In Retrospect: Lous Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America

Abstract

Almost half a century after its publication in 1955, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America continues to influence the way many Americans think about their nation and its history. Conservatives and radicals alike still explicitly invoke or implicitly embrace Hartz's analysis to support the claim that devotion to individualism and defense of property rights have defined American culture. In this retrospective assessment, I advance two arguments. First, despite its importance as a historical document, The Liberal Tradition in America (hereafter referred to as LTA) provides an inadequate account because its analysis is too flat and too static. Hartz focused exclusively on issues of economics and psychology and missed the constitutive roles played by democracy, religion, race, ethnicity, and gender in American history. He therefore misunderstood (as thoroughly as did his predecessors and progressive bêtes noires Beard, Turner, and Parrington, whose work he sought to replace) the complicated and changing dynamics of the democratic struggle that has driven American social and political conflict since the seventeenth century. We should historicize Hartz's analysis, understanding it in the context of the early post-World War II era rather than treating it as a source of timeless truths about America. Second, acknowledging the inaccuracies of LTA is important for us, because the widespread acceptance of its argument has had consequences unfortunate for the study of American political thought and poisonous for political debate. The time has come to refocus our attention away from Cold War era controversies over liberalism and socialism, and away from more recent controversies over liberalism and republicanism, and turn our attention toward democracy.