U.S. Political Thought

Lecture 2

September 28, 1995 Joseph Boland

Outline

  1. Questions or comments on the last lecture?
  2. A revision to the syllabus: you have three weeks to turn in one of your short essays
  3. Lecture: Hartz
    1. The Liberal Tradition as orthodoxy
    2. “No feudalism, no socialism”
    3. American exceptionalism
    4. celebratory and romantic view of westward expansion
      • ethical issue
      • Hartz’s need to depict an “immaculate conception” for American liberalism
    5. Characterization of American attitude toward the state
    6. Criticisms of American society
      • conformitarianism
      • provincialism
      • immaturity and incompetence in ideological debates
      • domestic fears (McCarthyism)
      • international prosleytizing
    7. Hartz as a conservative who renovates a traditional conception of the American ethos in light of the ideological needs of the Cold War
    8. Hartz as a cultural McCarthyist
  4. Readings for next class

Syllabus Revision

You have three weeks to turn in one of your short essays. This will give you time to give a draft of the essay to the members of your small group, receive feedback from them, and revise the essay.

1. Louis Hartz, “The Concept of a Liberal Society”

Note that a few of the quotes below come from other chapters of The Liberal Tradition in America.

Hartz’s 1950s characterization of America as unconsciously and compulsively wedded to liberal values retains today the quality of an orthodoxy which many argue with but few ignore. I will shortly consider why Hartz’s thesis has been so durable, but first I want to examine its principal features.

According to Hartz, America was born in the flight from European oppressions by settlers who took the classical liberalism of Locke as a self-evident belief system. Having rejected the feudal ethos intellectually, and never having had to battle against the power of the aristocracy and the clergy, Americans were ‘born equal.’ Because of this absence from America of feudal structures, and because of the overwhelming predominance of liberal values, the American political universe, though rich in conflict, lies almost wholly within the horizons of liberalism, a consensus which remains largely invisible precisely because it is virtually universal, uncontested, and taken-for-granted. Thus as Eric Foner puts it in his own summary of Hartz, “Without a feudal tradition, and a sense of class oppression in the present, Americans are simply unable to think in class terms.” For Hartz, though, the inability of Americans to think in class terms is not a matter of ‘false consciousness’ because American society is not, in fact, structured by class. The American ideals of “social mobility, individual fulfillment, and material acquisitiveness” (Foner, 62) have been sufficiently fulfilled to render a class-based view of American society unfounded.

The absence of feudalism means that socialism can gain no hold in America. It requires the existence in society of both actual class structures and of the complex of beliefs associated with the hierarchic and corporate societies of medieval Europe. Remember, in very different ways liberalism and socialism both seek to establish classless societies. For Hartz, liberalism and socialism emerged in Europe to battle feudalism, but due to the timing of the colonization of America--prior to the flowering of socialist movements and ideologies--only liberalism became influential across the Atlantic.

Because of this historical accident, American society is exceptional--unlike those of the ‘Old World.’ Not only does it lack “a genuine revolutionary tradition” (5), it also lacks a classically conservative one. The older conservative notion of an organic society never took root here, since it depended upon the permanence of a set of hierarchic relations through which people were, in general, located for life in a particular niche within a set of classes, orders, and corporate bodies. In America, as Hartz puts it, “men began to be held together, not by the knowledge that they were different parts of a corporate whole, but by the knowledge that they were similar participants in a uniform way of life” (55). Indeed, Hartz believes that it is not the middle-class but the upper-class that is frustrated, “trying to break out of the egalitarian confines of middle class life but suffering guilt and failure in the process” (8).

The establishment of a liberal way of life in America was made much easier by what Hartz calls “the magnificent material setting . . . found in the New World” (17). By this he means, first, that material abundance offered positive inducements to abandon the localistic barter economy of the village in favor of opportunities for commercial gain in a wider market economy and, secondly, that this abundance and the option of frontier settlement provided an economic basis for socio-economic mobility and belief in the capacity of individual achievement to overcome disadvantages of birth or circumstance.

Hartz’s extremely ethnocentric view of westward expansion is shown by a passage later in The Liberal Tradition in which expansion is contrasted with social revolution:

Revolution, to borrow the words of T. S. Eliot, means to murder and create, but the American experience has been projected strangely in the realm of creation alone. The destruction of forests and Indian tribes--heroic, bloody, legendary as it was--cannot be compared with the destruction of a social order to which one belongs oneself. The first experience is wholly external and, being external, can actually be completed; the second experience is an inner struggle as well as an outer struggle, like the slaying of a Freudian father, and goes on in a sense forever (64-65).

It is not only the moral issue that is important here; Hartz’s romantic and celebratory view of what others have called genocide is critical to his larger thesis, for a reason he himself alludes to in this passage. The existence of a universal and unconscious liberalism requires not only a radical break with the European past but an equally radical insulation from the indigenous cultures of the New World present. American liberalism must have an “immaculate conception.” It cannot turn out to be a hybrid political culture, especially at its beginning. For this reason, not only must indigenous cultures be exterminated, so must be any traces left upon the collective psyche of Americans by their destruction. This is a large issue which we will return to in some upcoming classes.

Another element of Hartz’s depiction of American liberalism that bears upon a later topic in this class is his assessment of the American attitude toward the state. Hartz begins with an interesting insight into Locke’s theory of limited government:

There are two sides to the Lockian argument: a defense of the state that is implicit, and a limitation of the state that is explicit. The first is to be found in Locke’s basic social norm, the concept of free individuals in a state of nature. This idea untangled men from the myriad associations of class, church, guild, and place, in terms of which feudal society defined their lives; and by doing so, it automatically gave to the state a much higher rank in relation to them than ever before. The state became the only association that might legitimately coerce them at all (59-60).

Hartz then declares, however, that the Americans “were not conscious of having already done anything to fortify the state; but were conscious only that they were about to limit it” (60). He is referring at this point to the Constitutional Founding. Yet in the constitutional debate Federalists insistently and unapologetically argued the need for a stronger state in defending the new constitution while Anti-Federalists decried the threats to liberty posed. Both sides considered the extent of federal powers to be the decisive issue.

I’ll close out this exposition of Hartz by looking at his criticisms of the American liberal tradition.

Hartz is concerned that American liberalism, born at the height of the power of natural rights philosophy, possesses a fixed, dogmatic (9), compulsive and insular character poorly suited to America’s post-war position as a world power. Domestically, it is excessively frightened of ideological challenge, producing McCarthyism. Internationally, it seeks to impose liberal values everywhere, but must confront the “limits of its own cultural pattern” (14). The ideological uniformity of American life, combined with the fact that its liberalism forms a largely unconscious, taken-for-granted cultural background, results in Americans feeling deeply and excessively threatened by ideological challenges, since their very identity as a people is at stake in them, and since they are unused to defending themselves ideologically.

Hartz, following Tocqueville, sees freedom in America limited by a conformitarian ethos. It is, he says, in a sense “profoundly anti-individualistic, because the common standard is its very essence, and deviations from that standard inspire it with an irrational fright” (56). “Freedom in the fullest sense implies both variety and equality; but history, for reasons of its own, chose to separate these two principles . . .” (57).

We’re now in a position to consider why Hartz’s thesis has held sway for so long. It is essentially conservative, but its conservatism is adroitly tailored to the requirements of Cold War liberalism as dominant American ideology. Hartz himself, in a later chapter of The Liberal Tradition, cites with approval the claim that “America is . . . conservative . . . But the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical” (50). Hartz asserts the preeminence of tradition in American life, only to declare that the specific tradition to be preserved is that of “atomistic social freedom” (62), a tradition of “new beginnings, daring enterprises, and explicitly stated principles...” bearing the marks of an “antihistorical rationalism” (48). How can such an apparently anti-traditional tradition possibly be meshed with a conservative worldview?

Conservative thought typically expresses the desire to preserve a valued way of life against disruptive and alienating changes. It further characterizes society as an organic whole, knit together by traditions and the institutions through which they are sustained. It regards with deep skepticism proposals for sweeping rationalizations of social life. The complexity of human cultures exceeds human comprehension, thus mandating a more circumspect and gradual approach to change. Finally, it usually defines a special mission for an elite not only as guardians of cultural traditions and dominant institutions, but as the conscious bearers of tradition and the ones chiefly responsible for initiating whatever modifications to them altered circumstances seem absolutely to require.

Now consider Hartz’s thesis in this light:

  1. He values the liberal ideal and wants it preserved; his criticisms of American political culture only concern the consequences of its unconscious allegiance to this ideal. Americans are too afraid of cultural and ideological difference, of encounters with those who are unlike them.
  2. He significantly modifies the conservative notion of society as an organic whole, a modification absolutely necessary in the American context. For an organic society he substitutes a “uniform way of life.” In both, the existence of profound social conflicts is masked by the claim that nearly everyone participates in an ideological agreement about the value of the existing social order.
  3. He doesn’t call for any radical changes in the American way of life, but rather for a more mature, reflective understanding among Americans of that way of life. As he puts it at the very end of The Liberal Tradition, the “shattering of American provincialism” holds out the hope for “a new level of consciousness, a transcending of irrational Lockianism, in which an understanding of self and an understanding of others go hand in hand” (308).
  4. Finally, he himself models the special mission of a liberal intellectual elite, which must promote this change of consciousness among the American people. This elite, though clearly secular for Hartz, retains a quasi-religious moral posture. Conscious of American ideals, it has the responsibility and the right to call Americans to task for their shortcomings and toward a renewal of their sacred principles. The alienation of this elite from the mass--the result of their reflective understanding of what is, for the “average” American, a set of basic premises unconsciously adhered to--is part of the condition of their being such an elite.

A different version of this last point is offered by Foner, who aware of Hartz’s Marxist background sees in his work a “devastating critique of a political culture incapable of producing anything approaching an original idea” (Foner, 62). Certainly a scholarly snobbishness toward or perhaps even contempt for the “average American” seems latent in Hartz. His talk of the uniform and unconscious liberalism of American life brings to mind the burgeoning suburbs of the fifties. Yet how can a critique be devastating that never doubts the basic integrity or supreme desirability of American liberal culture, only faulting it for a lack of maturity?

In sum, Hartz proposes a renovation of liberalism as dominant ideology in a manner suitable for the Cold War. His discounting of the force of racism in America is an instance of this, since in the global ideological struggle between the US and the Soviet Union, the latter highlighted this very racism in arguing the superiority of communism for the Third World.

Isn't there an aristocratic quality about Hartz? He assumes a position of superior cultural and historical knowledge and deplores the irrationality of the unenlightened masses given to hysterical overreaction when their unconscious liberalism is challenged. They are immature, clinging to their father, Locke. Hartz offers to tutor them in the ways of the (larger) world while promising to honor the father's precepts. Of course, the masses are not his audience; he speaks rather to the other high priests of liberal dogma about an esoteric problem concerning its adaptation and preservation in the face of heretical “foreign” doctrines (historically European, now primarily Soviet). This is another aspect of his cultural McCarthyism--socialism is a dogma that America escaped from by escaping from the European experience; therefore the threat it poses now is, by (his) definition a foreign threat, therefore Americans who sympathize or identify with socialism are, again by definition, un-American.

Readings for next class

Finish the Foner and Smith articles.