon, owned by the local boss, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), may indeed find that life in Deadwood is “nasty, brutish, and short,” but, aside from the obvious fact that the camp is far from poor, Milch’s most basic point in the series is that human life is not solitary, but takes communal forms even in the absence of the state and in the midst of bitterly divisive economic and social forces. As Milch says, “there’s an inevitability in our natures which draws us to some form of organization.”[20] Milch rejects Hobbes’s vision of the state of nature as solitary because he realizes that if community is not in some sense natural to human beings, then they will be hopelessly subject to the dictates of the Leviathan State, the artificial construct created to correct the defects of the state of nature.[21]
Nevertheless, despite Milch’s fundamental difference from Hobbes, life in Deadwood shares many characteristics with the state of nature portrayed in Leviathan. Milch may want to show that community is natural to human beings, but he does not wish to portray it as coming easily to them. In his view, human beings must struggle to achieve community, and must overcome many potential sources of conflict to do so. On the sources of that conflict, Milch and Hobbes are in remarkable agreement. Hobbes identifies three forces that lead to the war of all against all in the state of nature: “So that in the nature of men, we find three principall causes of quarrell. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory. The first, maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation.”[22] The same array of forces is at work in Milch’s Deadwood. Hobbes writes: “if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.”[23] That is exactly what happens in Deadwood. The characters fight, often to the death, over women, as well as gold, land, and other forms of wealth and property. In addition, both Hobbes and Milch see murderous violence arising from the radical insecurity of living without a clear government authority in place. Because any man may be attacked by any other at any time, he must forestall his potential enemies and attack them first.
Life in Deadwood continually follows this model of the pre-emptive strike. In season 1, episode 2, contrary to the traditional image of the honorable gunfighter, Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) draws first and shoots a man who has not yet reached for his gun, merely because he senses—correctly as it happens—that the man meant to kill him. Many of the episodes turn on the issue of whether to neutralize an enemy by killing him before he can kill you. This issue reaches its apex on the communal level in the third season, when the “native” citizens of Deadwood, under Swearengen’s leadership, must decide how to respond to the appearance in town of the mining magnate George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), who draws upon his great wealth to build up a private army of Pinkerton agents, which he increasingly employs to impose his will on the camp. All of Al’s instincts tell him to strike first against Hearst and his army. Swearengen begs a meeting of Deadwood’s elders to tell him why he should not undertake a pre-emptive strike while he still has a chance of defeating Hearst’s continually strengthening forces.
We can readily understand why these men fight over the same desired object or to defend themselves or to protect their family and property. But the violence in Deadwood becomes so widespread because it often seems irrational and unmotivated—men fighting, it seems, merely for the sake of fighting. But here, like Hobbes, Milch uncovers the deepest source of instability in any community: masculine pride and aggressiveness. Milch portrays Deadwood as a community of alpha males, who are constantly fighting to establish their individual dominance, to maintain a pecking order in the town. Hobbes explains this situation with his typical clear-sightedness: “For every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate he sets upon himselfe: And upon all signes of contempt, or undervaluing, naturally endeavours, as far as he dares (which amongst them that have no common power, to keep them in quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other,) to extort a greater value from his contemners.”[24]
Here Hobbes explains for us the fight between Swearengen and the ex-lawman and businessman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) that begins the second season of Deadwood, as well as the violent struggles between Hearst and a host of other characters in the series. This violence always seems disproportionate to its ostensible and proximate cause in some minor incident. As Hobbes puts it, men “use Violence. . . for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other signe of undervalue, either direct in their Person, or by reflexion in their Kindred, their Friends, their Nation, their Profession, or their Name.”[25] Because of all these sources of sensitivity, Deadwood is a powder keg of violence. Given the underlying struggle for domination in the town, the slightest incident may trigger an outbreak of murderous violence. The most powerful image of this situation is the titanic battle in the third season between Swearengen’s henchman, Dan Dority (W. Earle Brown), and Hearst’s bodyguard, Captain Turner (Alan Graf), which ostensibly takes place because Dority spoke disrespectfully to Hearst. Dority and Turner fight to the death not only for their own prestige and honor but also as the representatives of their masters’ power struggle to rule the camp.[26]
“I’ll Settle for Property Rights”
The extent of the agreement between Milch and Hobbes on the sources of violence among human beings only highlights their more fundamental difference. For Hobbes, only the institution of the Leviathan State can end the cycle of violence in the state of nature. By contrast, Deadwood shows that, even in the absence of government, human beings have motives for and means of limiting their violence on their own, which is another way of stating Milch’s principle that order is possible without law. Here is where Milch displays his greater affinity with Locke, who, unlike Hobbes, conceives of forms of order in the state of nature. The crux of the difference between Hobbes and Locke can be seen in the issue of property.[27] For Hobbes, there is no property in the state of nature: “Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. . . It is consequent also to the same condition, there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine or Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans [sic] that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it.”[28] It is entirely characteristic of Hobbes that he views the right to property as created only by the state. If the state creates the right to property, then it can take that right away at will—a key example of what Hobbes means by the state’s absolute sovereignty.[29]
By contrast, Locke argues that the right to property exists in the state of nature and thus pre-exists the state, or any communal action: “I shall endeavour to show how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the commoners.”[30] For Locke, rather than the state being the origin of property, property becomes in effect the origin of the state: “The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.”[31] Since, in Locke’s account, the right to property exists prior to the state, he sets limits on its treatment of private property. If the express end of government is to protect the right to property, it cannot legitimately seize property at will. Locke’s vision of limited government as opposed to Hobbes’s absolute sovereignty follows from his argument that the right to private property exists prior to the nation-state:
But though men when they enter into society give up the equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of nature into the hands of the society, . . . yet it being only with an intention in every one the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property—for no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse—the power of society. . . can never be supposed to extend farther than the common good, but is obliged to secure every one’s property by providing against those . . . defects … that made the state of nature so unsafe and uneasy.[32]
In contrast to Hobbes, then, Locke offers an example of what Milch means by order without law. Although Locke eventually concedes that the state is necessary to secure property rights, he insists that they can develop in society without the intervention of the state. This may seem like a trivial distinction—both Hobbes and Locke view the state as ultimately necessary—but, if one looks at the conclusions they draw from their contrasting understanding of property, the difference is very important. Locke’s conception of the state of nature as allowing for property rights gives him a basis for evaluating different forms of government and championing those that secure property rights as opposed to those that violate them with impunity.
Locke’s argument for a right to private property prior to the formation of the state grows out of his theory of self-ownership:
Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. . . . The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men.[33]
Locke’s argument applies particularly to land as property. He maintains that the value of land does not reside solely in the land itself, but, more importantly, in what is done with it. If someone fences in and cultivates a piece of land, he thereby increases its productivity and adds to its value, and that in turn entitles him to its use and makes it his own. As Locke puts it: “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.”[34]
The key to Locke’s defense of property rights is that he does not view the dividing up of the world into private property as a zero-sum game. It may seem that by making a piece of land his own, a man is depriving the rest of humanity of something valuable. But Locke stresses the way an owner improves a piece of land by laboring on it and thereby increases the general stock of humanity. He even offers a mathematical demonstration of his point:
He who appropriates land to himself by his labour does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind; for the provisions serving to the support of human life produced by one acre of enclosed and cultivated land are—to speak much within compass—ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common. And therefore he that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres than he could have from a hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind; for his labour now supplies him with provisions out of ten acres which were by the product of a hundred lying in common.[35]
Here is the magic of private property for Locke: if ten acres of cultivated land are more productive than one hundred acres of uncultivated, then a farmer who appropriates ten acres of land to himself will nevertheless effectively provide his fellow human beings with the benefit of at least an additional ninety acres of land.[36] Hobbes conceives of the state of nature as a zero-sum game, a realm of scarcity in which people have to struggle over severely limited goods. Locke, by contrast, offers the increased productivity of land once it is in private hands as a way of generating a new abundance in the state of nature that works to everybody’s benefit and creates a common interest in having land owned privately.
Locke and the Old Homestead
We can now see the root of the difference between Locke and Hobbes. Locke can imagine an economic order independent of the political order. Economic logic can dictate as complicated a social development as the dividing up of the world into private property, even in the absence of a government to enforce the results. Locke’s argument for the priority of economic order over political is the most important example of what Milch means by order without law, and perhaps a clearer way of formulating the idea. In Hobbes’s view, human beings left to themselves will simply start killing each other, and only the Leviathan State can stop them.[37] In Locke’s more optimistic view, human beings left to themselves will set to work cultivating their gardens (the killing starts much later). Locke makes his difference from Hobbes explicit: “And here we have the plain difference between the state of nature and the state of war which, however some men have confounded, are as far distinct as a state of peace, good-will, mutual assistance, and preservation, and a state of enmity, malice, violence, and mutual destruction are one from another.”[38]
Milch displays his affinity with Locke on the priority of economic over political order in a pointed exchange between his two heroes in season 1, episode 4. Wild Bill Hickok has a vision of the future of Deadwood: “Camp looks like a good bet. . . . They’ll get the Sioux making peace. Pretty quick you’ll have laws here and every other thing.” In Milch’s terms, Hickok makes the mistake of viewing law as the prerequisite of all social order. Seth Bullock replies to Hickok’s political vision with a more basic economic consideration: “I’ll settle for property rights.” In the process of laboring on a house for his family, and thus building for the future, Bullock realizes the importance of the economic foundations of society. He is not interested in grand political visions; he wants his economic circumstances clarified and determined before he will worry about political issues, and he believes that Deadwood can find ways to settle property disputes on its own.
The emphasis on property rights is the most Lockean aspect of Deadwood and comes naturally to a show dealing with a gold rush, a situation in which the fundamental issue for most people is staking out claims to mining territory.[39] Milch shows that even in the absence of conventional legal institutions, Deadwood is able to evolve ways of establishing and arbitrating property rights, or, as he puts it, “institutions can organically develop.”[40] We learn in the first episode that a land deal in Deadwood is ratified by spitting in one’s palm and shaking hands with the other party. Precisely because legal methods of enforcing contracts are unavailable in Deadwood, its citizens take the customs they have evolved for making deals very seriously.[41] For all the force and fraud that interfere with honest commerce in Deadwood, a basically functioning economic community still prevails, in which people can roughly rely on each other’s word—or handshake—in a business deal. With no legal authorities to fall back upon, the citizens of Deadwood are very careful about such matters as evaluating gold strikes and assaying gold itself. Since no business can take place in an environment of complete hostility and distrust, it is to everyone’s advantage to observe at least a minimum of civility and probity in their dealings with each other. George Hearst is usually gruff and insensitive in his treatment of other people, but he tries to be ingratiating in his business deals, working to cover over his hostility when he concludes the purchase of the mine of Alma Garrett Ellsworth (Molly Parker): “Advancing your interest, Mrs. Ellsworth, mine, and all others, what we do here seems natural and proper” (3, 12). “Common economic interest” is about as close as we get to a definition of natural law in Deadwood, a definition very much in the spirit of Locke.
Deadwood even operates with a Lockean definition of property. The premise of the series is that a mining claim is yours as long as you actively work it.[42] When Claggett (Marshall Bell), a representative of the territorial government, arrives in the camp, he makes this policy official: “The territory respects the statutes of the Northwest Ordinance, which state that a citizen can have title to any land unclaimed or unincorporated by simple usage. Essentially if you’re on it and improve it, you own it” (1, 9). This passage is so close to Locke’s analysis of property that it sounds as if he deserves a writing credit for Deadwood. Actually, this scene is evidence of Locke’s profound influence on the development of American political institutions. The Northwest Ordinance did, in fact, establish this principle of land ownership precisely because the governing powers in Washington DC were thoroughly familiar with Locke and his arguments for private property.[43] Even if Milch was not familiar with Locke’s writings on the subject, his thorough knowledge of American history led him in a Lockean direction in his treatment of the issue of property in Deadwood.
Commerce Tames the Alpha Male
The Lockean understanding of property in Deadwood points to a larger Lockean spirit in its economic and political understanding of the American West. The show reflects Locke’s hope that economics might trump politics, that the peaceful and cooperative spirit of commerce might triumph over the warlike and divisive impulses of political life. As we will see, David Milch is no friend of capitalism in the form of big business, and cannot be described as a champion of the free market. Nevertheless, for someone who is deeply suspicious of businesspeople, he is surprisingly open to arguments for the positive effects of commerce on human relations. In Deadwood commerce is the chief force that works to produce order without law. Above all, it seems to be the only force that can get the alpha males to set aside their differences, give up their fighting to the death, and work together for their mutual benefit.
The way in which economic logic can dictate social peace is most clearly evident in the career of Al Swearengen. In the incredible rogues’ gallery Milch created, Swearengen is the greatest rogue of all, and the most fascinating and complex character in the series.[44] As the owner of the Gem Saloon, he hardly seems to be a model citizen. He is involved in crooked gambling and prostitution, and we quickly learn that he is also guilty of shady land deals and runs a gang of highway robbers. He is responsible for a whole string of murders in the opening episodes. He has a hot temper and is brutal in his treatment of women and his subordinates. A perfect example of an alpha male, he seeks to dominate all around him and regards himself as the unofficial ruler of Deadwood. In short, in the early episodes he shows every sign of being the chief villain in the series and the most destructive force in the community.
Yet in the course of the series, Swearengen emerges as the chief architect of order without law in Deadwood. Of all the many alpha males in town, he is the most rational and the most able to control his emotions, especially his anger. He realizes when economic necessities demand that he restrain his violent impulses and work for peace. When the threat develops of Deadwood being annexed to the Dakota territory, thus becoming subject to the rule of outside forces, it is Al who organizes the influential citizens of the camp to respond to developments. One day he announces to the elders of the camp: “Be in my joint in two hours---we’re forming a fuckin’ government” (1, 9). He is constantly working to get the other powerful males in town to recognize their mutual self-interest and unite against their common enemies from outside the camp.
In the first season of Deadwood, one might well think that Milch was setting up a simple contrast between Al Swearengen as villain and Seth Bullock as hero. But the intellectual complexity of the series is evident in the way that Swearengen, the criminal, turns out to be a force for order in the community, while Bullock, the lawman, turns out to be a force for disorder. Although Bullock is genuinely good-hearted and well intentioned, he cannot control his emotions, especially his anger and his pride. Bullock is as much of an alpha male as Swearengen, and, as we have seen, their rivalry comes to a head in a brutal fight at the beginning of the second season. But it is Swearengen who realizes that they need to work together against the outside forces threatening the camp. He swallows his pride in order to make the conciliatory gesture of returning Bullock’s guns to him and thereby to solidify an alliance with a man he initially distrusted and despised (Swearengen even backs Bullock for sheriff of Deadwood). Swearengen continually struggles to calm Bullock’s hot temper and to get him to act rationally in the complicated circumstances in which they find themselves. In the third season, Swearengen is willing to take calmly a terrible insult from Hearst (he chops off one of Al’s fingers), whereas Bullock, provoked by mere words, hauls Hearst off to jail by the ear, thereby threatening to ruin Swearengen’s delicate negotiations with Hearst. Bullock has to learn to trust Swearengen. Silas Adams (Titus Welliver), one of Swearengen’s henchmen, sums up the paradox of his character: “When he ain’t lyin’, Al’s the most honorable man you’ll ever meet” (3, 12).[45] In the figure of Swearengen, Milch seems to be suggesting that one does not need high-minded, public-spirited motives to become a pillar of the community.
In line with Locke, then, and in contrast to Hobbes, Milch portrays how human beings, following their economic interests, can find ways to control their anger and their pride—and thus their violent impulses—and achieve forms of social order even in the absence of the state. They quickly reach the point where they themselves realize that killing each other is simply bad for business. This idea is further illustrated in the series in the role of Sol Starr (John Hawkes), Bullock’s partner in a hardware store in Deadwood. Unlike Bullock, who is a lawman at heart, Starr is born and bred a merchant. He is always quoting his Viennese father spouting maxims such as “you reduce costs buying in volume” (2, 3). Because he thinks predominantly in economic terms, Starr becomes one of the chief peacemakers in Deadwood. In the opening episodes, he labors mightily to mediate between an angry Bullock and a suspicious Swearengen. What ought to be a simple economic transaction—Bullock and Starr wish to buy land for their hardware store from Swearengen—threatens to erupt into a Hobbesian battle until Starr gets both Bullock and Swearengen to calm down and settle their differences. Generally good things happen in Deadwood when cooler economic minds prevail over the hot-temper of the aggressive males in the camp.[46] The hardware store represents the contribution commerce has to make to the Deadwood community. As Starr advertises his wares: “These are quality items. They meet these folks’ needs. They’re being offered at fair mark up” (1, 1). Without presenting Milch as the Milton Friedman of the Western, one may note many instances in Deadwood of the market being portrayed as a positive force in the community. When a rival bordello opens in town, and Swearengen raises the prospect of colluding to set rates, the new madam, Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), tells him: “As far as pussy, Al, we’ll want to let the market sort itself out” (2, 3). In the second season, Hearst’s geologist and advanceman, Francis Wolcott (Garrett Dillahunt), proclaims: “it’s always preferable to allow the market to operate unimpeded” (2, 4).
To be sure, Wolcott turns out to be the creepiest villain in the series, and Milch presents the business policies he pursues on Hearst’s behalf in an extremely negative light. But these policies could justifiably be described as the very opposite of the way a free market operates. Hearst is trying to buy up mining claims in an effort to create a monopoly, and doing so, not by straightforward market means, but instead by using force, fraud, and political influence. Hearst represents the intrusion of outside forces, on a national scale, into the local marketplace of Deadwood. Here we see Milch’s distrust of large-scale business allied with the state, as opposed to the small-scale independent entrepreneurship he generally admires. And when Hearst learns of the gruesome way in which Wolcott has murdered several prostitutes, he fires him and drives him to suicide—not because of any moral outrage, but simply because Wolcott’s behavior is bad for business. Many of the best outcomes in Deadwood happen for the “wrong” reasons—that is, not out of moral idealism but out of the apparently crudest material motives. Milch views this seeming paradox as characteristic of America, and a cause for celebration, not condemnation. He wants us to be clear-eyed about America and to recognize how its vices are bound up with its virtues:
None of us want to realize that we live in Deadwood, but all of us do. . . . After first recoiling in horror, we come to love the place where we live, in all of its contradictions. . . . American materialism, in all of its crassness and extravagance, is simply an expression of the fact that we have organized ourselves according to a more energizing principle than any civilization that came before us.[47]
From what we see in Deadwood, that “energizing principle” is the market economy. The best example of order without law is the free market.
The Gold Standard
Milch’s grudging respect for the material motives of humanity is reflected in his distinctive treatment of the motif of gold in Deadwood. Generally in American popular culture, money is viewed as the root of all evil, and the gold rush serves as an archetype of greed at its worst (think of Charlie Chaplin’s great 1925 silent film on the subject). At times, gold may seem to be the central villain of Deadwood. Many men and women die as a result of their quest for it, or ruin their lives and destroy their families in the process. Yet in trying to give a fuller picture of the human condition, Milch insists on the way that gold can function as an agent of civilization. He is well aware from his study of American history that the West would never have been settled or developed as rapidly as it was without a series of gold rushes, from California to Alaska. Gold becomes the central symbol in Deadwood of order without law:
The initial transactions of gold for drink or gold for sex give rise to a more complex social order that is traced in the development of Deadwood. Everyone in town takes up a position in a social order that is based on the premise that gold has value. . . . The agreement to believe in a common symbol of value is really a society trying to find a way to organize itself in some way other than, say, hunting or killing. . . . Agreeing on this single symbol of value has allowed us to organize our individual energies on a wider scale. If we’ve got to barter wheat for barley and barley for shoelaces, everybody is going to fight, “I worked seven months on these shoelaces and you’re going to give me one sheaf of wheat!”[48]
The evolution of gold as a medium of exchange is a prime example of the self-organizing power of society and its remarkable ability to replace violent confrontation with cooperative and mutually beneficial transactions.
In a particularly interesting plot twist, Milch shows how gold can work to solve the bitter problem of prejudice in society, a problem of which he has been acutely aware in all his television series. The community of Deadwood is saturated with prejudices of the most noxious and virulent kind—against Indians, Jews, blacks, the Chinese, women, and many other categories. Milch clearly deplores this aspect of human behavior. He shows that economic self-interest is one of the few forces in human nature that is powerful enough to overcome prejudice.[49] The people of Deadwood, as anti-Semitic as they are, accept Sol Starr, a Jew, once they realize that he is good for the economy of the town. Hearst’s monomaniacal obsession with gold makes him a kind of monster, indifferent to the most basic human concerns, but, on the bright side, it also makes him indifferent to the color line. He employs a black cook and forces the classiest hotel in Deadwood to let her live on the premises. He is willing to deal with her son and violate all social taboos by having a private dinner with him, only because gold is at stake between them. Milch articulates the ambivalent nature of our desire for gold:
Yet the process of abstraction that Hearst embodies, which is symbolized in gold, is also at the very heart of what makes us human. It’s the best in us, as well as the worst, and it is often both at the same time. . . . Hearst sees the power of gold. . . in the way [it] can eliminate the stickier aspects of our human particularity. That’s why Hearst can befriend Odell, the son of his black chef, Aunt Lou. Odell has discovered gold in Liberia. For Hearst, the agreed-upon value of gold is the root of all civilized behavior. It mandates a calculus of utility that trumps even the most deep-seated prejudice.[50]
It is remarkable to hear a television writer describe gold as “the root of all civilized behavior,” not of all evil. In the actual episode, Milch develops the point at length in a dialogue between Hearst and Odell (Omar Gooding): “Before the color [gold], no white man. . . no man of any hue, moved to civilize or improve a place like this, had reason to make the effort. The color brought commerce here and such order as has been attained.”[51] In the spirit of Locke rather than Hobbes, Hearst sees commerce, not the Leviathan State, as bringing order to human society:
Hearst. But for that gold, you’d never have sat at my table. And for the effrontery in your rising up, except that you’d showed me the gold, I’d’ve shot or seen you hanged without a second thought. The value I gave the gold restrained me, you see, your utility in connection with it. . . . Gold confers power, and that power is transferable. Power comes to any man who has the color.
Odell. Even if he is black.
Hearst. That is our species’ hope—that uniformly agreeing on its value, we organize to seek the color. (3, 7)
With all his failings as a human being, Hearst nevertheless gives the most eloquent expression of the great Lockean hope of Deadwood—that commerce might bring human beings together in peace by overcoming all the dark Hobbesian forces that set them at war with one another.
If human beings can develop a widely accepted medium of exchange out of their commercial transactions among themselves—a complex task of social coordination—then they can find other ways on their own of living together peacefully and productively. Gold provides an excellent example of “bottom up,” rather than “top down” order. It spontaneously evolved as a medium of exchange as a product of market forces, and is not the result of government action—in sharp contrast to any paper currency, which needs to be made legal tender by legislative fiat and thus is imposed on society from above.[52] Milch explicitly draws a connection between gold and the spirit of Lockean liberalism in Deadwood:
Yankton, the capital of Dakota territory, was a creation of the Indian agencies. It was the governmental bureaucracy, with all that that implies. When Deadwood came into being, it threw everything off. Provided with an abundant source of economic security of which any man could partake [gold], the Black Hills settlers and miners had returned to the traditional distrust of government and a renewal of pride and self-sufficiency, which the oligarchy in Yankton had never endorsed. Mining was a real industry as opposed to this sterile instrument of suppression, this paper fiction whose only real use was to steal from the Indians.[53]
As a student of American history, Milch seems to be aware that throughout the nineteenth century both government currency and treaties with the Indians were sometimes not worth the paper they were printed on. He thus views paper money as an instrument of government oppression and gold as a site of resistance to it. As such, gold is perhaps the best representative of spontaneous order and the independence of the economic order from the political.
Pre-political or Post-political?
As Lockean as Deadwood appears to be, his influence does not exhaust the relevance of state of nature thinking to the series, and Rousseau’s contrasting conception can add to our understanding of its philosophical dimensions. Rousseau would, in fact, call into question the claim that Deadwood offers any insight into the state of nature. Rousseau’s challenge to the show is evident in his criticism of the thinkers who preceded him in analyzing the state of nature, specifically Hobbes and Locke:
The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of going back to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it. Some have not hesitated to attribute to man in that state the notion of the just and unjust, without troubling themselves to show that he had to have that notion or even that it was useful to him. Others have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to preserve what belongs to him, without explaining what they meant by belong. . . . All of them, finally, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desires, and pride, have carried over to the state of nature ideas they had acquired in society: they spoke about savage man and they described civil man.[54]
Rousseau argues that previous philosophers were not radical enough in conceiving the state of nature. For example, Hobbes posits vanity and pride in his natural men; that is what drives them into the war of all against all. But, according to Rousseau, vanity and pride can arise only in the midst of civil society, where men can compare themselves with each other; these vices cannot arise in the isolated condition of natural men. Rousseau comes up with a vision of natural man stripped of all the characteristics he believes are acquired only in society, including speech and reason. The result is that, in civilized terms, Rousseau’s natural man is virtually subhuman, enjoying the peace and happiness of a grazing animal.
Rousseau’s version of the state of nature thus raises a serious intellectual difficulty about Deadwood. The townspeople may well be seeking a fresh start in Deadwood, but that means that they come to the camp with a great deal of baggage, intellectual as well as emotional.[55] This fact calls into question the idea that Deadwood is an accurate portrayal of a pre-political community. Although for the moment there may be no legally constituted authorities in the camp, its citizens operate with clear models of traditional political order. When they put Jack McCall (Garrett Dillahunt), the assassin of Wild Bill Hickok, on trial, they know ahead of time what a courtroom looks like—for example, that it requires a judge and a jury. They do not need to invent the institution from the ground up. When they start to organize as a community, they know that a municipality requires a mayor. Milch himself says of the meeting in Al’s saloon: “They start to act governmental.”[56] How could they act “governmental” if they had not already observed government in action?
Although the citizens of Deadwood may momentarily revel in the absence of law in the camp, from the very beginning they anticipate being reincorporated into the United States, and act accordingly. Already in the first episode, A. W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones), the editor/publisher of the local newspaper, says: “We will be restored to the bosom of the nation.” The characters in Deadwood are temporarily living outside the jurisdiction of any government, but they all have had the experience of living under political authority, they know what it entails, and they anticipate returning to that condition, with varying degrees of eagerness or reluctance. Rousseau would argue that the world of the law and the state is a shadowy presence throughout Deadwood, always hovering on the horizon as a either a memory or an anticipation, and in any case a guidepost. Washington DC is mentioned with surprising frequency in Deadwood for a town that is supposed to be without a nation-state.
The Rousseauian argument that Deadwood does not portray a truly pre-political community suggests an alternative way of understanding the series, one still compatible with Milch’s idea of order without law. Perhaps Milch’s Deadwood is best understood as a post-political community, one consisting of people who have for one reason or another deliberately fled the state and who seek precisely to live free of its stifling and inhibiting laws. They know full well what a state is and are quite familiar with its institutions, but—at least temporarily—they welcome the chance to operate without a government and see what they can achieve on their own. Their choice to live free of government becomes clear when some citizens in Deadwood imitate the state institutions they remember and start to re-impose regulations on the community. For example, after a fire breaks out in town, the people of Deadwood decide to create the office of fire marshal. With a typically bureaucratic sense of self-importance, Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) takes his new post very seriously and starts bossing the other people in town around. Faced with the imposition of fire regulations on his establishment, Tom Nuttall (Leon Rippy) balks: “That’s the kind of shit that ran me out of Wilkes-Barre” (1, 11).[57] In his protest against government meddling in his affairs, Nuttall speaks for the spirit of independence that created Deadwood in the first place.
From this perspective, the political treatise most relevant to Deadwood may well be James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. In a study focused on the hill peoples of Southeast Asia, Scott argues that ethnic groups usually offered as examples of true primitives—people living in a pre-civilized and pre-political state—are really refugees from centralized monarchies in the valleys, states that oppressed and exploited them, chiefly with high taxes and forced labor. As Scott sums up his argument:
In the valley imagination, all these characteristics are earlier stages in a process of social evolution at the apex of which elites perch. Hill peoples are an earlier stage: they are “pre-“ just about everything: pre-padi cultivation, pre-towns, prereligion, preliterate, pre-valley subject. As we have seen at some length, however, the characteristics for which the hill peoples are stigmatized are precisely those characteristics that a state-evading people would encourage and perfect in order to avoid surrendering autonomy. The valley imagination has its history wrong. Hill peoples are not pre-anything. In fact, they are better understood as post-irrigated rice, postsedentary, postsubject, and perhaps even postliterate. They represent, in the longue durée, a reactive and purposeful statelessness of people who have adapted to a world of states while remaining outside their firm grasp.[58]
In short, Scott argues that when we see a people living without a state, we should not automatically assume that they are at some primitive stage of development, as yet culturally incapable of forming a state. They may well have already experienced what it is to live under state control, rejected that regimented way of life, and sought an alternative, often by literally running for the hills.
At several points, Scott draws parallels between the region he is discussing and the frontier in the American West, and indeed Deadwood, set in the Black Hills, is a good example of the kind of hill community Scott has in mind. His description of the frontier of the Chinese empire fits Milch’s Deadwood perfectly: “a pandemonium of adventurers, bandits, speculators, armed traders, demobilized soldiers, poor migrants, exiles, corrupt officials, fugitives from the law, and refugees.”[59] Scott thus provides a new way of understanding the phenomenon Milch calls “order without law.” Scott documents in great detail how people who have experienced the worst aspects of state control can find ways to lead ordered lives without the rigid controls of government apparatus. In particular, Scott dwells as Milch does on the economic aspects of this non-governmental order. He emphasizes the role of commercial trade, especially the fact that hill peoples typically have access to resources greatly desired and/or needed by the valley states they border, valuable commodities they can use to gain leverage with their more powerful neighbors (and thus maintain their independence). The role of gold in Deadwood is an obvious example of this strategy.
Given the economic exchanges that typically occur between hill and valley, Scott points out that the boundary between stateless people and those living in states is extremely permeable and ever-changing. People will leave states when the tax burden and other government impositions become too great, but they may well return when conditions ease and the benefits of living under government again outweigh the costs. In conventional state of nature thinking, the social contract is a “once-and-for-all” proposition. Once people enter into a social contract, they supposedly leave the state of nature forever. Scott’s way of thinking suggests that the social contract is perpetually being negotiated and renegotiated. People break the social contract and slip out of the state when its burdens become too oppressive, but they will always consider returning when conditions become favorable again. In conventional state of nature thinking, the social contract may appear to be the hypothetical construct of the political theorist. But in his study of hill people, Scott suggests that the decision whether to live in a state is a genuine reality for human beings when they rationally weigh their alternatives. Scott’s account helps explain what might at first appear to be the peculiar relation of the characters of Deadwood to the state. Despite possessing good reasons for having effectively moved out from under governmental authority, they are constantly considering the possibility of being reincorporated into the United States, and carefully calculating the costs and benefits of doing so. The characters of Deadwood have the mobility, versatility, and adaptability that Scott claims is characteristic of hill peoples everywhere.
The idea of Deadwood as a post-political rather than a pre-political community provides an answer to Rousseau’s potential critique of Milch’s conception of order without law. As long as Milch concentrates on economic examples of order without law, he is on solid ground. Gold as a medium of exchange is an excellent case of a social ordering arrived at purely as a result of market forces, with no government intervention or legal postulation. When Milch shows underlying economic forces leading to social organization in Deadwood, it does not matter if the townspeople are following models derived from their prior existence in civil society (Sol Starr, for example, cites economic maxims originating in Old World Vienna). These models themselves evolved independently of government action and represent a perennial human possibility of society producing order out its own commercial transactions. One should not demand that the citizens of Deadwood go through the laborious process of rediscovering for themselves what makes gold superior as a medium of exchange (its independent value in alternate uses, its comparative rarity, its durability, its malleability, its transportability, its divisibility, and so on). All that matters is that, for Deadwood, gold, as it has for much of humanity, represents a medium of exchange people have arrived at on their own—not one imposed on them by a government and its legal tender laws. In the area of economics, Milch successfully shows that human beings are able to order their lives “naturally”—that is to say, spontaneously, without the intervention of government and laws.
Town with Pity
A Rousseauian critique of Deadwood for failing to provide insight into a pre-political condition may be countered with Scott’s notion of the post-political, but his Second Discourse can still provide insights into the series. One of Rousseau’s distinctive contributions to state of nature thinking is his claim that natural man is characterized by the trait of pity, a point he makes in explicit contrast to Hobbes:
There is, besides, another principle which Hobbes did not notice, and which—having been given to man in order to soften. . . the ferocity of his vanity, or the desire for self-preservation before the birth of vanity—tempers the ardor he has for his own well-being by an innate repugnance to see his fellow-man suffer. . . . I speak of pity, a disposition that is appropriate to beings as weak and subject to as many ills as we are; . . . and so natural that even beasts sometimes give perceptible signs of it. Without speaking of the tenderness of mothers for their young and of the perils they brave to guard them, one observes daily the repugnance of horses to trample a living body underfoot.[60]
Milch is Rousseauian in his insistence that pity, fellow feeling, is innate to humanity, and one of its most basic emotions. Compassion, particularly for the physical suffering of fellow human beings, is remarkably pervasive in Deadwood, especially for such a rough-and-tumble camp. What most surprises us in Al Swearengen as we learn more about him is that this brutal man actually has a tender side, often strangely conjoined with his cold-bloodedness. At the end of the first season, he carries out a mercy killing of the ailing Reverend Smith (Ray McKinnon), and at the end of the third, for what can only be described as sentimental reasons, he cannot bring himself to kill “Trixie the whore” (Paula Malcomson) on Hearst’s orders (although he is willing to kill another one of his prostitutes as a substitute).
The outbreak of smallpox in the first season is the first occasion for Deadwood to organize itself as a community.[61] The heroic actions to save lives on the part of Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif) and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) reflect the best side of humanity as Milch views it—a genuine concern for the welfare of other human beings. The specific contribution of women to life in Deadwood, especially toward the nurturing and educating of children, reflects a Rousseauian view of compassion as essential to human sociability. The events that truly bring the community of Deadwood together at the end of the second season—the funeral of Seth Bullock’s stepson William (Josh Eriksson) and the marriage of Alma Garrett and Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver)—also make a Rousseauian point about the importance of domestic sympathies to social life. As we saw in The Searchers, there is a long tradition in the Western of presenting women as the great civilizing force on the frontier, and Deadwood follows that pattern. The building of a new schoolhouse in the third season—an archetypal Western moment—is one of the central symbols of the growth of civilization in Deadwood.
“What Some People Think of as Progress”
The deepest way in which Rousseau is relevant to Deadwood is that, of the three principal state of nature thinkers, he has the gravest doubts about the value of civilization. Rousseau calls into question the triumphalism of the state of nature narratives in both Hobbes and Locke. They view the movement from the state of nature to the state of civil society as progress, a distinct improvement in the human condition. By contrast, Rousseau does not believe in the inevitability of the movement from the state of nature to civil society, and he is not at all convinced that this transition should be called “progress.” He insists that the movement out of the state of nature, far from being a necessary development, as Hobbes and Locke present it, resulted from a “chance combination of several foreign causes which might never have arisen and without which [man] would have remained eternally in his primitive condition.”[62] Moreover, Rousseau argues that even after humanity left the state of nature, its development might have stopped at a stage well short of the full-blown nation-state, and humanity would have been happier as a result.[63]
Human beings in Rousseau’s state of nature live in peaceful harmony, largely because they are scattered in the forests and hardly have anything to do with each other. There are no alpha males in Rousseau’s state of nature, and therefore no violence and, in fact, no competition whatsoever. In contrast to Hobbes, Rousseau views the state of nature as a realm of abundance, and in contrast to Locke, he views the development of property as generating artificial scarcities among human beings.[64] To sum up the differences: Hobbes argues that there can be no order without law created by the state; Locke argues that a limited economic order is possible independent of any law made by the state, but it ultimately can be secured only by the state; Rousseau argues that order is fully possible without law in the state of nature. In fact, for Rousseau, law actually generates disorder; the attempt to suppress the passions by laws only succeeds in inflaming them.[65]
Because Rousseau’s state of nature is so much more attractive than that of Hobbes or even Locke, his writings serve as a powerful indictment of existing governments, and helped to fuel modern revolutionary movements, beginning in America in 1776 and France in 1789. Rousseau’s state of nature offers a model of human freedom and autonomy. To be sure, Rousseau explicitly denies that the message of his work is “Back to Nature!”[66] He presents the state of nature as a kind of Paradise Lost.[67] But his political writings are devoted to the difficult task of recapturing as much of the positive aspects of the state of nature as is possible in modern civil society. He is highly critical of the way civic institutions have distorted human nature, especially through the inequalities a modern economy creates, with its property rights and division of labor. The most famous sentence Rousseau ever wrote is the beginning of The Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”[68]
Deadwood embodies a similar skepticism about the value of government and modern civilization. It may present the town’s movement toward developing municipal institutions and being incorporated into the United States as inevitable, but it questions whether this truly constitutes progress, an improvement in the lives of Deadwood’s citizens. In the spirit of Rousseau, Milch raises doubts about the triumphalism of the traditional Western. The standard pattern of the Western is the myth of the closing of the frontier, the bringing of civilization to the Wild West. Typically, a lawless community, overrun by rampaging gunfighters, must be tamed by a brave lawman or two in concert with civic-minded businessmen, a crusading newspaper editor, and a beautiful schoolmarm waiting in the wings to educate a new generation of law-abiding city dwellers.
One can hear this standard narrative of progress in the historical featurette “Deadwood Matures” included in the DVDs of the third season. The historians tell a familiar tale of the town’s march toward civilization, sparked by technological developments such as the telegraph and the railroad, as well as the growth of civilizing influences such as the schoolhouse and the theater.[69] A kind of Hegelian optimism informs these narratives—events in the West happened in the way they had to happen and no other outcome could have been better. Civilization must be good because it is what history led to. Elements of the Western myth of progress are present in Deadwood, especially in season 3, when outside forces truly begin to transform the town. But Milch evaluates this transformation quite differently, and refuses to view it simply as progress. Deadwood, in fact, dwells upon what is lost when a town makes the transition to civilization and becomes part of the nation-state. What is lost is freedom.[70]
The second season of Deadwood begins with Al Swearengen observing the new telegraph poles going up in the town and ruefully commenting: “Invisible messages from invisible sources, or what some people think of as progress.” Al is right to be skeptical about the benefit to Deadwood of becoming connected to the outside world. Its citizens will be kept better informed of gold prices in the East, and Dan Dority hopes that baseball scores will now be more readily available. But the telegraph will also allow the East to exert greater control over the West, and proves, in fact, to be the harbinger of a federal takeover of Deadwood. The upside of Deadwood’s initial isolation is its local autonomy. The bureaucratic and corporate forces that invade the town in the second and third seasons take away the camp’s control of its own destiny, and have little concern for the welfare of its citizens. Politicians and businessmen eye Deadwood as a place to plunder. The government officials who come to Deadwood are mostly looking to be bribed. With no intention of settling in the town themselves, they plan on governing it from afar, with little or no knowledge of what is actually going on there. George Hearst, as the representative of big business in the series, wishes to add the Deadwood camp to his far-flung mining empire. He wants to extract as much gold as he can from the Black Hills as fast as possible. At the end of the third season, he leaves Deadwood as abruptly as he arrived at the end of the second. He cares nothing about the town, speaking with contempt of the “small-mindedness and self-interested behavior that’s so pervasive in this shithole” (3, 6).[71]
During the first season of Deadwood, one might well have thought that no one could be more evil or worse for the town than Al Swearengen. It is a measure of Milch’s doubts about the so-called civilizing process that by the third season, Al has become a sort of hero in Deadwood for leading the resistance to the outside forces trying to “modernize” the town. We certainly start rooting for him in his struggles against Hearst, and the mining magnate becomes the new villain in the series, chilling us with a degree of cold-bloodedness that Al could not muster on his worst days. What are the differences between Swearengen and Hearst that make the latter the greater villain in Milch’s eyes and ours?[72] Swearengen is a tyrant, but he is Deadwood’s own tyrant. As a homegrown boss, he is by nature limited in his evil. When Al kills someone, he usually has to look him—or her—straight in the eyes. In general, he has to live with the consequences of his evil deeds. He lives among the very people he preys upon. This fact does not stop him from preying upon them, but it does moderate the way he treats them. He never kills indiscriminately. More generally, Al is a better man than his carefully cultivated public image as a cutthroat would suggest. Despite giving the impression that he is purely self-interested, he actually takes a certain civic pride in Deadwood, and from the balcony of the Gem Saloon, he secretly watches the public life of the town with a sort of seignioral satisfaction.
By contrast, in his portrait of Hearst, Milch shows all the dangers of a man who seeks to rule people as a complete stranger to them. The quality Milch associates with Hearst is abstraction. He has one goal in life—to find and extract gold from the earth—and Milch acknowledges that this ability to abstract from all other considerations gives remarkable energy to Hearst’s economic endeavors. But it also means that he is blind to all ordinary human concerns and tramples over anyone standing in his way. Unlike Swearengen, Hearst does not know the men he has killed and he always acts through intermediaries. He tries to keep as much distance as possible between him and the dirty deeds that make his business empire possible. For Milch, Hearst stands for the tyranny of abstraction, and symbolizes everything that is questionable about life in the modern nation-state, which places the seat of power remote from the communities it rules.
Deadwood begins as a small town, and the locus of small business, with impoverished men trying to make their fortunes in mining, accompanied by entrepreneurs like Bullock and Starr, who hope to make their living by providing necessary goods and services to the miners. Milch shows much that is questionable about the economic behavior that goes on in the isolation of this small town. Yet he seems to find it preferable to what happens when big government and big business invade Deadwood. As we have seen, there is something self-regulating about economic life in Deadwood, where everybody knows everybody else and people deal with each other face-to-face. It is the facelessness—the abstraction—of big government that Milch seems most to question. Big business presents the same problem. Hearst represents corporate interests, and therefore Swearengen and others see no point in killing him when other shareholders in his corporation would simply take his place. Hearst’s almost magical invulnerability in the third season symbolizes the implacable power of corporate-, or what might be better called state- or crony capitalism. What troubles Milch is the alliance between big government and big business that generates, and is in turn generated by, the nation-state.[73] In the modern nation-state, power is simply too abstract and too remote from the people, radiating from a system that has lost touch with ordinary human beings and their actions as individuals.[74] What Milch most objects to is the spectacle of an aloof and self-interested elite trampling over local interests.
Government as a Necessary Evil
Deadwood is filled with antigovernment comments that are almost libertarian in spirit. The federal government especially comes in for criticism, because it is the furthest removed from the people it tries to rule and therefore lacks the crucial knowledge of local circumstances needed to rule well. With regard to the United States’ treatment of the Indians, Swearengen sarcastically remarks: “deep fucking thinkers in Washington put forward that policy” (1, 3). Even one of the corrupt politicians from Yankton, Hugo Jarry (Stephen Tobolowsky), speaks with contempt of the federal government, specifically its attempts to hide its own corruption and incompetence: “Washington harasses us for our difficulties in distribution to the Indians, thereby distracting the nation at large from Washington’s own fiscal turpitudes and miasms” (3, 9). Jarry also complains about the ignorance of his fellow federal bureaucrats in Yankton: “They’re too busy stealing to study human nature” (2, 5). Milch clearly shares his characters’ skepticism about the federal government: “I’m always amazed when people say, ‘Congress has adjourned and they have accomplished nothing.’ A congressional term that accomplishes nothing is what the Founding Fathers prayed for. They wanted to keep the government canceling itself out, because it’s in the nature of government to fuck people up.”[75]
Deadwood shows how predatory government is on all levels. Nothing Swearengen can do on his own to rob the people of the camp can match the ambitious plans of the new municipal government to fleece them. The leading citizens get together under Al’s leadership to raise the money to bribe officials in Yankton to let their mining claims stand. The first thing that the newly “elected” mayor, E. B. Farnum (William Sanderson), proposes is a scheme to extract money from the unwitting townspeople: “Couldn’t our informal organization lay taxes on the settlement to pay the bribes?” Farnum hits the nail on the head when he defines the nature of government: “Taking people’s money is what makes organizations real, be they formal, informal, or temporary” (1, 9). With government activity epitomized by raising taxes to pay bribes, it is no wonder that politicians acquire a dubious reputation in Deadwood. Wolcott is the most repulsive character in the entire series, and yet even he insists on dissociating himself from the public sector: “I am a sinner who doesn’t expect forgiveness, but I am not a government official” (2, 10). Milch certainly shows that a great deal of chicanery and outright cheating goes on in Deadwood when business is unregulated. But the problem with offering the government as a solution to these economic problems is that the would-be regulators are far more corrupt than the people they are supposed to regulate. Milch presents government as basically petty theft on a grand scale. A government’s ability to extract money from people dwarfs what any individual criminal can accomplish.
Perhaps the most eloquent discourse on the nature of government in Deadwood—a ringing statement of the post-political creed--is delivered by Swearengen’s rival saloon keeper, Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe), on the occasion of Yankton’s attempt to question the validity of the town’s mining claims: “Who of us here didn’t know what government was before we came? Wasn’t half our purpose coming to get shed of the cocksucker? And here it comes again—to do what’s in its nature—to lie to us, and confuse us, and steal what we came to by toil and being lucky just once in our fuckin’ lives. And we gonna be surprised by that, boys, government being government?” (2, 5). Despite such negative views of government in Deadwood, Milch seems to acknowledge its necessity, and even the idea that the town must be incorporated into the nation-state. Civilization, after all, requires some sacrifices, even of our natural freedom. In the most Rousseauian comment in the series, Swearengen tells his henchman Dority: “From the moment we leave the forest, Dan, it’s all a giving up and adjusting’” (3, 2). But even with this concession, Milch, like Swearengen, gives a less than ringing endorsement of the power of government: “The politicians will always screw you, but there are circumstances in which we would rather have them around.”[76]
This quotation from Milch seems to epitomize the attitude of Deadwood toward government, especially the nation-state. Government is at best a necessary evil, but we must be skeptical about its claims to serve the public interest, and always remain vigilant to resist its perennial tendency to increase its power and encroach upon personal freedom. The closer power can be kept to a local level, the better. Milch’s faith in order without law ultimately puts him in the camp of those, like Locke, who believe in limited government, perhaps radically limited government. Maybe the dilemma of freedom versus law can be resolved along the lines of the United States Constitution, which attempts to limit government power, secure the freedom of its citizens, and impose the rule of law even upon the government itself. Moreover, the federalism of the constitutional system offers some hope of people retaining power at local levels.
Whether or not one agrees with these conclusions, one must acknowledge the sophistication of the economic and political thinking that went into Deadwood. The show is Hobbesian in the way that it analyzes the sources of violence in human interaction. The show is Lockean in the way that it portrays the establishment of property rights and the resulting commerce as civilizing forces in society. And the show is Rousseauian in the doubts that it raises about the standard narrative of the triumph of the nation-state as progress. To try to sum up the complex philosophical position of the show: it is basically Lockean in its faith in the self-organizing power of society, while maintaining a Hobbesian anxiety about the fragility of social order, together with a Rousseanian skepticism about its ultimate value.[77] In combining elements of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Deadwood exemplifies the seriousness and thoughtfulness of the Western at its best. Such is the remarkable result when Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau meet Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane on the American frontier.
Notes
The epigraphs to this essay are taken from David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills (New York: Melcher Media, 2006), 135 and Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986), 7.
[1] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Cook (New York: Hafner, 1947), 139.
[2] Ibid., 145.
[3] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1968), 187. On the importance of America in Hobbes’s thought (with some reference to Locke as well), see Pat Moloney, “Hobbes, Savages, and International Anarchy,” American Political Science Review, 105 (2011): 189-204.
[4] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. and trans. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1964), 224.
[5] I am speaking of the Rousseau of the Second Discourse here. In later works, especially The Social Contract, he tried to show how freedom and law could be made compatible in the form of a self-legislating community. In even later works, such as The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, he returned to his preference for freedom over law. The relation between freedom and law is in many respects the central issue in Rousseau’s thought and one on which he explored several possibilities.
[6] See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 27-29. On the separation of powers specifically, see Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., America’s Constitutional Soul (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 115-34. For a comprehensive treatment of the subject, see Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
[7] The ABC television series Lost (2004-10) actually featured characters named Locke and Rousseau.
[8] Milch has an exceptionally distinguished academic background, which makes it plausible to take his work seriously. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, he received an MFA from Iowa, and he went on to teach creative writing at Yale, where he worked with such noted scholars as Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and R. W. B. Lewis. In his comments about Deadwood and in the series itself, he displays an extraordinarily wide range of knowledge in many cultural areas, including philosophy. Episode 10 of season 3 of Deadwood, for example, contains a learned if somewhat irreverent discussion of Socrates and Alcibiades. In episode 9, season 2, one character mentions both David Hume and Karl Marx. Several references to “Leviathan” suggest that Milch had Hobbes specifically in mind when creating the series (although the Bible and Moby-Dick are obviously alternate sources of these references).
[9] For example, Daniel Salerno has said of the show: “No television program—or film, for that matter—that I can recall has done such marvelous things with the English language. . . . Television critics and viewers have often referred to it as Shakespearean” (“‘I Will Have You Bend’: Language and the Discourses of Power in Deadwood,” Literary Imagination, 12 [2010]: 190).
[10] Television is a collaborative medium, and Milch himself would not claim sole responsibility for creating the whole of Deadwood. In the cumulative screen credits for the three seasons the show ran, a total of fourteen different directors and sixteen different screenwriters are named. In his commentaries, Milch makes it clear that he worked closely with the individual actors in creating the characters they were playing. Nevertheless, all the evidence suggests that Deadwood is essentially the product of David Milch’s imagination; he maintained creative control over all aspects of the production. When asked point-blank in an interview “Do you write the show alone?”, Milch did not simply deny it: “I have a pretty heavy hand. I work on pretty much every scene. First they [the other writers] do drafts, and then I work on them,” http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/feature/2005/03/05/milch/print.html (consulted September 9, 2008).
[11] I have transcribed all quotations from Deadwood from the Home Box Office DVDs (season 1—2004, season 2—2006, season 3—2007). I will cite them by the season number and episode number in parentheses (so that this citation would read: 1, 1).
[12] Milch, Deadwood, 121.
[13] The quotation from Brown is from the bonus feature commentary “The Wedding Celebration” in the second season set of DVDs of Deadwood. For a similar statement of the central question of the series, see Erin Hill, “‘What’s Afflictin’ You?’: Corporeality, Body Crises and the Body Politic in Deadwood,” in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I. B. Taurus, 2006), 181: “the central question of Deadwood. . .is whether or not residents can be trusted to handle their business themselves without being regulated by a larger power, or, put more simply, whether order is possible without law.” This understanding of the Old West is not unique to popular culture; it is, in fact, common among historians; it is one of the central themes, for example, of Frederick Jackson Turner: “Western democracy included individual liberty, as well as equality. The frontiersman was impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order, even in the absence of legal authorities” (The Frontier in American History [New York: Henry Holt, 1953], 212; see also 343-44). For an excellent discussion of order in the Old West, with a useful bibliography, see Ryan McMaken, “The American West: A Heritage of Peace,” Mises Daily Article, February 12, 2004, http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1449 (consulted February 12, 2004).
[14] The quotation from Milch is from the bonus feature commentary “The New Language of the Old West” in the first season set of DVDs of Deadwood.
[15] The phenomenon Milch is examining—the self-organizing power of society—has a venerable intellectual history, going at least as far back as the Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand. Perhaps the best label for what Milch is talking about is “spontaneous order,” a term made popular by Friedrich Hayek. See his Law, Legislation and Liberty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), especially Vol. 1, 72-123. Hayek argues that in the British common law tradition judges “discover” the rules that have already evolved in commercial and other social transactions, and articulate and codify them as law in the course of their case-by-case decisions. This is a perfect example of what Milch means by “to retrospectively apply the sanction of the law to the things we do to maintain order.” Hayek contrasts this kind of common law, which as it were bubbles up out of society, with positive law, legal codes devised by legislatures and imposed on society from above. For another analysis of a Western in terms of Hayek’s concept of spontaneous order, which also draws upon Hobbes and Locke, see Aeon J. Skoble, “Order without Law: The Magnificent Seven, East and West,” in The Philosophy of the Western, ed. Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 139-47. For another vision of the self-organizing power of society, rooted in Alexis de Tocqueville’s understanding of America, see Chapter Four, on Burton’s Mars Attacks!
[16] Hobbes, Leviathan, 223-24.
[17] For Hobbes’s basic indifference on the issue of forms of government, see Leviathan, 238-40.
[18] See, for example, Paul Wright and Hailin Zhou, “Divining the ‘Celestials’: The Chinese Subculture of Deadwood,” in Lavery, Reading Deadwood, 157, 166.
[19] Hobbes, Leviathan, 186.
[20] This quotation is from the bonus feature commentary “An Imaginative Reality” in the first season set of DVDs of Deadwood.
[21] On the artificiality of the state, see Hobbes, Leviathan, 226.
[22] Ibid., 185.
[23] Ibid., 184.
[24] Ibid., 185.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Milch says of Dority and Turner: “They are champions who represent their masters” (Milch, Deadwood, 157).
[27] See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 234-35 and Robert A. Goldwin, “John Locke,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), 492.
[28] Hobbes, Leviathan, 188; see also 234. The word propriety meant the same as “property” when Hobbes was writing.
[29] For Hobbes on property, see Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom: The Story of How through the Centuries Private Ownership Has Promoted Liberty and the Rule of Law (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999), 32. This book gives an excellent overview of the issue of property throughout history.
[30] Locke, Two Treatises, 134.
[31] Ibid., 184. For Locke on the sanctity of property, see Pipes, Property, 35.
[32] Locke, Two Treatises, 186.
[33] Ibid., 134.
[34] Ibid., 136.
[35] Ibid., 139.
[36] See Strauss, Natural Right, 242-45 and Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 43-46..
[37] On the absence of all commercial activity in the state of nature, see Hobbes, Leviathan, 186: “In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society.”
[38] Locke, Two Treatises, 130. The sharp contrast between Hobbes and Locke on the state of nature begins to blur once one looks beneath the surface in their writings, that is, once one accepts Leo Strauss’s argument that Locke was an esoteric writer. Given Hobbes’s notoriety as, among other things, an atheist, Locke had every reason to exaggerate his differences from his predecessor and to minimize his agreements—if he had any hope of seeing his political ideas accepted by his contemporaries. A careful reading of the Second Treatise shows that Locke ultimately accepts Hobbes’s characterization of the state of nature as a state of war, or at least he admits that an original state of nature must necessarily develop into a state of war, once property disputes multiply. That is why Locke, like Hobbes, views as inevitable the establishment of a government to settle the disputes that develop in the state of nature. On the buried similarities between Hobbes and Locke on the state of nature, see Strauss, Natural Right, 224-28, Manent, Liberalism, 47-48, and Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) Vol. 2, 258, 268-71. See especially Pangle, Modern Republicanism, 246: “Locke exaggerates (especially in the first half of the Second Treatise) the peaceful and reasonable possibilities of the precivil condition in order to mask the extent of his agreement with the unpalatable Hobbesian conception of human nature: he thus seduces most of his readers into accepting or entertaining the essentials of that account without being shocked into quite realizing what they are doing” (see also 131, 170-71). But whatever the esoteric meaning of the Second Treatise may be, its exoteric message is clear: Locke is offering an alternative to Hobbes’s view of the state of nature. Since it was that exoteric message that functioned in eighteenth-century political discourse, I am safe in drawing a sharp contrast between Hobbes and Locke in discussing their influence on America, and by extension Milch’s Deadwood.
[39] For an excellent discussion of how the problem of staking out mining claims in the absence of legal authorities was actually handled in the Old West, see Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 104-119. As its title indicates, this book is a revisionist history of the West, showing that it was much less violent and contentious than popular culture has pictured it. It does the best job of providing the historical background for anyone interested in Deadwood and Milch’s theme of “order without law.” For example, in discussing the relatively peaceful development of the fur trapping trade in the Old West, Anderson and Hill quote historian Hiram Chittenden: “It might be concluded. . . that, as the country was literally lawless, or without means of enforcing laws, lawlessness and disorder would be the rule. Such was not the case. . . . It will be found that life, liberty, and the right to property, were as much respected in the depths of the wilderness as within the best regulated of cities” (89).
[40] Milch, Deadwood, 99. Contemporary sociological studies have confirmed Milch’s intuitions in this respect, especially Hernando de Soto’s work on squatter communities in Peru. He reports that his research “found no evidence to bear out the charge that life in informal settlements is anarchic and disorganized. On the contrary, it found a set of extralegal norms which did, to some extent, regulate social relations, offsetting the absence of legal protection and gradually winning stability and security for acquired [property] rights.” He goes on to conclude that his research “shows that people are capable of violating a system which does not accept them, not so that they can live in anarchy but so that they can build a different system which respects a minimum of essential rights” (The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World , trans. June Abbott [New York: Harper & Row, 1989], 19, 55). De Soto is describing Lima, Peru, but he might as well be describing Milch’s Deadwood. On the role of squatters in the development of the West, see Turner, Frontier, 101, 122-23, 137.
[41] When the community puts the assassin of Hickok on trial, the hastily assembled jury is told that, without a proper court or legal procedures, they “must rely on common custom” (1, 5).
[42] When Alma Garrett’s husband is murdered, and she inherits his rich claim, Whitney Ellsworth must be brought in to work it actively in order for her to maintain her claim to the property.
[43] See Pangle, Modern Republicanism, 308, note 5, where he speaks of “the truly amazing speed with which Locke’s conception of property permeated and radically transformed English common law. By 1704 (six years after the publication of the Two Treatises!) Locke’s notions begin to appear as the standard or orthodox notions in legal commentary. I believe it is safe to surmise that Locke’s influence on the legal and hence political thinking of the American colonists in subsequent years, by way of this transformation in legal thinking, was enormous.” On the importance in general of federal policies for turning public lands into private property, see Turner, Frontier, 170, 211, 259, 272-73, 276, 293. See especially 27, where Turner quotes Senator Scott of Indiana describing the federal government’s land policy as “merely declaratory of the custom or common law of the settlers.” This is a perfect example of what Milch means when he speaks of “retroactively apply[ing] the sanction of law to the things we do to maintain order.” The great hope of the citizens of Deadwood is that the territorial authority will simply ratify the mining claims they have already established on their own. Anderson and Hill discuss historical precedents for such ratification: “In 1851, California passed the Civil Practice Act, which established a judicial system and basically codified the agreements that had been reached in the mining camps. The justices, in deciding mining cases, were to admit as evidence ‘the customs, usages, or regulations established or enforced at the bar or diggings embracing such claims’” (Wild West, 114).
[44] Consider Salerno’s hyperbolic—but perhaps prophetic—comment on Swearengen as an artistic creation: “The character is already legendary—beloved by modern audiences and critics—and if there is real justice, he will still be as studied and beloved in 400 years as Falstaff and Iago—his closest Shakespearean analogues—are today” (“Discourses of Power,” 197).
[45] For Milch’s own formulation of the paradox of Swearengen, see Deadwood, 17: “He is a very good man with none of the behaviors of goodness. He’s a whoremongering murderer who protects the whores he abuses.”
[46] On this point, see David Drysdale, “‘Laws and Every Other Damn Thing’: Authority, Bad Faith, and the Unlikely Success of Deadwood,” in Lavery, Reading Deadwood, 142.
[47] Milch, Deadwood, 213.
[48] Ibid., 41. Cf. Locke’s treatment of barter and money in Two Treatises, 144: “And thus came in the use of money—some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful but perishable supports of life.”
[49] For an excellent historical analysis of the positive role of commerce in the American West, especially of the way it worked to overcome prejudice and created economic opportunities for ethnic minorities, see Bradley J. Birzer, “Expanding Creative Destruction: Entrepreneurship in the American Wests,” Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Spring 1999): 45-63.
[50] Milch, Deadwood, 55.
[51] Hearst follows an old prospector’s custom of referring to gold as “the color.”
[52] Locke stresses the fact that commodity money originally develops independently of any government activity: “This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions men have made practicable out of the bounds of society and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money; for, in governments, the laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions” (Two Treatises, 145). On this point in Locke, see Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 291. Locke’s commodity theory of money was not fully developed until the late nineteenth century, in Austrian economics, which emphasizes the idea that money develops naturally out of a barter economy, with no need for government intervention; see Carl Menger, Principles of Economics, trans. James Dingwall and Bert F. Hoselitz (Grove City, PA: Libertarian Press, 1994), 257-71. Apropos of the Western, Menger argues that one of the earliest forms of money was cattle (263-65). As for commodity money in Deadwood, since it is a gold rush town, it naturally operates on the gold standard. When Alma Garrett opens the first bank in town, her “full faith and credit” is founded on the gold reserves on her property.
[53] Milch, Deadwood, 142.
[54] Rousseau, Discourses, 102.
[55] Milch writes: “The men who came to Deadwood craved a new beginning, a chance to break their ties to civilized institutions and forms of meaning” (Deadwood, 15). But this claim implies that these people were already shaped by those civilized institutions. Try as they may, they cannot totally escape their links to the East Coast and the European Old World (after all, some of the characters are not even American but British).
[56] This quotation is taken from the bonus feature commentary “The New Language of the Old West” in the first season set of DVDs of Deadwood.
[57] See Hill, “Body Politic,” 182.
[58] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 337.
[59] Ibid., 118; see also 335.
[60] Rousseau, Discourses, 130.
[61] See Hill, “Body Politic,” 181.
[62] Rousseau, Discourses, 140.
[63] Ibid., 150-51. The Western offers the opportunity to explore this Rousseauian possibility of a community halfway between the undeveloped state of nature and the overdeveloped modern nation-state. Sometimes this happy medium takes the form of a Native American community (just the sort of “savages” Rousseau himself offers as an example of this intermediate state). Milch may be offering Deadwood prior to its absorption into the United States as another form of happy medium.
[64] For Rousseau’s negative view of property, see Discourses, 141-42, 151-52, 156-57.
[65] See ibid., 134, 137.
[66] See especially the important discussion in note i of the Second Discourse, 201-203.
[67] On this idea in Rousseau, and his relation to John Milton, see the chapter “A Discourse on Eden” in my book Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1-25.
[68] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 41.
[69] For a similar view in a traditional historian, see Turner, Frontier, 205.
[70] For similar views of the series, see Drysdale, “Unlikely Success,” 139-41 and Amanda Ann Klein, “‘The Horse Doesn’t Get a Credit’: The Foregrounding of Generic Syntax in Deadwood’s Opening Credits,” in Lavery, Reading Deadwood, 99-100. Scott provides a trenchant critique of the standard account of civilization as progress; see especially Not Being Governed, 7-8 and 188: “What the schema portrays is not simply a self-satisfied normative account of progress but a gradient of successive stages of incorporation into state structure. Its stages of civilization are, at the same time, an index of diminishing autonomy and freedom.” This is a perfect formulation of the theme of “civilization and its discontents” in Deadwood.
[71] Hearst has the same attitude toward small towns that Paladin exhibits in Have Gun-Will Travel; see Chapter Two. Both come from San Francisco; they seem to represent the big city elites who have no respect for small towns and the small businesses that operate there. Unlike Gene Roddenberry, Milch believes that small towns can run themselves and overcome deep-rooted problems such as prejudice on their own—even and especially small towns run by businesspeople.
[72] For a detailed comparison of Swearengen and Hearst, see Salerno, “Discourses of Power,” 202-203.
[73] For other critiques of the collusion between big business and big government, see Chapter Five, on The Aviator, and Chapter Six, on South Park.
[74] For a similar defense of ordinary people and local interests against the national government, see Chapter Four, on Mars Attacks!.
[75] Milch, Deadwood, 143.
[76] Ibid., 135.
[77] As a sign of the importance of state of nature thinking to the genre, one might be able to classify Westerns as basically Hobbesian, Lockean, or Rousseauian in spirit. The majority of American Westerns tend to be Lockean. As shown by the title of a famous example—How the West Was Won (1962)—American Westerns generally portray the victory of civilization over various forms of frontier barbarism. By contrast, the Italian Western—the so-called Spaghetti Western created by Sergio Leone—is usually Hobbesian in spirit, portraying the West as profoundly lawless and truly a “war of all against all.” Westerns like Kevin Costner’s Dancing with Wolves (1990), which romanticize the world of Native Americans and celebrate the virtues of a pre-political way of life, could be called Rousseauian in spirit. For an analysis of the portrayal of Native Americans in Westerns, with specific reference to Dancing with Wolves and a discussion of the background in Rousseau, see Michael Valdez Moses, “Savage Nation: Native Americans and the Western,” in McMahon and Csaki, Philosophy of the Western, 261-90. The best Westerns, such as Deadwood and the films of John Ford, seem to be those that combine elements of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau in creative tension. For the view that Westerns alternate between the poles of Locke and Rousseau, see John Marini, “Defending the West: John Ford and the Creation of the Epic Western,” in Print the Legend: Politics, Culture, and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford, ed. Sidney A. Pearson, Jr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 10, 17 notes 10 and 11. For other attempts to apply state of nature thinking to popular culture, see Dean A. Kowalski’s analysis of the 2006 film V for Vendetta in “R for Revolution: Hobbes and Locke on Social Contracts and Scarlet Carsons,” in Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture, ed. Joseph J. Foy (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 19-40, and Claire P. Curtis, Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010)—Curtis draws on Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
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