So the other day I bought a friend of mine with a degree in Political Science a book called The Liberal Tradition in America by Louis Hartz. This was a book I stumbled across as I was researching my Masters dissertation, and it has a really provocative thesis which has been rolling around in my brain ever since. Basically, according to Hartz, since America, unlike Europe, has never had to contend with feudalism or any of its related residua like aristocracy, guilds, a deeply embedded sense of class consciousness, or an essentially agrarian understanding of economic activity, Americans (or at least the white ones) were, as Tocqueville put it, born free without ever having to become so. So, Lockean liberalism, which in Europe was a new and radical idea which had to contend against and defeat a feudalist conservatism, was basically the ideological baseline or starting point for almost everybody in America. Moreover, since socialism developed later in the nineteenth century in Europe largely in opposition to the remnants of feudalism, there has been little if any ideological impetus for the establishment of a meaningful socialist tradition in America either (and to those who claim the contemporary Democratic Party is socialist, may I direct you to a dictionary?) Put simply, Lockean liberalism here has never had to face a meaningful challenge either from its left (there are no Karl Marxes in America) or its right (and no Edmund Burkes either). All the mainstream politics here basically boil down ultimately to big and rich property-owners (securing freedom so the the virtuous job-creators can create jobs) vs. small-time or aspiring property owners (yay to equality of opportunity and boo to corporate i.e. rich peoples influence in politics). Heady stuff, I know, but I found this really cool lecture Hartz delivered right before Johnson obliterated Goldwater (unchallenged liberalism indeed) where he not only summarizes all this much better than I, but also seems to predict the explosion of experimentation in culture and social behavior which was then looming only a year or so away. And if youve read this far, you may be just the type who can abide it:
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 04:33:26 +0000
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