September 28, 1995
Due by the end of class October 10 (Note: the extra time is due to the Internet tutorial scheduled for Thursday, October 4th.)
1. Summarize the main points in Smith's criticism of the "Tocquevillian story." Is Smith's paper an attack on American liberalism, a defense of it, both, or something else altogether? Explain.
2. Compare Foner’s assessment of Hartz with that of Smith. What do these assessments say about each author’s own ideological position?
3. Despite disagreeing sharply, Smith and Hartz are both critical of failures of the liberal community. Discuss their respective diagnoses of the ills of American liberalism. What do they prescribe? Do you find either of these accounts persuasive?
4. Foner faults existing answers to the question “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” chiefly for taking what he considers at best partial explanations and illegitimately inflating them to cover the whole of American history. Does he underestimate the explanatory power of some of these answers? How does he himself answer the question?
5. In depicting Hartz as essentially conservative, have I underestimated the force of his critique of American society, a critique which both Foner and Smith mention? Or is this itself an aspect of his conservatism?
6. Discuss the styles of any two of the authors in light of the following quotation:
A conventional model of American historiography would present it as obedient to two imperatives. The first is the necessity of a foundational myth, felt for obvious reasons by a nation founded in experiment and sustained by immigration... In the United States, whose history is so largely a history of the mutations of Protestantism into civil religion, the myth of foundation further takes the form of a myth of covenant. The nation is held to have made at its beginnings a commitment, in the face of God or history or the opinion of mankind, to the maintenance of certain principles; and it is the historian's business to ascertain how the commitment was made, what the principles were, and whether the covenant has been upheld or allowed to lapse. . . . Having ascertained the terms of the covenant, he or she must proceed to recount the history of which the covenant was the beginning and is thereby obliged to write in a choice, or a mixture, of two styles. One is liturgical, the recital of how the covenant was kept; the other, and by far the commoner, is jeremiad, the recital of how it was not kept and of what sufferings have fallen on the nation by reason of its sins and shortcomings.
-- (J. G. A. Pocock, “Republicanism and Ideologia Americana,” pp391-392 in The American Enlightenment, edited by Shuffelton)
8. Explain between 5 and 8 of the allusions to European historical figures and movements in the selection from Hartz. Describe each person or movement in 1-3 paragraphs. Be sure to indicate, at least implicitly, the reason for Hartz’s allusion.
7. Your question here (but run it by me before proceeding).