On Hartz and the American Liberal Tradition and the Kitschy American elites
The Liberal Tradition in America: An interpretation of American political thought since the Revolution (1955); hereafter Liberal Tradition) by Louis Hartz was rather important during the Cold War. It’s a veritable citation monster. In particular it forged a tight link between America as a Lockean/liberal nation. As Duncan Bell (2014) noted “The Lockean narrative was frequently generalised into a broader claim about the Lockean-liberal character of Anglo-American (sometimes Western) societies, an interpretive strategy popularised by Louis Hartz and that was to have a profound effect on the emergent subfield of comparative politics.” (p. 704)
As regular readers know I am not a fan of the tight linkage of liberalism and Locke-anism which obscures how liberalism was historically developed as a critical response to Locke’s and Lockean mercantilism and obscures what’s distinctive about the initial liberal moment between, say, 1776-1820. In fact, if I am not mistaken Hartz (1919 – 1986) never quotes from Locke and never identifies texts in Locke with any of the claims he attributes to American liberalism (which, in addition, he often elides and conflates with Whiggery). But about all of that some other time much more.
If we leave aside my pet-peeve on the conflation of liberalism and Locke-anism, the Liberal Tradition has not held up especially well. Some truly astonishing omissions are the lack of interest in the whole system of Jim Crow (not just as racism, but also as a political economy, a system of domination, and legal philosophy) and a more general lack of interest in feminism and what (euphemistically) we might call the West (and Latino Southwest). This is ‘American’ as seen from the North-East (but not Waspy—Thoreau and many other anguished Bostonians are ignored) and Midwest. In addition, it is remarkably blasé about what we may call the features of Jacksonian democracy toward those not part of the American demos.
But before I get to today’s topic, the book also has some really astonishing strengths in addition to the fact that it carries its learning very lightly and is quite readable with many quotable one-liners and apercus. First, while focused on America, it is genuinely comparative political theory with lots of incredibly helpful comparisons and contrasts with the situation in England and France. And it connects this to important historical and institutional contrasts.
The most important of these contrasts, which drives the whole narrative, is that America never had to overcome feudalism; this is then used to offer a running criticism of the theoretical limitations of American Marxism and a means to explain the ways in which American progressivism could hew toward liberalism.
Yes, he misses the significance of Burnham’s great works from the 1940s completely and doesn’t pick up on the publication of The Conservative Mind (1953) by Russell Kirk. He is writing in a bubble. Even so, I also thought his treatment of the thinkers of the American South was surprisingly multi-faceted, despite evincing no sympathy for them or their racism at all. In particular, he treats Fitzhugh so charitably (which reminded me of Berlin on some of the nineteenth century romantics) that it may be the first time reading about him I didn’t think Fitzhugh was the inventor of fascism.
Okay, today I want to focus on a side comment in his analysis. That connects to one of his real strengths. The absence of feudalism Stateside explain the absence of a romantic/paternalism Whig nationalism (why the US never had its Bismarck nor Disraeli). One of the ways he cashes this out (with nods to Veblen that I have omitted) is as follows:
An elite suspended between aristocratic frustration and bourgeois anxiety is bound to have some limitations, and one of these was that it did not always display the highest degree of responsibility. If it was “un-American” to be feudal, why should one bother with feudal paternalism? Power, as once again Ashley saw, came to be an end in itself for the new American giant, “his essential reward,” which gave him the feeling, as with Pullman, that a “principle was involved” when labor unions struck. Even William Graham Sumner worried about this, though he had nothing to say in favor of unions, and after arguing at one point that the “mercantile” class ought to give up once and for all the idea of aping aristocrats, he finally conceded that some interpenetration of feudal with mercantile habits might do a lot for bourgeois leadership. (p. 222)
Before I get to the present. The oddity of Hartz’s book is that he misses how almost more than a century after Bentham’s attack on corruption,** progressivism in America was connected to a frontal attack on a spoils/patronage system so characteristic of nineteenth century American government (and will be characteristic again) and (also un-mentioned) that it simultaneously relied on party-machines in the big cities that were de facto clientelist in character (through the present) and Unions that also often re-enforced color-lines. But that also reinforces Hartz’s point: American elites were never responsible in the sense described here.* It doesn’t follow they were always as irresponsible as now.
The underlying mechanism is described as follows:
Now it is this rise of a race of giants in an intensified democratic setting which gives to the status issue a vividness greater than it had ever had in the American liberal world…He might long for higher things, but lacking the Tory outlet, barred, as Ashley put it, from “securing a baronetcy, buying a country estate, founding a family, and ending his days with the rustics bobbing to him and a Debrett on the study table,” where was he to find such things?…But within the American world itself there was no escape from the race even for those who won it, and any attempt to escape, to claim the feudal privilege in any way, as George Baer once did when he referred to the “infinite wisdom of God,” was bound to be blasted by the Progressive with the very language the Whig habitually used against him: as being outside the American ethos. Thus the painful resort of the American “aristocracy” was an ever increasing display of material wealth itself, which indicated not removal from the race but merely victory. (220-221)
Obviously, this is not the whole story about the absence of fruitful honor among American elites. (But Hartz is on to something: the absence of genuine fear of a proletarian revolution is a non-trivial difference that makes a difference.) But it goes some way to help explain not just the range and intensity of rent-reeking we see now, but also why politics itself must be conquered and be re-made as a source of endless private deals and income. (This is exaggeration, of course, American philanthropy by the wealthy is more dynamic than the European kind.)
This contrast between the effect of European feudalism on Europe vs its absence in Stateside is also aesthetic in character. Not to put too fine a point on it, and not to be mocked by
[@Hinternet] for my European bourgeois sensibility, but the embrace of joyful kitsch by American contemporary elites of all political stripes is a genuine contrast with most of their counterparts in Europe. Orban went for Scruton, who is un-imaginable in the MAGA White House (recall also here and here).Okay I have gone on long enough. You get the start of point.
*Perhaps, there is a period during the Cold War that may be the exception that proves the rule.
**He is not wholly blind to the trajectory here. For example, he writes, “But Dicey nevertheless overlooked the fact that along with Bentham in England had gone Ricardo, and that the American liberals now had to import the latter fifty years late into their own milieu.” (p. 215)