American Liberalism
The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution.
by Louis Hartz.
Harcourt, Brace. 329 pp. $4.75.

Mr. Hartz attempts to explain the American liberal tradition by relating it to European history. This relation, he tells us, lies primarily in the absence of feudalism in America, and secondarily in the crucial influence of certain European ideas (or rather books), notably those of John Locke. Parts of this volume have already appeared as brief essays in learned journals, and in that form seemed brilliant. But this is not the work we had hoped for from Mr. Hartz. His occasional passages of profound exegesis do not add up to a fresh and coherent interpretation of American liberalism. He does, however, unwittingly reveal a good deal about the present state of the liberal tradition in America.

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Although Mr. Hartz purports to liberate our thinking about ourselves, he ends by confining his thinking about America in a prison of European comparisons. He seems unable to describe what is characteristically American except by enumerating the several peculiarly European phenomena which have happened to be absent from American history. The basic fact, which dominates the book, is “the absence of feudalism”; but also “we have never had a real [i.e. European] conservative tradition”; “there were three parts to the problem American Whiggery faced: the absence of an aristocracy to fight, the absence of an aristocracy to ally with, and the absence of a mob to denounce”; “The Civil War . . . if it seems on the surface like a French Revolution in reverse, is really nothing of the kind.” And so it goes. This is all like describing a horse by saying that it is an animal that lacks the trunk of the elephant, has not the neck of the giraffe, and also cannot jump like a kangaroo. But how much clearer and more helpful simply to say what a horse looks like and how it behaves!

This preoccupation with European comparison carries with it, of course, a readiness to accept European “liberal” clichés about American culture. We are “a kind of national embodiment of the concept of the bourgeoisie”; we suffer from a “conformitarian ethos”; we have attached “to the Horatio Alger cosmos the grand and glorious label of Americanism.” The most prominent feature of recent American life is the “red scare mentality.” Mr. Hartz’s obviously lively mind expresses itself not in new insights but in the translation of cliché into paradox. “The outstanding thing about socialism in America,” he tells us, “was not its presence but its absence.”

The obscurity of Mr. Hartz’s style comes not only from his obsession with the superficially paradoxical but from his prodigious bookishness. These pages bristle with allusions; and the reader is made to feel that if he is not already as learned as the author, he cannot hope to understand what the author has to say.

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Unfortunately, this is not merely a stylistic mannerism, nor is it the inevitable disproportion between the scholar and the amateur. It betrays perhaps the deepest flaw in the book—as also in contemporary liberalism—namely, a weakness for mistaking books for life. “Condorcet might make sense out of Burke’s traditionalism, for it was the reverse of his own activism, but what could he say about Otis, who combined both concepts in a synthesis that neither had seen?” “Whatever might be said about Jackson, he is not a Benjamin Disraeli; and whatever might be said about Leggett, he is something short of a Friedrich Lasalle.” Calhoun is described as one who tried “to live at the same time in the dark world of Sir Walter Scott and the brightly lit world of John Locke.” Mr. Hartz writes as if the American past had been inhabited not by people but by books. His “American liberalism” is a baroque tapestry of books, and books about books, but hardly finds place for the facts of life. Such institutions as equality, representative government, federalism, constitutionalism, civil liberties, free enterprise, and free public education are either referred to not at all, or described in the mirror of hostile critics. For Mr. Hartz no event or institution seems quite so important as a book; the notion that even books might finally have to be justified in the texture of life or in the shape of institutions is nowhere seriously suggested.

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It is, of course, dangerous these days to accuse anyone of bookishness, since that makes the critic an “anti-intellectual.” But this book is a monument of hyper-intellectualism. It overlooks the everyday operation of our institutions for the narrower satisfaction of discussing the neatly arranged contents of books. It betrays the mind which has become more interested in playing with itself than with its subject. In this Mr. Hartz’s work is perhaps an accurate expression of the current “liberal” tradition, which seems unable to avert its gaze from the library long enough to discover the characteristic processes and virtues of American life; and which is more concerned to develop a language in which a priesthood can preach to the converted than with finding avenues to the great community.

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