Who is louis hartz

Liberalism's Lockean outlook was America's one and only political philosophy, he believed. If the purpose of history is to learn from the past, the ambitions of people like Hartz and the subsequent analysis of people like Hulliung and his colleagues are necessary ingredients.

Whatever its standing today, its impact was undeniably huge in its own day and its reassessment by Hulliung and his contributors is long overdue. In this new book, eight prominent scholars consider whether Hartz's analysis should be repudiated or updated and whether a study of America as a "liberal society" is still a rewarding undertaking. Offering their own respective understandings of the significance of The Liberal Tradition in America in the worlds of yesterday and today, they reassess the Hartzian legacy after half a century while also addressing the triumphs, failures, trials, and tribulations of liberalism in America.

These eight distinguished scholars offer insights that are often critical of Hartz, representing a plurality of viewpoints that suggest no definitive conclusion as to the status today of his famous book. But although some may judge Hartz's work as misguided, they affirm that his concern for the fate of liberal society is still with us. These stimulating essays will reward all readers who seek a better understanding of both the Hartzian legacy and America's brand of liberalism today.

More than just engaging with Hartz, they bring their own views of the American liberal tradition to the fore.

The nobility, which sometimes looked with favor on the philosophes , did not see the danger of its being undermined by corrosive social speculation. In America the opposition came not from the generalities of the philosophes but from the specific grievances of practical men. The colonial legislatures took the lead, and the politicians were only forced by circumstances to become theorists. The Americans could be more sober and responsible as they proposed new adjustments.

In the absence of a feudal order people like Sam Adams or James Otis could act on behalf of an already established responsible government. In America the clergy, instead of being a source of corruption and intolerance, would lead the struggle for change, in a situation which was not socially revolutionary. Those first two lectures Hartz gave serve now, as they did then, to introduce the nature of his work; he gave another stimulating 23 before the summer course was over.

Individual insights that he advanced had been anticipated before by others. But no one had put them together as he had, with the same purposes in mind. One lecture was on why England did not have a revolution; another touched on the nature of human freedom; and he worked all this into the fate of nationalism in Italy and Germany. If, as Hartz believed, philosophizing exists only where there is fundamental social conflict, it is no wonder that American political thought, compared to what happened in Europe, never succeeded in getting off the ground.

My notes from that course do not indicate that he ever once returned to his point about the creativity that took place in the antebellum American South. According to Hartz the issues in American history had lacked the basic character of European conflicts.

And he thought that the American experience became unique in the context of the political principles common to Western Europe. I suppose it was because of a kind of missionary spirit that I had acquired that I did not then mention a blunder Hartz had made in the epigraph to his book.

Essentially Hartz was proposing a new, full-scale theory about the course of American history. If America had essentially been a liberal society from the outset, and had had no need for a revolution on a European scale, then that explained why America had also lacked a Reaction, and the tradition of genuine conservatism that was so characteristically a part of European political thought. Ideas had consequences, and were not just reflexive of social circumstances.

For in America the state had never been charged with the same purposes of reform which European leftists like Bentham and Voltaire had intended for it. He was trying to expose a fixed, dogmatic liberalism in American life. It was, he held, only because of the nature of the American liberal consensus that so much attention could be paid to technique rather than first principles. Hartz used the name of John Locke to symbolize the kind of liberalism characteristic of America: consent was the ultimate basis for political obligation; political communities arose out of the rational agreement of its individual members; and individual liberties, including importantly property rights, were the ultimate purposes for which the legitimate community existed.

Hartz was not citing Locke for purposes of technical philosophical analysis; nor was Hartz making a historical argument about how frequently the colonists read Locke, or cited him. Hartz had little interest in the study of political ideas as a scholastic exercise but rather wanted to use Locke as a symbol for a brand of political thought which could illuminate political reality.

But he hoped that the perspective which would enable America to overcome its provincialism might arise from the new significance for the country of world politics. Hartz was not trying, as it has been so often alleged of him, to emphasize solidarity in order to minimize the significance of conflict in American history or to downgrade the importance of the struggles that had taken place.

He was instead trying to describe the ideological circumference in which conflicts in America had occurred. American studies had been, Hartz thought, promoted by nationalist forces that were blind to a comparative perspective.

While progressive historians saw pendulum-like swings recurring throughout the American past, he thought his own outlook was less complacently confident that political virtue would eventually triumph.

Hartz picked four main periods in American history to illustrate the power of his liberal society analysis: the American Revolution, Jacksonianism, the South before the Civil War, and the epoch symbolized by the writings of Horatio Alger. He littered his text with the names of thinkers who might be familiar to students of intellectual history, but were bound to sound unusual in an interpretive work about American political thought.

There is little doubt that his categories have permanently affected the way historians treat that phase. The books that were written by the Founding Fathers, and the arguments that they advanced both against the British as well as in behalf of the new Constitution, represent a permanent addition to Western thought.

A few years later, when C. Fitzhugh was a neglected writer from a forgotten school of thought until Hartz called attention to him. Fitzhugh had not only defended slavery but had done so within terms outside a liberal framework. Fitzhugh saw the merits of hierarchy, restraint, and order and at the same time assailed the North for embodying a worse form of tyranny than anything the South practiced.

Like European conservative thinkers, Fitzhugh saw the hypocrisy behind the Northern commitment to freedom. Genuine liberty requires a social basis for support, while to Fitzhugh the freedom of the Northern workingman was a fiction. As this argument was re-created by Hartz, Fitzhugh appeared as a lonely seer able to break through the conventional thinking of American culture. For what kind of conservative could Fitzhugh be, in a section of the country which honored Thomas Jefferson so centrally among its forefathers?

While Fitzhugh could assail the encroachments of the North, he did not seem able to acknowledge the degree to which the South was part of a tradition of liberalism. Fitzhugh was fascinating precisely because the problem of slavery drove him beyond the insights typical of liberalism.

The Liberal Tradition in America was widely recognized as a landmark in the understanding of American political thinking. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Curiously enough the most savage onslaught on Hartz had come from Daniel J.

Boorstin, the former librarian of Congress but then a professor at the University of Chicago. But Boorstin, an ex-Marxist, then saw Hartz as a prisoner of European comparisons. To me the remarkable feature of this book on political thought is the regular substitution of nonintellectual categories for ideas. It is basically, I think, a study of the un conscious mind of America, conditioned by a peculiar historical and social experience.

Each time I have gone through The Liberal Tradition in America I have found individual insights that are new to me as his argument freshly illuminated writers with whom I was now more familiar. At the time I first read it successfully through, however, it simply made me take more courses by Hartz.

It was primarily on European thinkers, and it remains the greatest series of lectures I have ever heard delivered. My huge stack of notes makes me remember how exhilarated rather than exhausted I was by note-taking at the time. He did, however, once publish an article drawn from a popular undergraduate course called Democratic Theory and Its Critics, which I audited before I graduated. Hartz had been part of the post-World War II proponents of General Education at Harvard, and while that generation of scholars who believed in the creation of the program have now all passed from the teaching scene, and the General Education courses replaced by a different curriculum, a version of the same course is still being taught at Harvard.

In Democratic Theory and Its Critics he outlined the classical defense of liberalism, as articulated by Locke, Bentham, and Rousseau, and then showed how it fared in the face of 20th-century challenges. Hartz was proposing to try to preserve the ideals of democracy in the face of fresh insights on the part of modern thinkers. He presented the ideas of the English guild socialists and the American pluralists; he taught Freud and elitist theorists; and he articulated the challenge of socialist ideology.

His objective was to reconstruct liberalism in the light of these 20th-century schools of thought. Students came away with an understanding of what some of the key problems associated with democratic theory might be. He had a Toynbeean tendency, and evidently aspired to understand all of world history.

With the help of four distinguished collaborators Hartz had extended his insight into American history to help understand the central strands in the histories of Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. My own work was then on the mundane issues of Ph. I chose Hartz as my supervisor, which in that department at Harvard meant that if he approved of your work that was essentially all the secure backing that one needed. I remember proposing to write on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, but hesitated to Hartz on the grounds that I might not yet be ready to take on such an immense figure like Hobbes.

In those days I was his head course-assistant in his Democratic Theory and Its Critics, and we chatted on informal occasions. He once said to me in a quiet way that he regretted the neglected role of race in his The Liberal Tradition in America. I remember, when a draft of my thesis was finished, that we had lunch once to discuss it; and he challenged me so about what my work had added up to that the luncheon essentially forced out of me the writing of a new conclusion to the dissertation.

After getting my Ph. I can never forget the despair I felt about myself, when I first began lecturing, after I once again heard him perform in class. My only consolation was that there was no necessary reason that I had to proceed like him, although in my heart I knew my own work could be more structured. Before giving his own lectures I had seen him sitting alone in an isolated coffee shop totally concentrated on his lecture notes. But I believe that at that time Hartz still had some exceptionally promising pupils.

They did not go to Hartz, as some students went to others, for the sake of future patronage; he never had his eye on possible job openings.