Inactive Theory & Practice
Nobody Here but Those Liberals: Alan Wolfe on Louis Hartz
Alan Wolfe’s essay in the New York Times Book Review on Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America raises some interesting, Independence Day-like issues that call for comment. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read Hartz’s book (do I get credit for owning and browsing it?), so my comments here are comments on Wolfe’s essay, not Hartz’s book.
The thesis of Hartz’s book—as Wolfe describes it, and as seems confirmed by my assiduous browsing--is that American politics operates within an ideological consensus established by the premises of a Lockean politics. Wolfe puts it as follows:
The American consensus, Hartz argued, stemmed from the ideas of the British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). For Locke, equality is natural to human beings because at a minimum all people own the same property: their labor. Freedom is preferable to authoritarianism because the best governments are those that win the consent of the people. Religious toleration is a good idea because faiths that are free will be stronger than those that are coerced. Hartz argued that Locke's liberalism had morphed into the American way of life, creating a consensus around property rights, social mobility, individual freedom and popular democracy so powerful that no one could escape it.So while intellectual historians before Hartz had seen “American political thought…through the lens of conflict,” Hartz saw it through the lens of Lockean consensus.
There’s something deeply right about that—and something just as deeply misleading. It’s unquestionably true, I think, that American politics is fundamentally Lockean; that claim has been borne out by post-Hartzian scholarship as well. And Wolfe describes the ingredients of a Lockean politics accurately enough. The trouble for Hartz’s thesis, however, is that a commitment to Lockean politics is as compatible with consensus as it is with conflict.
It’s a matter of perspective. If you look at American politics by comparison with, say, Egyptian or Pakistani politics, what stands out is the shared American commitment to Lockean liberalism. But if you focus in a more fine-grained way at what distinguishes left-liberals from say classical liberals in America, what stands out are the differences in their interpretations of Lockean liberalism. Lockeans take “freedom” to be the defining political value, but one look at discussions at HNN should demonstrate the equivocality of that term. My recent post here on eminent domain—and Oscar Chamberlain’s response to it —is a case in point. Oscar and I both profess to believe in property rights, but we disagree on their content and what counts as a rights-violation. From one perspective, there’s an agreement there; from another, a fairly radical disagreement with radically different practical implications.
Wolfe goes on later in the article to praise Hartz’s prescience:
Yet Hartz got the large picture astonishingly right. It is not just that Republicans praise the sanctity of property rights; Democrats, they claim, represent the elite, while they stand for the common man. Trying to roll back the egalitarian reforms of the New Deal, Republicans describe their goal, with perfect Lockean pitch, as ''an ownership society.''That’s a bit exaggerated. I see Republicans praising the “sanctity” of heterosexual monogamous marriage. But the sanctity of property rights? Not really. To clarify this issue, I suggest talking to suburban Republicans. The ones I know are not usually inclined to put property rights before property values--two rather different things. Suburban Axiom: If “the neighborhood is going down,” property rights go out the window. That axiom gave us the exclusive zoning regime we had in New Jersey before the so-called Mt. Laurel decision-—a massive, systematic, race-driven violation of property rights tolerated for decades both by “elite” Democrats and “common man” Republicans. It’s worth adding that if Republicans were really interested in property rights, you would see them addressing a rather strange issue that falls through the cracks of suburban American life: what are the property rights of homeless squatters on unowned (or publicly-owned) parkland or open space? An enigmatic question, I realize, but one I’ll clarify soon in a separate post here.
Wolfe raises some criticisms that have been made of Wolfe, none of which strike me as particularly persuasive:
However prescient ''The Liberal Tradition in America'' may have been, it has not lacked for critics. If the South was given over to fantasy, the political scientist Rogers Smith has written, why was the Civil War necessary, and how did Reconstruction defeat the dream of racial equality for so long? Political philosophers have devoted themselves to discovering a republican tradition that emphasizes the common good over individual rights to counter Hartz's claim that there was nothing outside of liberalism.The first question has a fairly obvious answer: political fantasies, like personal ones, can be maintained with a ferocious zeal, and it can take a while for reality to catch up to the fantasist, especially if he or she initially meets with a too-easy toleration or by non-fantasists. Case in point: Al Qaeda, interestingly (though perhaps simplistically) described by the writer Lee Harris as being in the grips of a “fantasy ideology” . As for the second question: the political philosophers in question seem to have overlooked the possibility that the maintenance of individual rights might constitute the common good.
I have to end on a note of puzzlement. Near the end of his piece, Wolfe has this to say:
For Hartz, America's consensual liberalism stood in sharp contrast to Europe, where ideologies like fascism and Communism had poisoned political life. Hartz never feared that his country would adopt those alien systems; our Lockeanism would not allow us to do so. But he did worry that Lockeanism itself could turn into what he called ''a colossal liberal absolutism'' that ''hampers creative action abroad by identifying the alien with the unintelligible and . . . inspires hysteria at home by generating the anxiety that unintelligible things produce.'' Joe McCarthy was a major political figure in the year the book appeared…The first two sentences are clear enough, but the rest strikes me as unintelligible. If Lockean liberalism stood out in “sharp contrast” to European fascism and communism, what exactly would be wrong about its being “absolutist”—absolutely opposed to fascism and communism, let’s say? I can’t quite see anything about such absolute opposition that “hampers creative action abroad.” Wasn’t the Normandy landing creative? Wasn’t it abroad? How about the Iwo Jima or Anzio landings? As for “inspiring hysteria at home” a la McCarthy, I find it difficult to see the connection. Joseph McCarthy, Lockean liberal? Had Louis Hartz no sense of decency, at last?
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