"Narcissism of the Minor Differences": What Is at Issue and What Is at Stake in the Civic Humanism Question

Abstract

Debate about the nature and vitality of a civic humanist tradition in America long featured an argument between adherents of Louis Hartz's thesis of the United States as the world's most liberal nation and J. G. A. Pocock's claim that the eighteenth-century American political culture involved a transformation of the European civic republican tradition. More recently, scholars have converged on a pluralistic account stressing the mutual interactions of several paradigms in the early Republic. Yet questions can be raised not only about the functioning of the linguistic paradigms that underlie much of the argument, but also about the meaning of civic republican language in its U.S. usage and context. A reexamination of Hartz's work and of the largely ignored comparative dimension of Pocock's approach yields a surprising degree of agreement between the two on the existence of a liberal civilization in the early United States and the importance of the weakness of non-liberal streams of thought in forming American political culture. This consensus suggests that the communitarian effort to revive civic republicanism is unlikely to succeed because it fails to sustain the notion of critical difference between a community of democratic individuals and capitalist development.