The Liberal Tradition in America

Louis Hartz advances a single bold thesis across this 1955 work of American political theory: The United States, settled by people who fled the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World, developed as a uniquely liberal society, and the absence of feudalism has shaped the entirety of American political thought. Because America never had a feudal order to destroy, it never produced the revolutionary ideologies that arose in Europe to destroy one, nor the reactionary ideologies that arose to defend one, nor the socialist ideologies that grew out of both. What it produced instead was an all-encompassing, irrational attachment to the philosophy of John Locke, the 17th-century English theorist of individual liberty, property rights, and limited government, an attachment so total that Americans have never recognized it as an ideology, calling it simply the "American Way of Life" (11).

Hartz begins by arguing that this insight, though implicit in the old "storybook truth" (3) that America was founded by men escaping Europe, has never been developed as an interpretive framework because the study of American history has proceeded in isolation from European history. Only by comparing America with societies where feudalism survived can one see what its absence meant. A society without feudalism is, as the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "born equal" (v) rather than becoming so through revolution. It therefore lacks both a radical left and a genuine right. Its liberalism becomes natural, a settled fact rather than a fighting creed. Hartz argues that socialism, far from being an inevitable product of capitalism, is largely an ideological phenomenon arising from the feudal class structure and the liberal revolt against it. America, uniquely lacking the feudal tradition, has uniquely lacked a socialist tradition as well. Yet this unanimity carries a dark side: Locke's doctrine, a symbol of liberty in Europe, becomes in America a compulsive force producing what Tocqueville called "the tyranny of opinion" (11), a conformitarian impulse that transforms dissent into heresy during times of external threat.

Hartz then turns to the American Revolution, arguing that the colonists of 1776 operated with a mentality fundamentally different from that of European revolutionaries. Because their liberal society was already substantially achieved, they did not develop the crusading messianic spirit of the French or Russian revolutions. Their militant Dissenting clergy was already revolutionary, so there was no need to create a political religion to replace Christianity. Their free society meant they could attack political power continuously without the European liberal's agonizing need to centralize authority to overcome an ancient corporate order. Most important, the absence of a feudal aristocracy meant the Americans never developed the passionate middle-class consciousness that drove European liberalism. Instead, they developed a community consciousness based on uniformity rather than hierarchy, which simultaneously produced equality and a deep conformitarian impulse.

Turning to the internal conflicts of the Revolution, Hartz contends that the "social revolution" thesis advanced by Progressive historians like Charles Beard is misleading. The feudal relics abolished, such as primogeniture and established churches, were indeed relics, which explains why their elimination was swift and painless. Even Daniel Shays, leader of a 1786 Massachusetts insurgency, could not produce anything resembling socialist visions because American liberalism offered no ideological materials for such dreams. The Federalists of the Constitutional era constructed a Hobbesian picture of ferocious social conflict that was a massive distortion of American reality. Their scheme of checks and balances survived not because it contained the frightful conflicts they imagined but because those conflicts never materialized.

Hartz devotes considerable attention to the Jacksonian era, framing it as the "Whig dilemma." American Whiggery, the tradition of wealthy propertied liberalism exemplified by Alexander Hamilton, was defeated in America during the 1830s at the very moment its European counterparts were triumphing. In Europe, the wealthy middle class could play its enemies off against one another, leading the masses against the aristocracy, then allying with the aristocracy against the masses. In America, the democrat, a massive hybrid absorbing peasantry, proletariat, and small property owners into a single liberal personality, was unconquerable because he shared the liberal norm. Only when Whiggery abandoned elitist pretensions and embraced democratic capitalism, beginning with the William Henry Harrison campaign of 1840, did it discover the secret of American politics. Hartz calls this the "great law of Whig compensation" (19-20): The principle that a community unified around the liberal norm could be enchanted by the capitalist dream once Whiggery stopped fighting the people and started wooing them. Yet the democrat was himself deeply confused. His hybrid character produced agonizing tensions, and his capitalist hunger repeatedly betrayed his anticapitalist rhetoric.

The most dramatic chapter concerns the ante-bellum South's attempt to construct a feudal-reactionary ideology, what Hartz calls the "Reactionary Enlightenment." Driven out of the liberal camp by Northern abolitionism, Southern thinkers like George Fitzhugh and John C. Calhoun tried to follow the path of European reaction, embracing Edmund Burke's traditionalism and Benjamin Disraeli's Tory socialism. But their enterprise was fundamentally fraudulent. Behind the feudal surface lay not feudalism but slavery, which fit no Western social category. The Southerners were "iconoclastic conservatives," using the revolutionary spirit of Voltaire to advance Burke's arguments in a society where liberalism was the tradition. Their own Lockean heritage kept breaking through: Calhoun repudiated Locke's contractualism but advanced a theory of minority rights that carried it forward. The North never bothered to reply philosophically because the South was refuting itself. After the Civil War, this intellectual movement was forgotten as the South's liberal self resurfaced.

Hartz then traces the post-Civil War triumph of democratic capitalism under what he calls the Horatio Alger ethos, named for the popular novelist whose stories of poor boys rising to wealth embodied the promise of equal opportunity and upward mobility. American Whiggery deployed two weapons: the charm of the Alger dream and the terror of "Americanist" nationalism, which denounced any deviation from Locke as "socialist" and "un-American." No Tory escape existed for the successful millionaire, no socialist solace for the failed worker, and conformity to the single ethos was enforced by the very individualism that generated it.

Against this backdrop, Hartz examines Progressivism and American socialism as two trapped responses. Progressivism, facing no serious socialist challenge, was psychologically enslaved to the Alger dream. The trust became its central symbol because smashing trusts allowed Locke to be kept intact. American socialism was isolated because Progressives used no class language, leaving no bridge by which disenchanted reformers could drift into socialism as they did in England and France. The New Deal receives similar treatment. Hartz argues that the Great Depression confirmed socialism's failure stemmed from ideological rather than economic causes. Franklin Roosevelt's experimentalism allowed substantial departures from liberal orthodoxy without triggering a conscious moral crisis: By submerging Locke and "solving problems," the New Deal innovated with a freedom that European reformers, constrained by ideological systems, could not duplicate.

Hartz concludes with America's 20th-century world involvement. He argues that "Americanism" has a dual international life: an isolationist impulse, rooted in fleeing from alien things, and a messianic crusading impulse aimed at reconstructing them in the American image. Both are responses of an absolute national morality that "cannot live in comfort constantly by" alien things (13). The red scares that followed both World Wars revealed the distinctive force of this absolutism: The nation contained far fewer radicals than any other Western society, but the hysteria against them was far vaster. Hartz closes by asking whether the world involvement that intensifies this absolutism might also shatter it, providing the "spark of philosophy" that American history has denied. The book ends with the questions it began with: Whether a people "born equal" can ever understand peoples who have to become so, and whether such a people can ever understand itself.