The Liberal Tradition In American Politics

Views American democracy, revolution, and capitalism in the light of Western history.

This “brilliantly written” look at the original meaning of the liberal philosophy has become a classic of political science (American Historical Review). Winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award As the word “liberal” has been misused and its meaning diluted in recent decades, this study of American political thought since the Revolution is a valuable look at the “liberal tradition” that has been central to US history. Louis Hartz, who taught government at Harvard, shows how individual liberty, equality, and capitalism have been the values at the root of liberalism—and offers enlightening historical context that reminds us of America’s unique place and important role in the world. “Lively and thought-provoking . . . Fascinating reading.” —The Review of Politics Includes an introduction by Tom Wicker

First Published in 1999. This volume explores the full range and depth of the liberal tradition in America and how it has been perceived by political theorists and historians. The contributors weigh the various paradigm shifts in our understanding of American political development according to consensus, polarity and multiple traditions. They break new ground by taking into account African-American and proslavery thought, gender and identity politics, citizenship in the Reconstruction and Progressive eras, and models of SupremeCourt decision-making. The Liberal Tradition in America questions the effect of viewing American history through these paradigms on the progress of research, and moves the emphasis in research from the development of political ideas to the development of political institutions

Eight prominent scholars consider whether Louis Hartz's interpretation of liberalism in his classic 1955 book should be repudiated or updated, and whether a study of America as a "liberal society" is still a rewarding undertaking.

Rossinow revisits the period between the 1880s and the 1940s, when reformers and radicals worked together along a middle path between the revolutionary left and establishment liberalism. He takes the story up to the present, showing how the progressive connection was lost and explaining the consequences that followed.

The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics," Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Like only a handful of American historians before him—Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard are examples—Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.

Traces the roots of modern liberal ideas to the moral and spiritual foundations of America and its Founding Fathers, and explains how liberalism is the right approach to guide America in the future.

A former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and currently Acting Senior Vice President for Research at The Heritage Foundation, Kim R. Holmes surveys the state of liberalism in America today and finds that it is becoming its opposite—illiberalism—abandoning the precepts of open-mindedness and respect for individual rights, liberties, and the rule of law upon which the country was founded, and becoming instead an intolerant, rigidly dogmatic ideology that abhors dissent and stifles free speech. Tracing the new illiberalism historically to the radical Enlightenment, a movement that rejected the classic liberal ideas of the moderate Enlightenment that were prominent in the American Founding, Holmes argues that today’s liberalism has forsaken its American roots, incorporating instead the authoritarian, anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist prejudices of the radical and largely European Left. The result is a closing of the American liberal mind. Where once freedom of speech and expression were sacrosanct, today liberalism employs speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, and shaming rituals to stifle freedom of thought, expression, and action. It is no longer appropriate to call it liberalism at all, but illiberalism—a set of ideas in politics, government, and popular culture that increasingly reflects authoritarian and even anti-democratic values, and which is devising new strategies of exclusiveness to eliminate certain ideas and people from the political process. Although illiberalism has always been a temptation for American liberals, lurking in the radical fringes of the Left, it is today the dominant ideology of progressive liberal circles. This makes it a new danger not only to the once venerable tradition of liberalism, but to the American nation itself, which needs a viable liberal tradition that pursues social and economic equality while respecting individual liberties.

How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of postwar liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today. Liberalism and Its Discontents moves from a penetrating interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal to an analysis of the profound and frequently corrosive economic, social, and cultural changes that have undermined the liberal tradition. The book moves beyond an examination of the internal weaknesses of liberalism and the broad social and economic forces it faced to consider the role of alternative political traditions in liberalism's downfall. What emerges is a picture of a dominant political tradition far less uniform and stable--and far more complex and contested--than has been argued. The author offers as well a masterly assessment of how some of the leading historians of the postwar era explained (or failed to explain) liberalism and other political ideologies in the last half-century. He also makes clear how historical interpretation was itself a reflection of liberal assumptions that began to collapse more quickly and completely than almost any scholar could have imagined a generation ago. As both political history and a critique of that history, Liberalism and Its Discontents, based on extraordinary essays written over the last decade, leads to a new understanding of the shaping of modern America.