Search results

Itis a strange quirk of intellectual history that essays in the comprehensive interpretation of history seem to have become fashionable in inverse proportion to the decline of system-building in philosophy. Given this tendency, however, it is not surprising that philosophical historians have again focussed their attention upon America and that new systematic interpretations of American development have come to light. One such interpretation returns to the theories of one of the most praised but most neglected students of American society: Alexis de Tocqueville. According to this view the crucial fact in American history is the absence of a Europeanancien régime. The leading exponent of the "back to de Tocqueville" movement adverts to what might be called "the storybook truth about American history: that America was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World." If this view is correct, "then the outstanding thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the nonexistence of those oppressions, or since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community." But in this sense of the term, "liberal" America was not the only "liberal" community, for America was not the only country which created a frontier existence free of many of the restraints of the old European society. Australia developed a comparable frontier life, and it had no entrenched aristocracy of the European sort.