Hartz and Minds: The Liberal Tradition after the Cold War

Abstract

The Liberal Tradition in America is truly an exceptional book. Its conceptual framework has been widely criticized as wrongheaded, and each of its organizing theses has been held to be historically inaccurate. Nonetheless, it continues to figure as a central text for scholars in political studies and American studies. We teach it regularly in graduate seminars, allow the problems it raises to shape our research agendas, and organize symposia to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that, if nothing else, Louis Hartz long ago proved that it is more desirable to be interesting than to be right. To that end, I write here to register an appreciation of his work even as I acknowledge the aptness of much of the criticism to which it has been subjected. To my mind, a Hartz who has been refined and reframed by decades of criticism can still offer valuable insight into America and America's engagement with the world, particularly in a moment of caustic political and sharp economic divisions that would seem to belie the consensus he emphasized, and in the midst of the emergence of forthrightly illiberal doctrines shaping both American domestic and foreign policy. HARTZ'S LIBERAL TENSIONSHartz's work assailed, even as it brought theoretical sophistication to, what he called the "storybook truth about American history," that American politics is shaped by a continuous tradition of Lockean liberalism. 1 Settled as a place of escape from the religious, political, and social dogmas of the Old World, Amer-ica's most unique and fundamental historical feature, as Hartz saw it, is defined by an absence, or more precisely, by three related absences: lacking the constitutive ground of feudalism, with its strict -and strictly fixed -structures of wealth and authority, America failed to develop both a genuinely revolutionary tradition and a genuinely conservative defense of the old order. American politics and American history are thus structured, he argued, not primarily by class conflict but by political struggles conducted for the most part against a background of shared commitment to liberal values and institutions. But for all of the apparent social pliability, for all of the formal liberty and equality bequeathed by America's distinctive development, the legacy of American liberalism is not more freedom, Hartz contended, but less. In the United States, the "fixed dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life" (9) produces a cult of liberal constitutionalism, a language of political rights that exerts an unshakable hold over the American political imagination, a tyranny of unanimity by which nominally democratic processes achieve the suppression of free thought, free speech, and free action with a dispatch and thoroughness that eluded centuries of European despots and Divine Right absolutists. What most animates Hartz's book, then, is its apprehension of a paradox at the heart of American politics: liberal freedom is most imperiled not by external adversaries, but by liberalism's...

The American liberal colonial tradition

“…But this pastlessness is nonetheless a powerful political claim and thus a powerful historical force, and a close reading of Hartz reveals the degree to which America's embrace of pastlessness constitutes a dynamic principle at work within the American liberal tradition. 22 Holland's assessment is apt, except I argue that it is not "elision and erasure of history" but rather the disavowal of the nation's past that is at work here. The difference is that elision and erasure invoke absence, whereas disavowal refers to absence and presence, at once.…”