The Liberal Tradition in America [Paperback]

Louis Hartz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 29, 1991 | ISBN-10: 0156512696 | ISBN-13: 978-0156512695 | Edition: Second Edition

Hartz’s influential interpretation of american political thought since the Revolution. He contends that americanca gave rise to a new concept of a liberal society, a “liberal tradition” that has been central to our experience of events both at home and abroad. New Introduction by Tom Wicker; Index.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Louis Hartz was born in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, but grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. After graduating from Technical High School in Omaha, he attended Harvard University, financed partly by a scholarship from the Omaha World Herald .

Hartz graduated in 1940, spent a year traveling abroad on a fellowship, then returned to Harvard as a teaching fellow in 1942. He earned his doctorate in 1946 and became a full professor of government in 1956. Hartz was known at Harvard for his talented and charismatic teaching. He retired in 1974 due to ill health and spent his last years living in London, New Delhi, New York, then Istanbul, where he died.

Hartz is best known for his classic book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) which presented an original view of America's past that sought to explain its conspicuous absence of ideologies. Hartz argued that American political development occurs within the context of an enduring, underlying Lockean liberal consensus, which has shaped and narrowed the landscape of possibilities for U.S. political thought and behavior. He attributed the triumph of the liberal worldview in America to its lack of a feudal past, and thus the absence of a struggle to overcome a conservative internal order; to its vast resources and open space; and to the liberal values of the original settlers, who represented only a narrow middle-class slice of European society. Hartz was chiefly concerned with explaining the failure of socialism to become established in America, and believed that Americans' pervasive, unthinking consensual acceptance of classic liberalism was the major barrier. Hartz thus firmly rejected Marxist ideas about the inevitability of class struggle.

In The Founding of New Societies (1964), Hartz developed the idea that the nations that developed from settler colonies were European "fragments" that in a sense froze the class structure and underlying ideology prevalent in the mother country at the time of their foundation, not experiencing the further evolution experienced in Europe. He considered Latin America and French Canada to be fragments of feudal Europe, the United States, English Canada, and Dutch South Africa to be liberal fragments, and Australia and English South Africa to be "radical" fragments (incorporating the non-Socialist working class radicalism of early 19th century Britain).

Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Second Edition edition (July 29, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156512696
• ISBN-13: 978-0156512695
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #636,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Liberalism as Flight August 7, 2004

By R. J. Stroik

Format:Paperback

A retired professor in the history of ideas, I have before me the 1955 first edition. I turn to this book because of the enduring question why much of the world has a love/hate relationship with the United States of America. Much of the relationship is expressed in Thomas Jefferson's rationale for the Louisana Purchase, his idea of an "empire of liberty."

The history of the United States of America is a history of flight, first from Europe, than westward from the united colonies that declared their independence on July 4, 1776, all the way to the other end of the continent and beyond.

In the pursuit of individual liberty, manny of us fail to realize that freedom is the power to act, a power that marginalizes others, giving rise to continuing flight, the marginalized as immigrant.

But what of those people who can neither flee nor transform their own governments, feudal governments in alliance with our fragile planet's only superpower? For them the absence of flight becomes fight, the terrorism that frightens us.

As we near the 50th anniversary of THE LIBERAL TRADITION OF IN AMERICA in 2005, this book becomes must reading.

Ray Stroik

4.0 out of 5 stars Un-Locke America January 27, 2013

By Bennett Weiss

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Penetrating insights into how the vast majority of America has come to unquestioningly embrace the notion that our rights, particularly property rights, are the based on natural or God given and are immutable.

The problem is that Harzt writes very opaquely and assumes a post-graduate level of background from his reader.

This is must-read for all who sense a need to Un-Locke America and rethink the basics.

But it sure ain't an easy one.

6 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Liberal Tradition October 24, 2005

By A Martini

Format:Paperback

The text is a bit dated; today such a single factor analysis, that the U.S. has had no serious counter Lockean political movement because we never experienced feudalism, is too simplistic to be accepted as a complete explanation. That does not mean that it is entirely off base.

Widely considered a classic.