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

Modern Age, Summer, 2005 by Irving Louis Horowitz

Liberalism has for two centuries served different masters: as a theory it aims its shafts against tyrannies ancient, medieval and modern. But as a culture it aims to broaden a marketplace--free of official doctrine, even of democratic doctrine. In other words, it has an ambiguous relationship to State power. It wishes to curb such powers as they inhibit the performance of individuals who deviate from social and political norms, but it also wants to harness the economic clout of centralized authority to make sure that certain norms such as unbridled private competition are themselves curbed. Increasingly, it is the force of economic clout that has come to define what the state can do. Liberalism sees itself in the forefront of social welfare, health benefits, housing redistribution, job equity through racial profiling, etc. Limiting State intervention becomes an eminent domain of its conservative opponents.

By the close of the twentieth century, the new liberalism as an ideology drew closer to what might be called third-stream socialism, or welfare socialism. It seemed an ideal way to resolve the dilemma of activist policy without recourse to totalitarian advocacy. As a result, with the collapse of communism and secular authoritarian modalities, the old dichotomization of ideology between conservatism and liberalism was re-established. Radical politics tended to drift off into the margins, at least in secular societies, while religious politics were seen as outside and beyond the scope of Western culture as such. Liberalism thus becomes the broad-based Left rather than the Vital Center. It becomes a crucial element in the cultural polarization of the West.

The growing interchangeability of terms like liberalism and socialism became the common coin of the discursive realm for a conservative counterattack. Whether reaction and religion were linked in liberalist rhetoric as touchstones of conservatism, what in fact took place was a resilient capacity to distinguish going slowly forward from marching rapidly backward. Whatever the specifics of the debate, it has become clear that the liberal idea is no longer dominant the way Louis Hartz celebrated, and C. Wright Mills on the Left decried. Rather it is this singular polarity that organizes demands for maximizing equity. By the same token, conservatism of the sort outlined by Russell Kirk (12) becomes the umbrella ideology of an Anglo-American tradition forged against the Franco-American utilitarian tradition that organizes itself on the presumed Right in support of the idea of liberty. Clearly, value issues change very slowly if at all over time. Tactical and strategic issues change rapidly. To avoid confusion between the two is perhaps the best starting and ending point for a discussion on liberalism and its destiny in the twenty-first century.

The contours of twenty-first century neo-liberalism have already begun to take shape. Again, it is the inner contradictions of liberalism that provide a clue as to where exactly this ideology, fashioned in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, is going. On the one hand, there is the firm advocacy of multiculturalism and relativism in value systems. On the other hand, there is the emergence of non-absorptive political theologies such as Moslem fundamentalist doctrines that are dead-set in their opposition to a wide variety of liberal credos. Liberalism is further pushed to the brink by strains within advanced cultures: to a divide between those for whom opportunity is key--the multiculturalists--and those for whom equity remains the touchstone of a liberal society. Thus, whether it is dual linguistic systems in nations or personal habits of dress in schools, or what is permissible in photo-identification regimens, the problem remains the range of tolerance for individual differences versus the need for standards to assure equity in performance and in outcome. Perhaps Robert Kagan provides the closest thing to an appropriate generalization of liberalism in the twenty-first century. He views its current status as one torn between two opposing aspirations respecting state sovereignty and protecting individual rights. Indeed, for those who look deeply into the history of liberalism, this inner contradiction has been in existence throughout its history. The new element is how liberalism can handle the assaults on state sovereignty and on individual rights that stem from the globalization of politics as such.