In his introduction to the 1991 edition of Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, journalist Tom Wicker noted its relevance for understanding the ambivalent appeal of values that had led both to the downfall of communism and to the “demonization” of Saddam Hussein. Wicker also noted that Hartz's synoptic use of “liberal” as encompassing what is commonly referred to in American political discourse as “liberal” and “conservative” ideologies might “add to some Americans' confusion” about the already “confused and abused” use of the term.¹

As we reach the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Hartz's book, it is important to reassess the work, especially in light of what might seem an obvious parallel between his concerns in the context of the Cold War and contemporary worries about the relationship between American foreign policy and domestic politics that has evolved since 2001. Whether the valence has been negative or positive, Hartz's image of a liberal consensus in the United States has created a picture that has held the academic mind captive and shaped its approach to both scholarship and political analysis.

The reception of Hartz's argument, however, has been distinctly and notoriously mixed, and that reception has, in turn, been examined, evaluated, and debated in very great detail. While his thesis has significantly informed how both scholars and pundits view the American past, it has also often represented a claim that many have felt compelled to modify or even reject. The various criticisms that have been directed toward his book have, however, often been based less on a close reading of the text than on its use as a convenient foil for pursuing some tangential theme. And often what is taken as Hartz's thesis is only loosely related to his actual purpose, intention, and argument. Part of the difficulty in approaching Hartz's book, so many years after its publication, is that, like many such influential texts, what interpreters often now respond to is less the work itself than the discursive residue of multiple reconstructions and the uses to which they have been put. Hartz's text has tended to fuse with the successive secondary renditions of his argument and become entangled with the claims of those who employ it in various capacities as well as of those who pointedly seek alternative perspectives.

Most of the initial as well as recent criticisms, as well as defenses, of Hartz have failed to discern and confront what he was doing in his formulation and account of the liberal tradition and how this image functioned in his work. Attempting to specify what Hartz was doing, in the process of saying what he said, is not entirely a matter of determining what he believed himself to have been doing. It would seem that the latter, or his basic purpose, that is, what he wanted to accomplish or what effect he wished to produce, was, at the time, relatively clear even if how he pursued it is more difficult to specify. He was speaking directly about and to contemporary political problems in the United States. The political context of his argument, however, has tended to recede from view, or, at least, it has often been depreciated in various ways and treated as incidental or ancillary to the more universal implications of his thesis. The political ambience is frequently noted, but often somewhat in passing, as a contextual explanatory factor that in some way shaped his argument and approach. Even though some commentators have stressed the importance of this context in understanding how he viewed the American past, Hartz's purpose was, overtly, far more “political” and “presentist” than “historical.” His work was less an historical argument that was inspired by contemporary circumstances and that had implications for the present than an argument about the present that sought to persuade by reference to the past. The book expressly confronted issues raised by America's place in the world during the 1950s. This, he said, was precisely why he wrote the book, and these issues defined the basic audience he wished to address and convince. Hartz was not primarily addressing historians. What we might think of as the specific intention of the book, that is, the genre to which it belonged and which he employed for pursuing his purpose, as well as his intended use of the concept of a liberal tradition, are considerably more ambiguous. And this is probably the case in part because these were not matters that he had entirely sorted out.

One underlying problem in interpreting Hartz has been the presupposition that all talk about the past is history, and, to some extent, this might have been Hartz's own assumption. Although what constitutes, or should distinguish, historical scholarship is surely a contentious matter, his work cannot easily be categorized or evaluated in terms of any obvious and agreed upon criteria of historicity. The liberal tradition, he claimed, reflected Lockian principles and could be explained in terms of Tocqueville's remarks about the absence of a feudal past and the manner public opinion dominated in a classless society. His persistent name-dropping and his references and allusions to past events and ideas, however, obscured the fact that the book contained little or no original historical research, and his claims about “liberal absolutism” and “conformity” lacked, at least in his presentation, any definite sociological foundation. For all his talk about Locke's ideas as inhabiting the core of the American psyche, there was no concrete reference to Locke's work and not a single instance of an explicit examination of Locke's influence. Even the implication that the claim about a liberal consensus directly reflected what Tocqueville actually said about the tyranny of the majority is dubious. In the book, for example, there are only two brief citations of Tocqueville's work and no discussion of the text. Hartz's concern about the “tyranny of opinion” manifest in liberalism sounded more like the manner in which Tocqueville had been filtered through recent worries about mass society such as those voiced by David Riesman and Robert Nisbet. Nisbet had already identified Tocqueville as anticipating “the problem of liberalism,” and Tocqueville's commentary had been presented as a mantic statement throughout what Hartz noted as Riesman's recent “brilliant work.” Riesman had offered an immensely popular account of “other-direction” as becoming “the dominant mode of insuring conformity” in America where its “hegemony” was “not far off.”²

If we think of the enterprise of guild history as devoted to such tasks as adducing new or little known factual information; constructing detailed narratives or accounts of ideas and their context; providing explanations of specific events; undertaking careful scrutiny of crucial texts and arguments; studying the details of conceptual development; and the like, it would be difficult to make the case that Hartz really accomplished, or even attempted to accomplish, any of this. The work was largely comprised of assertions. As he himself pointed out, much of the book was actually a cobble of past articles, some of which had been written before he had fully formulated his principal argument. Consequently, my reading of Hartz will focus on the first and last chapters (“The Concept of Liberal Society” and “America and the World”), which framed the intermediate, more detailed, and largely previously published material. In much of the work, the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” scarcely appeared, and when they were used, it was often not in the exact sense of his basic argument.

As a whole, the book was a reflection on what Hartz perceived as an endemic problem of American political thought and practice, which he couched in a genetic form by constructing an image of the American past and extrapolating the implications of that image as a basis for characterizing and judging the present. It was a critical rhetorical exercise, albeit one that may have captured or brought to the surface an important dimension of American politics that could be illuminated through a comparison with the kind of social structure and transformations that had characterized much of European history. The liberal tradition that Hartz identified was, however, a metaphor in which the particularities of American life were subsumed, flattened, and presented as if they were manifestations of this image. The tradition he referred to was, at most, his retrospective analytical construction based on noting, from the perspective of the present and in terms of some relatively arbitrary criteria, certain putative similarities between various diverse ideas and events. In academic practices, this is a quite common, although not literal, use of the term “tradition,” but such a concept of tradition has no actual preconstituted historical reference. None of Hartz's claims about its constitution and impact were rendered in anything resembling a potentially falsifiable or even empirically arguable form. This tradition was not only basically metaphorical but, even in Hartz's own explicit formulation, largely ineffable and something that could be identified and recovered only by a therapeutically oriented genealogical analysis. It was neither a tradition initially open to view nor one that he uncovered and brought into relief for inspection. This is why most of the criticisms and defenses of Hartz that focus on the issue of whether he was factually correct seem so forced and often irrelevant as far as understanding and evaluating his work.

From the point that Hartz's book was published, there has been a persistent line of argument, on the part of historians and political and social theorists, claiming that he was, in some basic manner, historically and sociologically incorrect. Many have argued that the very idea of a basic underlying unanimity in America, whether advanced critically such as by Hartz or celebrated as in the case of Daniel Boorstin, belied the existence of deep conflicts and diversity as well as the importance of other traditions such as civic republicanism. Furthermore, much has been written to suggest that the United States is not as different from Europe as many of the “exceptionalist” persuasion have claimed. Much of this literature, and particularly that published during the last decade, represents an important body of scholarship, but although it often uses Hartz as a contrast model, it does not, for the most part, provide much insight into Hartz's book.³

Despite what many critics have alleged or implied, Hartz distinctly recognized and noted the one-dimensional character of his argument and the extent to which it participated in the American exceptionalist literature. Notwithstanding his claim about the pervasiveness of what he characterized as the liberal tradition, he also pointed out that, in many respects, there was great diversity and significant conflict across the American political experience. Arguments about how, in some manner, he painted an incorrect picture of the American past have, however, consistently been countered by a range of claims to the effect that his thesis is defensible historically and applicable to a sociological analysis of American politics and culture.

These perennial views on Hartz were recently manifest once again in a symposium published in Perspectives on Politics, an organ of the American Political Association.⁴

Here Philip Abbott, a political scientist, carefully reviewed and critically analyzed the criticisms that have been directed toward Hartz's work, but he defended Hartz's formulation by arguing that it remained the “most potent interpretation of American political thought” and suggesting, as a test case, how it might be employed as an “approach” to understanding the United States in the 1960s. Richard Iton, a political scientist specializing in African American studies, claimed that the book, in several respects, failed as a tool for accomplishing that task and that “Abbott and Hartz could do a better job of considering the influence of ascriptive traditions and practices upon American political thought and development.” Historian Sean Wilentz directly and systematically challenged Abbott's, then Hartz's, interpretation of American politics and culture in the 1960s. As useful as these discussions are in summarizing and exemplifying the debates that have revolved around Hartz's book, they, once again, did not look closely at the text, and they continued to focus on issues of historical verisimilitude and of the utility of the thesis as a tool of historical and political analysis. Although Hartz is typically presented as advancing something that might credibly be called an empirical argument, I suggest that engaging Hartz on matters such as whether there was more than one important tradition in the United States or whether Locke was as great an influence on American politics and culture as civic republicanism is somewhat irrelevant as far as understanding his work. And often those who argue with Hartz do so less on the basis of some distinct standard of judgment than by constructing alternative incommensurable analytically constituted traditions.

Hartz was quite clear about the metaphorical character of what he called “liberalism.” A metaphor is a “figure of speech” in which a term is detached from what it normally designates and transferred, implicitly or by analogy, to another object. An actual liberal tradition, as Hartz explicitly pointed out, was something that did not exist in the American experience. It was part of the history of Europe – along with feudalism, conservatism, socialism, and the like – all concepts that, he claimed, were alien to America. The apparent paradox, then, was that what Hartz referred to as the “liberal tradition in America” was really the absence of a liberal tradition. A careful reading of Hartz reveals that there were two liberal traditions being discussed: an actual liberal tradition, which existed in Europe, and the metaphorical, but historically absent, liberal tradition that he attributed to the United States. The latter, he claimed, was so pervasive that it could not be comprehended apart from a comparison with its opposite number. This, however, was not like saying, for example, that people who, all their life, live among liberals and never see a conservative lack an adequate sense of what it is to be a liberal. Even though those who Hartz conceptualized as American liberals were supposedly in various ways the historical descendants of European liberals, they were liberals only by virtue of their possession of what Hartz argued were, at some level of abstraction, liberal attributes. In other words, the American liberal was a token of a type. The type was supposedly based on historical particulars, but even these were less than clearly demonstrated. The point, however, is that once we realize that Hartz's concept of the liberal tradition was basically a rhetorical metaphor, there is little interpretive purchase in analytically and historically deconstructing it or defending it. The irony, however, is that Hartz's interpreters, and to some extent Hartz himself in the course of the book, reified the metaphor and treated it as a claim about an actual tradition. This has been a principal, but maybe unintended, legacy of his work.

As Hartz pointed out at the beginning of the book, his “analysis” was “based on what might be called the storybook truth about American history,” that is, the belief that the United States was in some way unique. But this was a “story” whose various versions extended far beyond popular culture and which was deeply embedded in American scholarship. The persuasive force of Hartz's imagery was built upon his recognition of this predisposition to believe in the American exception. He also noted at the outset that he was using “broad terms broadly” – terms such as “feudalism” and “liberalism” – rather than in any strict referential sense. He suggested that while some of the actual characteristics of feudalism were in fact present in America, “‘liberalism' is an even vaguer term clouded as it is by all sorts of modern social reform connotations.” The actual “American community” was, he admitted, only “in the broadest sense liberal” and a “liberal community.” Although Hartz claimed that he was using “liberal” in “the classic Lockian sense,” it is necessary to be careful in construing what he meant by that claim. Locke certainly did not employ the term “liberal,” and there was, at the time that Hartz wrote, no “classic” reigning academic account of Locke as the founder of a liberal tradition. Hartz was, maybe less than entirely self-consciously, contributing to the construction of an emerging vision of liberalism as something involving Locke and representing an actual tradition. He was one of a number of social theorists, particularly in the field of political science, who by mid-century had begun to refer to liberalism as a general intellectual and political tradition that explained, for better or worse, the condition of modernity and the character of American politics.

What Hartz was most specifically doing, as he made clear, was taking what he perceived, and what had been commonly viewed, as certain attributes of Locke's work, such as the valorization of individualism, and, by projecting those attributes, constructing the image of the liberal tradition. Locke, in Hartz's story, was also a metaphor, and a pervasive one that functioned as part of what he termed a “large generalization” used for grasping the “uniqueness” of America by “contrasting it with what is not unique.” American historians, particularly Progressives, Hartz argued, had insisted on the distinctiveness of America vis-à-vis Europe and had focused on indigenous conflicts; in the end, however, they had actually failed to juxtapose the American experience to “European history and politics.” What, he claimed, now required such a comparison was the fact that the United States had been, in unprecedented manner, suddenly thrust into world politics “where a whole series of alien cultures have crashed in upon the American world.” If Americans did not become conscious of their “idiosyncrasies,” through comparative analysis, they could understand and deal with neither the wider political universe in which they resided nor their own domestic problems. It was “the entire crisis of our time which compels us to make the journey to Europe and back which ends in the discovery of the American liberal world” (3–5). It is in this phrase that we can grasp the basic intellectual location of Hartz's work. It belongs to a whole class of literature that emerged in the 1950s and which posited a crisis of Western modernity and urged a need for a “historical” answer to questions about the nature and origins of that crisis. But most of those answers were far from literally historical – they were rhetorical evocations.

Hartz claimed that America, as a “non-feudal society,” lacked a genuine revolutionary tradition” and “a tradition of reaction.” It was thus a society that had begun with Locke and remained with Locke, that is, with “the universality of the liberal idea.” As a consequence of this “self-completing mechanism,” it eschewed socialist ideas and lacked a “socialist tradition.” This “tyranny of Locke” produced an “innocent” or “natural liberal mind” unencumbered by real conservative forebears, alternatives, and possibilities, and this in turn led Americans both to view their enemies in “satanic terms” while failing to recognize their own identity. It was this “fixed dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life,” which was both the basis and manifestation of a hidden consensus and “moral unanimity,” that, he urged, explained such things as the acceptance of pragmatism as a philosophy, the authority of the Supreme Court and the Constitution, and the emergence of pluralism and the group theory of politics which so pervasively dominated the American vision of democracy.⁵

But, Hartz argued, even when Americans might seem to have deviated from the Lockian path of limited government, such as in the case of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, what made such innovation possible was an underlying Lockian faith that it was not really deviance.

All these things “flourished on the corpse of philosophy” as the hegemony of Lockian rationalism was transformed into an irrational liberalism. One consequence was that there was no actual liberal movement, party, or tradition in America, because there was nothing for it to react against, and thus “‘liberalism' is a stranger in the land of its greatest realization and fulfillment.” The result was that liberalism's “compulsive power has been so great that it has posed a threat to liberty itself” as the “hidden conformitarian germ” of Locke's ideas blossomed into the “danger of unanimity” and “opinion” which took such forms as “Americanism” and the “red hysteria.” For Hartz, the problem of the modern age was that of what “counter resources a liberal society can muster against this deep and unwritten tyrannical compulsion it contains.” Although he suggested that the individualist ethic rooted in Locke was in large measure the culprit, Hartz himself embraced individualism as the essence of democracy and saw potential resources in the “individualist nature of the Lockian doctrine.” American Progressivism, both as a political and intellectual movement, had, however, seldom been able to draw adequately upon the positive dimension of this ethic as it consistently succumbed to various versions of a “national general will” that, in the past, had tended to intensify rather than shatter when confronted with difference either at home or abroad. He claimed that, in the 1950s, the ultimate outcome of this dialectic between individualism and conformity was in the balance, and his basic purpose was to tip that balance in the direction of self-realization and liberty (5–14).

Hartz, however, pointedly recognized that there were, and had been, distinct and important conflicts in American society. He acknowledged that “new historians have uncovered beneath our struggle for national independence a whole series of domestic conflicts” (67), and he noted that he was basically looking at the other side of the coin rather than failing to admit these tensions and differences. He stressed that, despite his account of liberalism as a “psychological whole,” he did not want “to obscure or to minimize the nature of the internal conflicts which have characterized American political life.” Further, with the possible exception of the Civil War, many of these conflicts were functionally correlative to those in Europe and the rest of the western world. His point was simply that these conflicts paled in the face of the greater dimension of unanimity that he wished to illuminate. The ultimate ends pursued in American life were, he claimed, always liberal ends, just as the outcomes were shaped by the liberal ideological context and “the magnificent material setting it found in the new world – only the means were different. The differences between parties, for example, amounted largely to family quarrels, and thus liberalism was, functionally, conservative just as all of what Americans thought of as conservatism was, functionally, liberal. Hartz's main quarrel with Progressive historians such as Charles Beard and J. Allen Smith was that they insisted on focusing on conflict when “‘solidarity'” and conflict were, from a broader perspective, “false alternatives” which obscured the wider ambience of the liberal framework in which both operated in a complementary manner.

Hartz also explicitly anticipated the criticism that his work was a “‘single-factor' analysis.” Although he admitted the limitations of “monistic” studies and arguments, he maintained that his account isolated a “significant historical variable” of the kind that was at the heart of “scientific analysis” and which served to balance the typical kinds of past explanations that had been offered by historians and social scientists (20–23). He also claimed that the relevance of his work was not a one-way street, since a study of America provided “data for checking Europe” and a comparative understanding of the importance of feudalism in that setting. Although he stressed his explanatory social scientific aims, Hartz, like Tocqueville, saw some normative “virtues in the European feudal ethos,” but he did not want to go so far in endorsing them as his contemporary “conservative” American intellectuals who, like the Progressives in an earlier time, were stressing the need for community. Hartz wanted to avoid being viewed as a Progressive and associated with the “shadow” cast by scholarship emanating from this perspective (24–27). It was not so much that he was ideologically at odds with the concerns that initiated this literature as the fact that much of it had been dedicated to the creation of a kind of national unity that undermined the value of individualism, which he wished to defend in an age of conformity.

Hartz was quite willing to concede that every generation rewrote history based on its own view, and often “in light of America's involvement with the world”, however, despite their attacks on such venerated periods as the founding, he argued that the Progressive historians had been prisoners of the liberal vision and represented a kind of liberal “nativism” in which they “carried on a profound nationalism of their own.” He was perceptive in his recognition that, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Progressives, despite their ideological retreat from their nineteenth century predecessors, still viewed American democracy as grounded in unity. Whether, as in the case of sociologist Robert Horton Cooley, it was a unity that was dormant and required resurrection or whether, as with public intellectuals such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann and political scientists such as Charles Merriam, it was largely one that was yet to be created.⁶

And even John Dewey (The Public and its Problems, 1927) had held on to the idea that democracy in America required that the “Great Society” with all its diversity be transformed into a “Great Community.”

According to Hartz, the Progressive diagnosis of divisiveness in the American tradition and the recommendations for solidarity were conducted with “the whole scheme of liberal unity blacked out.” Their dichotomies of conservative and radical were only a species of the liberal genus and, in a peculiar manner, further from the truth than the claims of the earlier conservative propagators of a vision of national homogeneity whom they had criticized. They always found a hero for every villain, and “in their demonology the nation never really sinned: only its inferior self did.” In a similar manner, those such as Arthur Bentley who contributed to the founding of a theory of pluralist democracy, also belied the underlying liberal consensus by their focus on society as fragmented into groups. According to Hartz, it was the message of Tocqueville's version of the tyranny of majority opinion that had been consistently overlooked in American historical analysis. Hartz anticipated that he would have harsh critics, because,

But Hartz claimed that “instead of recapturing our past, we have got to transcend it,” and this was the book's true goal. It was in many ways less about explaining the past than about escaping it. Ultimately, there was, he said, “no going home again for America” – either in deed or word. His book was not primarily about “recapturing the past” but about conjuring up an image of the past that would be persuasive in the present.

After marshalling and elaborating the details of his “historical” sketches, which focused on insisting how everything from the Revolution to the Civil War and forward through the Gilded Age to the New Deal, could be construed in terms of the image of a liberal tradition, Hartz returned to his basic and announced purpose. This was his critique of American politics at mid-century. The situation he described was one in which the United States, after all its splendid failure to come to consciousness of both itself and the character of other societies, was suddenly “catapulted to the heart of world politics” in the role of “the leading national power in the struggle against the communist revolution.” What now was at stake were the “success of American policy abroad and the fate of American freedom at home,” but the intellectual resources for coming to grips with these problems were suppressed by the heritage of a “colossal liberal absolutism,” which had caused “death by atrophy of the philosophical impulse.” This, he argued, inhibited “creative action abroad by identifying the alien with the unintelligible, and it inspires hysteria at home by generating the anxiety that unintelligible things produce.” The “red scare” and the voices of “Americanism” such as that of Joseph McCarthy represented an “irrational anticommunist frenzy” that alienated the United States from many democratic nations. The country even turned away from its own basic values, such as individualism, because of the fear of socialism, while embracing regimes that were not truly democratic. Much of what Hartz was referring to, with respect to both domestic and international Cold War politics, was going on at Harvard's political science department, where he was teaching, and it is important to remember this dimension of the context.⁷

Once again, he claimed, “an absolute national morality is inspired either to withdraw from ‘alien' things or to transform them” – “its messianism is the polar counterpart of its isolation,” and Americanism at home was the search for the purification of this morality.

Hartz's answer was to offer hope that the new phase of “world involvement” would engender a sense of difference and eventually ignite some “spark of philosophy” and awaken Americans. He saw some evidence of this in the twentieth century, but as he surveyed the previous years, he noted that it had been a race between tendencies that both “heightened and shattered” the forces of Americanism. It was in the present, in this moment of greatest crisis, however, that “if it is going to happen at all, I believe that it will begin happening now” (284–288). Although he acknowledged that Russia posed the greatest threat in history to world freedom, he argued that it was necessary to expose the internal dangers to liberty which emanated from the “liberal hysteria at home.” This was not a passing comment; rather it was an expression of his basic purpose and intention in writing.

As a political theorist, Hartz predictably stressed the intellectual dimension of politics. Part of the problem, he claimed, was that the contemporary world struggle was not just a material but a “psychological” or “ideological competition” in which the United States was forced to compete, but “since the American liberal creed is a submerged faith . . . it is obviously not a theory which other peoples can easily appropriate or understand.” Even the Americans themselves did not understand it. Consequently, the appropriate response was not to “export” some American creed but “to transcend the perspective it contains.” This would make it possible to understand the experience and situation of other countries in Europe and Asia and particularly the case of Russia which was characterized by a “genuine ideology of social revolution.”

But the greatest problem was still the contemporary and unprecedented degree of the “‘closing down' of Americanism at home” symbolized by McCarthy. McCarthy, however, as an individual, was only a symptom of a deeper malaise, and if that pathology was not identified, there was little hope for change. In the end, Hartz famously asked, “Can a people ‘born equal' ever understand peoples elsewhere that have to become so?” Yet he wanted to hold out “hope of an inward enrichment of culture and perspective” and “a new level of consciousness” regarding ourselves and others. This was important not only for the United States but, “given the totalitarian nature of Russian socialism, the hope for a free world surely lies in the power for transcending itself inherent in American liberalism,” and this required finding “what is best in that tradition.” For Hartz, this was what he called, without explication, the “concept of personality.” By this, he seems to have meant the ethic of individual freedom and its capacity for breaking the hold of the very conformity that, he, like Tocqueville, claimed, conditions of equality and individuality had produced. Although, in some respects, his argument sounded more like John Stuart Mill than Tocqueville, the basic problem was that essential democratic values, if they moved in a certain direction, could, like some autoimmune disease, become self-destructive. In the end, Hartz recommended Lockian solutions to Lockian problems, and, in a strange way he could not seem to project himself outside the parameters of the very liberal consensus he sought to identify.

It is no longer very meaningful to ponder the historical “truth” of Hartz's account or suggest emendations, but it has been just such an approach to his work that has led to the failure to interpret adequately what his goal was. The book is now a his- torical object, and its enduring value is found in the manner in which it shaped subsequent academic conversations and perceptions and the extent to which it was a, or perhaps the, major factor in the mid-century constitution of the concepts of liberalism and the liberal tradition.⁸

Furthermore, once the work is more properly interpreted, there is the question of what its present political and scholarly relevance might be. It is necessary to ask why Hartz chose the metaphor of liberalism and what the consequence of that choice has been. He could very well have made his argument about an American consensus, as Boorstin did, albeit with a significantly different vector, without using the term “liberal” at all and certainly without speaking of a liberal tradition.⁹ For Boorstin, the “givenness” of American life was grounded in a lack of ideology, and for Hartz it represented a hidden ideology that he characterized as liberalism. In both cases, there was the typical American claim that theory was to be found in practice.

The Liberal Tradition in America was not only a significant factor in the emergence of the idea of a liberal tradition but was a critical point in the turn away from liberalism as a term of approbation in both politics and the American academy. Prior to the 1930s, the word “liberalism” seldom appeared in either the language of American politics or in academic talk about politics. The concept was used occasionally generically to distinguish regimes that had moved away from authoritarianism and as a proper noun to refer to English and European parties and politics and to classical economic theory; however, even when it emerged as a more general concept, the meaning of “liberalism” was hardly fixed. Several factors account for the subsequent conceptual rise and expansion of “liberalism.” First, European commentators began to refer to America as liberal. Second, as the term “Progressive” lost its positive connotation in various circles, “liberal” often began to take its place in the vocabulary of individuals such as Woodrow Wilson. Third, by 1930, the theory of democratic pluralism had become the dominant paradigm of American political science, and “liberalism” became a preferred term as “democracy” began to lose some of its normative power as pluralists associated it with the “dogma” of a statist image of social unity and as it was appropriated by regimes that many considered to be the antithesis of democracy. Fourth, as the political world at large was increasingly viewed in a bipolar manner, liberalism qua pluralism was designated as the counterpart of, or counterpoint to, what was called, for the first time, “totalitarianism,” and the United States was viewed as the embodiment of the liberal spirit.

Although it was in the discourse of politics that the concept of liberalism first took on substantive meaning, it began, during the late 1930s, to gravitate into the universe of academic discourse where it was gradually appropriated, emptied of its concrete mundane political meaning representing either laissez-faire or interventionist policies, infused with philosophical content, and then reified and reapplied to political events and extrapolated backward as a historical tradition. Although Hartz was writing at the highpoint of this academic transfiguration of the concept of liberalism, the principal impetus behind this transformation was the European émigré scholars' entrance into the conversations of political science and history. They brought with them both the memory and idea of an actual liberal tradition in politics and the image of a parallel, but entwined, philosophical development rooted in the origins of modern thought and thinkers such as Locke. The predominant image of liberalism propagated by Leo Strauss, Otto Kirchheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and others was derived from a number of diverse sources, ranging from Karl Marx to Carl Schmitt. They implanted the idea that liberalism, along with the attending values of relativism, pluralism, scientism, and progress, were deeply implicated in the decline of the West and in a political and intellectual crisis manifest in mass society and the advent of totalitarianism. Even more generally, the problem was located in the rise of society that Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1959) associated with the demise of genuine political life and which Sheldon Wolin would later refer to as the “sublimation of politics” (Politics and Vision, 1960). It was not, however, until after WWII that this vision began to seep significantly into American scholarship.¹⁰

Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, the study of the history of political theory, from Plato to the present, was institutionalized, and the classic texts were transformed from a chronologically organized canon into a “great tradition” with a sense of world-historical meaning and significance. This genre reached its apex in works such as George Sabine's A History of Political Theory (1937), which was essentially an account, from Aristotle onward, of the progress of democratic pluralism and what Sabine viewed as a general liberal spirit. What is worth noting, however, is that Sabine, as well as earlier writers, neither counted Locke as a liberal nor isolated any specific liberal tradition that resembled that which would soon be articulated. The idea of Locke as a liberal, as well as that of Tocqueville as a great theorist of American democracy, were largely mid-century academic creations, and Hartz's book was a key element in these developments.

Concurrent with Hartz's first formulations, Strauss (Natural Right and History, 1953) and Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, 1951) produced full-blown versions of their story of the decline of Western political thought. This was an image of decline marked by the beginning of liberalism as both a theoretical and political tradition that they claimed was rooted in the ideas of Locke and that had previously functioned as the threshold of contemporary totalitarianism, but had now proved inadequate as a bulwark against these incursions into the free world. This new story of the history of political theory, which largely reversed the received view represented in, for example, Frederick Watkins's The Political Tradition of the West: A Study of the Development of Modern Liberalism (1948), had, for a decade, been elaborated by a variety of émigrés as well as by indigenous fellow-travelers such as John Hallowell (The Decline of Liberalism, 1943). It would soon extend forward to works such as that of Wolin, who was in part influenced by Hartz's teaching, just as Bernard Crick's critique of the American Science of Politics (1959), as embodying a liberal ideology, was in part inspired by visiting with Hartz at Harvard.

It was in America that the émigrés discovered what Wolin would refer to as the “vocation” of political theory and the idea of the great tradition; however, as in the case of the concept of liberalism, they replaced the contents of this intellectual vessel and transformed the story of liberal progress into a tale of liberal decline, which became the basis of a critique of American politics and political science. As with Hartz, they, in most instances, held out some hope for a liberal cure for liberal ills, but the kinds of problems that they associated with liberalism, such as an unreflective materialist mass society with authoritarian implications, resonated in Hartz's account. Essential to the émigré critique was an argument about the pathologies of pluralism – a view also reflected in Hartz's work. He suggested that something such as Bentley's account of pluralist politics was conceivable only on the assumption that there was an underlying unity, and he was quite correct on that score. At the core of the pluralist account of democracy, from its emergence in the 1920s to its rearticulation by Pendelton Herring (The Politics of Democracy, 1940), David Truman (The Governmental Process, 1951), and Robert Dahl (A Preface to Democratic Theory, 1956), was the idea of a basic consensus that held congeries of interest together and provided the rules of the game. For many leading political scientists of this period, including Bernard Berelson, Giovanni Sartori, and Harry Eckstein, democracy was identified with stability, which was rooted in consensus. In a strange way, Hartz validated that claim even as he called into question the nature and effects of the consensus. Yet in criticizing the consensus, he was, like some many theorists of this period, such as C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956), striking at the heart of the pluralist doctrine. This doctrine was the core of the theory of democracy that was embedded in the discourse of American political science and that, in a broader sense, had become, as Theodore Lowi would argue (The End of Liberalism, 1969), the public philosophy in the United States.

The American consensus, Hartz claimed, was neither a neutral procedural protocol nor a benign agreement on basic values that constituted, as Boorstin had argued, the “genius of American politics.” Rather, it was an often pernicious ideological blindness. By the early 1960s, the critique of liberalism had became largely definitive of the literature of political theory as this subfield increasingly became a critical, dissenting voice alienated from mainstream behavioral political science and its theory of democracy. It seemed that any critical evaluation of politics required a historical narrative that would explain the pathology of the present. This critique was an equal opportunity endeavor, embraced by thinkers across the ideological spectrum from Strauss to Max Hork-heimer, and it was represented in less easily categorized arguments such as that of Arendt. This was the general intellectual context of Hartz's work, it is difficult to imagine his book outside that context.

Although The Liberal Tradition contributed significantly to the reification of the concept of liberalism in academic discourse, Hartz, himself, was ambivalent in his use of the concept. While he explicitly indicated that he was using the term “liberalism” and subsequent references to Locke simply as convenient symbols or labels for a number of analytically distinguishable attributes, his language and presentation often undermined that perspective. He often conveyed the sense that it was actually Locke's ideas and their progeny that was at issue and that there was, literally, an actual liberal tradition that could be historically investigated. Most of Hartz's readers, however, were not ambivalent. Perhaps more than any other work of this period, it was Hartz's book, and the arguments of both its defenders and detractors that fixed in academic discourse the assumption that there was, for better or worse, such a historically autonomous tradition. All assumed that what was being discussed was not simply a retrospective construction but an inherited complex of ideas and practices that had a distinct beginning, had evolved and been transmitted between generations, and had precipitated a crisis in western politics and political thought. It is unlikely that without Hartz's book the generation-long academic debate about whether the American founding was liberal or republican would have occurred. Much of the now vast literature on various facets of liberalism and the liberal tradition would be inconceivable apart from the conversation that this work initiated. Hartz's critics, despite their disagreements and qualifications, have, on the whole, tended to reinforce the sense of the actuality of the tradition, at least to the extent that they have treated his claim as a corrigible historical argument.

How, in the end, do we characterize and read The Liberal Tradition in America? As I noted earlier, it is not likely that he was, or could have been, entirely self-conscious about the genre in which he was participating – and creating. He probably did construe his work as historical in some sense that exceeded mere talking about the past. I suggest, however, that the work really belongs to the literary form of the “essay,” which is defined as “a composition on a single subject, usually presenting the personal views of the author” that reflects a somewhat experimental attitude. By this definition, an essay involves an “attempt” or probe justified less by logic and evidentiary verisimilitude than by the capacity of the form and content of the narrative itself to compel agreement. Hartz's work, essentially a treatise on the dangers to liberty in the context of the Cold War and about a persistent feature of American culture that instigated and sustained that danger, meets these criteria. It is difficult, even for critics, to come away from Hartz's book without the sense that, like his hero Tocqueville, he elicited some deep insight into the character of American culture and politics, but it is something we cannot easily categorize as a historical discovery. Whatever quarrels scholars have initiated with Hartz's thesis, few have failed to recognize the power of his image or have been willing to deny that he provided a basic window into American political life, but to treat it as either a historical discovery or an approach to understanding history is to miss the point of his argument and mistake the genre to which it belongs. Although liberalism functioned as a rhetorical metaphor in Hartz's essay, this is not to say that it lacked analytical significance and meaning.

The best way to think about the nature of Hartz's formulation is in terms of Max Weber's concept of the “ideal type” – or Ludwig Wittgenstein's image of a “perspicuous representation.” In both cases, the aim was to produce neither an idiographic description nor an explanatory historical account but rather to extract and abstract from largely accepted facts a model or typification that captured the essence and underlying meaning of the phenomena in question.

Per Weber's concept, the “ideal type” was a product of the fundamental paradox of social scientific analysis, that is, the need to find a language for reconstructing, generalizing, and conveying the meaning of a preconstituted and historically situated discursive cultural construction. The ideal type was like a “utopia” produced by an “accentuation of particular elements of reality” and by bringing together “certain relationships and events of historical life into an internally coherent conceptual cosmos.” Such concepts were a means or heuristic rather than logically exclusive hypotheses or descriptions that could be judged true or false. The ideal type was neither an “ethical” ideal nor a “representation of the real” but a vehicle of interpretation. Such reconstructions were, Weber claimed,

It would seem difficult to find a better description of Hartz's concept of the liberal tradition.

Wittgenstein might be construed as identifying something approximating Weber's description of ideal types when he spoke of the manner in which philosophy, or any metapractice, might approach its subject matter. Wittgenstein suggested that what was required in giving an account of a Lebensform and Weltbild, that is, what might be called a form of cultural objects, was a “perspicuous representation” or “sketches of a landscape” that, despite its aspectival point of view, “produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections'.” The kind of representation that he sought was to be accomplished by “inventing intermediate cases” that determined “the way we look at things.” Although the subject matter consisted of “language games” embedded in various social practices, he recommended, and saw the necessity of creating, second-order language-games that would be “set up as objects of comparison” and that were “meant to throw light on the facts . . . by way not only of similarities, but also dissimilarities.” Here one might generalize in the sense of seeking “family resemblances” but not succumb to the kind of “craving for generality” that characterized so much of modern thought. Such a model would, again, be, “an object of comparison . . . a measuring rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond.”¹²

For Wittgenstein, as for Hartz, the purpose of such analytical constructs was both explanatory and therapeutic. The goal was in part to deconstruct what Wittgenstein spoke of as the pictures that hold one captive and to open up other ways of seeing.

We might reasonably liken Hartz's book to Weber's Protestant Ethic in that it was not really a historical explanation of American politics but rather a reconstruction used to interpret social phenomena and make them and their cultural significance understandable. Disputes about whether Hartz was, historically, right or wrong are as otiose as arguments about whether it was Marx or Weber who was correct about the origins of capitalism and whether their historical references actually proved their thesis. There are few who would deny that Weber and Marx contributed to an understanding of the phenomenon of capitalism, and whatever one might say about Hartz's account of the liberal tradition, it would be difficult, particularly at this moment in time, to dismiss the significance of his conclusion that Americans typically deal with political and cultural “otherness” by either isolating themselves or attempting to transform the world in their own image. His representation of the character of American foreign policy and the dialectic between that policy and issues of domestic freedom could not be more poignant.

Weber did note, however, that, in the case of an ideal type, empirical “historical research” could determine how closely it approximated an individual instance of what was specified. The purpose of the ideal type was to provide a path to accessing and understanding social and historical phenomena. From this perspective, I urge that, rather than attempting to judge whether Hartz was historically correct or incorrect about the liberal consensus, we should focus on the extent to which his construction illuminates not only the present context but the more general history of American politics. While it is no more a framework or “approach” to research on American history than the Protestant Ethic provides a research design for understanding modern economics, it might provide a means for producing, as Weber hoped the ideal type would, limited generalizations about the phenomena of American politics that at once go beyond singular historical accounts but yet do justice to the particularities of political phenomena. But, as Weber warned regarding the formation of ideal types, it is necessary to guard against the persistent danger of reification. Where the ideal type went wrong, as Weber argued with respect to the model embraced by classical economics, was when it was universalized and when it was confused with the object it was designed to illuminate. Failing to recognize these dangers has led two generations of political theorists and historians into sterile debates about a mythical tradition that has been in some ways as obfuscating as the American dream world which it was designed to shatter.