Suchergebnisse

In the seventeenth century America escaped from the world, in the twentieth century it has been forced to return to it. This cycle contains the drama of the American historical consciousness which protected America's provincialism in the past but is bound now, in the age of the reverse migration, to serve as an instrument of its dissolution.

The central fact of the twentieth century for America is its involvement with the world, and for a nation bred in the psychic and geographic isolation of a uniform liberal faith this has evoked the dialectic battle of a pair of impulses: the effort to intensify "Americanism," to retreat to the comfortable womb of ancient fetishes, and the effort to transcend it, to move out maturely into a welter of national experiences where the fetishes have lost their magic. It would be comforting if we could say that this battle has been clear cut, that it has been fought out by Good Men and Bad Men, much as the battle between "conservative" and "radical" has been fought out in the nationalist histories of the Progressive scholars. But this has not been true, if only because the issue itself has been hidden from sight and the men who have grappled with it, as in some Hegelian tale, have served purposes beyond their understanding. The struggle against the constraints of "Americanism," that peculiar blend of liberalism and nationalism that only America has produced, has been as confused as the record of the twentieth century itself.

In a liberal society such as prevailed in America during the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras, where the aristocracies, peasantries, and proletariats of Europe are missing, where virtually everyone, including the nascent industrial worker, has the mentality of an independent entrepreneur, two national impulses are bound to make themselves felt: the impulse toward democracy and the impulse toward capitalism. The mass of the people, in other words, are bound to be capitalistic, and capitalism, with its spirit disseminated widely, is bound to be democratic. This is one of the basic insights Tocqueville had about the actual behavior of the American people. The irony of early American history, however, is that these impulses, instead of supplementing each other, seemed to fight a tremendous political battle. The capitalist Whiggery of Hamilton was frightened of democracy, and the democratic tradition of Jackson, which was therefore able to destroy it, formulated a philosophy which seemed to deny its faith in capitalism. The result was a massive confusion in political thought, comparable to the one that we find in the constitutional era, and a set of victories and defeats which the Americans who experienced them scarcely understood. One is reminded of two boxers, swinging wildly, knocking each other down with accidental punches.Looked at from one point of view, it is strange that Federalism and neo-Federalism should have been shattered so badly in the liberal setting of American politics.

"The great advantage of the American," Tocqueville once wrote, "is that he has arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution…." Fundamental as this insight is, we have not remembered Tocqueville for it, and the reason is rather difficult to explain. Perhaps it is because, fearing revolution in the present, we like to think of it in the past, and we are reluctant to concede that its romance has been missing from our lives. Perhaps it is because the plain evidence of the American revolution of 1776, especially the evidence of its social impact that our newer historians have collected, has made the comment of Tocqueville seem thoroughly enigmatic. But in the last analysis, of course, the question of its validity is a question of perspective. Tocqueville was writing with the great revolutions of Europe in mind, and from that point of view the outstanding thing about the American effort of 1776 was bound to be, not the freedom to which it led, but the established feudal structure it did not have to destroy. He was writing too, as no French liberal of the nineteenth century could fail to write, with the shattered hopes of the Enlightenment in mind. The American revolution had been one of the greatest of them all, a precedent constantly appealed to in 1793.

Nearly seventy-five years have elapsed since Henry Carey complained that the term laissez faire had become a meaningless symbol, an object, as he put it, of "word-worship." If the task of definition seemed imposing in his time, it is not less so in ours. The concept has been used with abandon on various levels of political and economic discussion. It belongs to a whole category of catchwords in our social thought whose connotations, if they ever were precise, have become blurred through constant and polemical usage. They are dangerous labels for the historian. This paper seeks to analyze the ideas developed in Pennsylvania to oppose governmental action in economic life during the period from the Revolution to the Civil War. For the present purpose it is not a matter of significance whether one chooses to believe that any of these ideas are genuinely laissezfaire in character or not.

Frontmatter -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- I. The Setting -- II. The Early Years -- III. Declaration of Principles -- IV. Western Wisdom at Its Source: Evolution and Ethics -- V. The Wealth of Nations -- VI. On Liberty -- VII. The Spirit of the Laws -- VIII. A History of Politics -- IX. Mill's Logic -- X. Meditations on the Tao -- XI. The Later Years -- XII. Some Implications -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Glossary -- Index

Front Matter -- Half Title -- Books by Louis Hartz -- Title -- Copyright -- Preface -- Contents -- Part 1 A Theory of the Development of the New Societies -- 1. The Fragmentation of European Culture and Ideology -- 2. Fragmentation Patterns: Feudal, Liberal, and Radical -- 3. The European Fragment, Africa, and the Indian Tribes -- Part 2 Five National Histories -- 4. United States History in a New Perspective -- 5. The Heritage of Latin America -- 6. The South African Dilemma -- 7. The Structure of Canadian History -- 8. The Radical Culture of Australia -- Back Matter -- Notes -- Index