Louis Hartz and the Liberal Tradition: from consensus to crack-up

Modern Age, Summer, 2005 by Irving Louis Horowitz

THE VIEW THAT LIBERALISM is the self-evident dominant ideology of democratic capitalism has been repeated frequently by many different social scientists and historians. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., declared this to be as a matter of American policy at the close of the 1940s in The Vital Center, (1) and it was declared to be an empirical reality in American history by Louis Hartz (1919-1986) in the early 1950s in The Liberal Tradition in America. (2) Indeed, this proposition was so much an article of political faith that it became, from a variety of vantage points, something of a mantra in normative circles. Even those in bitter opposition to liberalism accepted as a given its hegemonic status. From Russell Kirk (1918-1994) on the right to C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) on the left inadvertent tribute was granted to the unique status of liberalism in America at mid-twentieth century.

Before engaging in the academic pastime of after-the-fact critiques, or attempting to update or to revise the tenuous situation of liberalism at mid-decade of the twenty-first century, it might be valuable to summarize the view of liberalism as the dominant ideological thread in American history. Professor Hartz's essential view is that the tradition that comes down to us from John Locke is one that respects individual property rights while at the same time honors the sanctity of the social contract, and everybody's inalienable right to participate in it. He further argues (and this is perhaps the source of the debate) that liberal democracy is essentially the only political tradition that the United States had ever known. The view of America as the "First New Nation," unencumbered by the feudal inheritance of Europe, was given substantial reinforcement and sociological support by Seymour Martin Lipset in his own outstanding work by that name. While Hartz never quite denies the prospects of any other ideological vision for America, it is fair enough to say that he postulated the idea of a liberal consensus, one that has served to unify and to purify the American imagination first through the revolutionary process, then through a Civil War, and finally, through two twentieth-century world wars fought on the basis of liberal persuasions and risks to their continuation.

It was Hartz's misfortune that at the very time he was announcing a liberal consensus, the crack-up of that long tradition was well underway. However, it should not be thought that the Hartzian position somehow went unchallenged until the founding of National Review by William F. Buckley in the same year as Hartz's book appeared in 1955. But Buckley, like Russell Kirk and other conservative thinkers, did not so much deny the significance of liberalism, as regrettably and even wistfully assert the Hartz thesis, as argue the need to topple and to replace its dominance with an eighteenth-century vision of an American nation in which civic values and personal virtues, rather than collective interest groups, would once again reign supreme.

Opposition to the notion of a liberal consensus (even if not by name) has a long history. Indeed, one might argue that The Federalist Papers of Madison, Jay, and Hamilton marked the opening salvo in the effort to reconfigure an American nation in terms of a conservative consensus. But I think it is fair to say that Hartz's love affair with the nineteenth century, summarized in his own volume on the subject, rested in large measure on the huge shift in both Europe and America from an aristocratic tradition to a democratic one, from a rural economy to an industrial society, and from an elitist to a mass vision that rested on the emergence of the political party system, trade unions, and voluntary associations outside and beyond the church system. (3) I find it hard to argue with a premise that sees liberalism as the dominant ideology of the nineteenth century in North America and in Western Europe. But this is due to the fact that the ideological underpinnings in both areas were derived from a shared British and, to a lesser degree, French sense of Enlightenment.

It is when America moved into the twentieth century that this first stage of the liberal ideology suffered large-scale setbacks. Its cracks became manifest-something that Hartz was reticent to acknowledge. Illustrative of this new under-current of discontent with the liberal consensus were the remarks of the first president of the American Political Science Association. In a work even older than his presidential address at the APSA's first of one hundred presidential addresses, Frank Goodnow in Politics and Administration, served a warning on the proposition that liberalism is or could ever be the sole source of popular government. He argued the case for the force of the people to be exercised through the will of the State. Indeed, he felt that the civic administrative apparatus, which was starting to expand rapidly at the start of the twentieth century, far from serving all people, was seriously flawed. Goodnow argued that what was needed in America was a political system in which the party and party leadership had become strong enough to combat the rising tide of civil service. (4) This home-grown "common sense" vision of the Hegelian premises of The Philosophy of Right and Law was thus part and parcel of vanguard thinking in the APSA, and I daresay of educated public opinion fearful of the democratic implications of advancement through education, expertise, and policy-making without politics.