THE LIBERAL TRADITION REVISITED
Marc Stears Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford,
Oxford, OX1 3UQ, United Kingdom; email marc.stears@politics.ox.ac.uk
Key words
Louis Hartz, liberalism, exceptionalism, multiple traditions, race
Abstract
Louis Hartz’s ‘liberal tradition’ thesis, which argued that the United States was born and
has remained essentially ‘liberal’, has been the subject of vigorous and sustained
criticism in recent years with scholars arguing that the thesis is incapable of explaining
what might be called ‘the politics of exclusion’: the process whereby members of
particular social groups (especially racial groups) have been denied equal access to the
rights enjoyed by other Americans. We must, such scholars thus contend, replace the
thesis with an alternative account of the political identity of the United States. This
review essay critically analyzes these arguments. It suggests that despite an appearance of
uniformity three distinct, and often contradictory, alternative theses have actually been
recently proposed: ‘the multiple traditions thesis’, ‘the liberalism as exclusion thesis’, and
‘the liberal multiplicity thesis’. Having described each in turn, the essay further contends
that of these three it is the thesis closest to the original Hartzian view which best captures
the essence of the political identity of the United States and offers the most to future
students of American politics.
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INTRODUCTION
For generations of scholars both inside and outside of the United States, Louis Hartz’s
The Liberal Tradition in America (first published 1955, edition cited 1991) defined
American politics. Hartz set out to demonstrate a ‘storybook truth’ about America: that
the United States had been born liberal and had remained so. American politics were thus
said to be shaped by a distinctive social and political history - characterized most notably
by the absence of feudalism - and by a monolithic political creed that emerged from that
history (Hartz 1991, p. 3). This creed itself was said to be the form of liberalism that
Hartz dubbed ‘Lockian’. Hartz thus perceived the citizens of the United States as almost
uniformly dedicated to ‘atomistic social freedom’ (Hartz 1991, p. 62): a doctrine which
involved a commitment to individualist ethics, widespread hostility to the power of the
state, a pervasive scepticism of social elites, and an intense sense of social equality. All
successful political arguments in American history, he charged, had to be cast in these
terms: all institutions and laws justified by the tradition’s demands. This ‘fixed, dogmatic
liberalism’ was, then, at the very heart of American political identity (Hartz 1991, p. 9).
Drawing on research going back to de Tocqueville, and standing alongside similar
interpretations from Gunnar Myrdal (1944), Richard Hofstadter (1967), and Seymour
Martin Lipset (1996), Hartz’s liberal tradition thesis exerted an astonishing grip on
political scholarship for most of the second half of the twentieth century. It provided the
primary explanation for a host of distinctively American political and social outcomes,
including the failure of socialism, the absence of a European-style welfare state, the rise
(and fall) of McCarthyism, and even the relatively high rates of crime and family
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breakdown. Yet despite this, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Liberal
Tradition in 2005 was marked by remarkably little fan-fair. The book was remembered
only by a small collection of essays in Studies in American Political Development, a brief
symposium in Perspectives on Politics, and no doubt by a supporting conference or two.
Te book that had once dominated a discipline has all but fallen from view.
This relative neglect perfectly symbolizes dramatic fall from grace of the liberal
tradition thesis. Over the last decade scholars have increasingly argued that the thesis
overlooked many political issues that are ‘essential to understanding our nation’s past’,
present, and future. Most fundamentally, it is charged that Hartz’s thesis is incapable of
explaining what might be called the ‘politics of exclusion’; it cannot, that is, account for
the United States’ history of excluding certain groups - especially racial groups - fom the
political rights and social entitlements that have been extended to other citizens (see
Kloppenberg 2001, p. 463). The liberal tradition thesis is almost silent on these issues, it
is claimed; indeed it was only a widespread academic failure to consider them that
allowed the thesis to gain so many adherents in the first place (see Kloppenberg 2001, p.
465). Eric Foner thus captures the spirit of the age when he suggests that a new, postHartzian account is required to ‘paint a far more inclusive, nuanced, and accurate picture
of the American experience’. No-one, Foner concludes, should ‘regret the demise’ of
Hartzian ‘generalizations that claimed to distill the essence of the American saga, even as
they reflected the history of only a single party of the American people’ (Foner 1994, p.
435).
And so it stands. Once the orthodoxy itself, the argument of The Liberal Tradition
has been discarded and in its place there is a new perspective: Hartz’s thesis was
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compelling only for a generation of scholars who were not alert to political exclusion on
ground of race, ethnicity, gender, and other social categories. Scholars concerned with
explaining the intellectual source of these exclusions, it is thus argued, should not be
satisfied with the liberal tradition thesis and ought instead seek new accounts of the
United States’ political identity (see Morone 2005).
The emergence of this new perspective has been followed by an explosion of
scholarship on the politics of exclusion in general, and of race in particular. Much of that
scholarship has been invaluable and has enriched our understanding of a whole host of
American political phenomena (for an example and an overview see Sniderman and
Carmines 1999). There has, however, been little in the way of critical reflection on the
new perspective itself. Indeed, a synthetic analysis of the range of arguments that have
been levelled against the original liberal tradition thesis has yet been offered. It is now
time, though, to take stock: time both to evaluate the power of the critique and to
understand where it leaves scholarly understanding of the political identity of the United
States today. This essay, as such, offers a critical synthetic overview of the assault on
Hartz. It seeks, in particular, to demonstrate that three distinctive and contradictory
collections of arguments have been advanced by recent scholars: collections which it
calls the ‘multiple traditions thesis’, the ‘liberalism as exclusion thesis’, and the ‘liberal
multiplicity thesis’. It also suggests that the most powerful of the recent arguments
against Hartz is, perhaps paradoxically, the argument that is closest in essence to the
position he originally advanced. Such an account should not only prompt greater caution
as to the persuasiveness of the new view but should also demand that we continue to
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revisit the liberal tradition, and even reconsider its place in twenty-first century American
political science.
THE MULTIPLE TRADITIONS THESIS
Recent challenges to the liberal tradition thesis did not start in the academy. They
emerged, rather, from the political context of mid- to late- twentieth century America.
The l970s, 80s and 90s were extremely difficult times for self-described ‘liberals’.
Following decades of racial tension, student unrest, rising crime, and profound
difficulties in international affairs, explicitly liberal political ideals found few adherents.
The prevailing view of the median voter on crucially salient political questions especially ‘cultural’ questions - was widely at variance with the views of self-described
‘liberal’ activists; there was little political advantage to be found in arguing for a
‘tolerant’ approach to crime or in taking a libertarian stance on civil liberties in a political
era that rejected ‘permissiveness’ and where citizens placed ‘public order’ at the top of
their list of concerns (see Shafer 2003). Given this series of attacks on explicitly liberal
politics, it was only natural that the Hartzian notion of a monolithic liberal tradition
would prove increasingly difficult to maintain. How could one convincingly argue that
the United States possessed a hegemonic liberal tradition when successfully to label a
candidate for high office - even a Presidential candidate - as a ‘liberal’ was effectively to
sign his political death warrant?
Despite efforts to salvage the standard Hartzian paradigm by suggesting that the
‘liberalism’ of the liberal tradition thesis was distinct from the ‘liberalism’ that was being
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politically rejected towards the end of the century, scores of books and articles soon
began to emerge challenging the idea that the United States was characteristically liberal
(see Brands 2001). In historical scholarship, this assault had begun earlier in the form of
the ‘republican thesis’ - which charged that the ideology of the Founders had been shaped
as much by the democratic republicanism of Republican Rome and Renaissance Italy as
by the liberalism of Locke and the English settlers (see Bailyn 1967, Pocock 1975) - but
in political science it only exploded in the early 1990s. When the moment came, though,
it a whole host of challenges emerged, focusing primarily on the role played in American
politics by religion, race, and gender (see Appleby 1992, Morone 1991, Shain 1994,
Shklar 1991). In 1993, for example, Richard Ellis explicitly rejected the Hartzian
paradigm and claimed that the United States possessed no fewer than six distinctive
political cultures, including the distinctly non-liberal traditions of ‘fatalism’, ‘hermitude’,
and ‘hierarchy’ (Ellis 1993). Of all of these scholarly efforts, though, it was Rogers
Smith’s arguments that most profoundly captured the imagination. In his now celebrated
attack on ‘Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz’ in the American Political Science Review
(1993) and in his later Civic Ideals (1997), Smith argued that, contra-Hartz, three political
traditions ran throughout the history of the United States shaping its cultural assumptions
and its helping determine its political outcomes. Those traditions were the liberalism
discussed by Hartz, the republicanism outlined by Bailyn and Pocock, and an ideology
described by Smith as ‘inegalitarian, ascriptivist Americanism’.
Smith’s account was primarily focused on explaining the intellectual sources of
the politics of exclusion. As such, Civic Ideals examined the citizenship laws of the
United States from the founding of the republic through to the progressive era. At each
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stage, Smith detected laws which he argued were inexplicable from the perspective of the
liberal tradition thesis: laws which excluded large sections of society - women, African
Americans, native Americans, immigrants - from the rights and entitlements extended to
other Americans. Smith contended that the arguments which had motivated and justified
these laws had been ‘inarguably nonliberal’ (Smith 1997, p. 26), and were drawn instead
form an intellectual tradition which Smith labeled ‘ascriptive Americanism’. This
tradition was characterized by two elements. First, it ascribed distinctive and ineradicable
characteristics to different categories of human beings, especially different racial and
ethnic groups. Second, it then associated those categories with different political and
social statuses. By doing so, it ‘manifested beliefs that America was by rights a white
nation, a Protestant nation, a nation in which true Americans were native-born men with
Anglo-Saxon ancestors’ (Smith 1997, p. 3). It was, Smith continued, vital to disentangle
such a tradition from the Lockian liberalism that had fixated Hartz. The task of the new
political scientist was to trace the differential impact that both traditions had exerted.
Such an effort would discover that whilst liberalism was indeed responsible for the
justification of the American regime of individual rights, personal independence, the rule
of law, and the market economy, it was the tradition of ascriptivism that had provided the
motivation and justification for exclusionary endeavors such as the attempted
extermination
of
the
native
Americans,
slavery,
the
post-Reconstruction
disenfranchisement of many African Americans, and nativist campaigns immigration
restriction. ‘The story of American civic development’, Smith concluded, ‘is in some
ways more disturbing, but also more comprehensible when our vision encompasses
America’s illiberal, undemocratic traditions as well’ (Smith 1997, p. 39). To its many
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admirers this marked a ‘new start’ in attempts to trace the contours of American politics
(Lorenzo 2002, p. 357). By the beginning of the new century it was hard to avoid the
‘multiple traditions thesis’, even if some of American liberalism’s greatest analysts did
give the argument their own distinctive twist (see Brinkley 1994, Gerstle 2002, Hero
2003, Nackenhoff 2005).
Not everyone shared in the excitement, though. Skeptics quickly pointed out that
similar arguments had been leveled against Hartz at least since the late 1960s. The lack of
fit between liberal aspirations and the reality of racial segregation had thus been a
commonplace in scholarship on civil rights and the role played by the politics of ethnicity
in limiting the fortunes of the political left had been equally often remarked upon by
those analyzing the failures of American radicalism (see, for examples, Record & Record
1965 and Miller 1974). Indeed, the labor historian Kenneth McNaught argued that
American scholarship was actually ‘beyond Hartz’ as early as 1974 (McNaught 1974, p.
345). In the early 1990s, this critique was voiced most ferociously by Jacqueline Stevens.
For Stevens, there was almost nothing new in Smith’s analysis; indeed there was even an
implicit insult - perhaps even an ascriptively inegalitarian insult - in Smith’s assumption
of novelty. Smith’s ‘sweeping claims about the hegemony’ of the liberal tradition thesis,
Stevens thus argued, were ‘naïve and wrong’; the multiple traditions thesis ‘offers no
significant original arguments, but [only] offers old ones to a mainstream (i.e. white,
male-dominated) forum.’ (Stevens 1995, pp. 987-8).
Unsurprisingly, Stevens was right in some ways, but wrong in others. Those who
promoted the multiple traditions thesis were dependent on the research of previous
generations, and their apparent suggestion that everyone in American scholarship had
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been enrapt by Hartz since 1955 must have been understandably irksome to many (see
Kammen 1993, Higham 1994, Spiro 1999). But as Smith later insisted there was
something distinctive about the ‘multiple traditions’ approach too. For unlike earlier
critics, Smith and his colleagues’ approach was at least as much about saving liberalism
as it was about asserting the importance of ascriptivism. By suggesting that it was a
tradition of ascriptivism that had justified the exclusive elements of the American
political tradition, after all, Smith detached liberalism from association with those selfsame elements. As Stuart McConnell recognized in an early review of Civic Ideals, on
the multiple traditions account the public philosophy known as liberalism was held
‘responsible for … the best in American history’, whilst its rivals were held accountable
for the worst (McConnell 1998, p. 1036.)
All of this also implied that Smith and colleagues were not only more sympathetic
to the liberal tradition than the earlier critics were but were also (perhaps paradoxically)
more supportive of the essential moral rightness of that tradition than Hartz himself had
been. For whereas Hartz thought liberalism was generative of both the good in American
political history - such as the protection of individual rights - and the bad - such as an
irrational hostility to political experiment - the multiple traditions view attributed the
good to the liberal and the bad to the ascriptive tradition (see Hartz 1991, p. 301). In
Smith’s view, both Hartz and his critics had simply failed to see that neither the ideal
principles nor the political logic of liberalism were capable of generating the exclusionary
elements of American citizenship law. That is precisely why a multiple traditions account
of American ideological identity was required instead, according to Smith (see Smith
1995, p. 991; see similarly Gerstle 2002, pp. 12-13). In highlighting the negative aspects
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of the American political tradition and associating those aspects with inegalitarian
ascriptive Americanism, Smith was explicitly prosecuting aspects of the United States’
past whilst implicitly acquitting its liberals and their ideals.
THE LIBERALISM AS EXCLUSION THESIS
Smith’s multiple traditions thesis dramatically reinvigorated examinations of the
intellectual sources of the politics of exclusion and rapidly took a central position in the
canon of American political science. The defensive aspect of the thesis, however, failed
to satisfy a number of harsher critics. Drawing on the earlier work of critical analysts
including Joyce Appleby (1992) and Jennifer Hochschild (1984), scholars such as
Desmond King (1995, 1999, 2000) and Ira Katznelson (2005) thus spent much of the
decade following the publication of Civic Ideals developing an alternative approach. That
approach – one I call here the ‘liberalism as exclusion thesis’ – suggested that liberalism
itself must shoulder more - perhaps most, possibly all - of the blame for the politics of
exclusion. As Ira Katznelson argued, in Smith’s ‘Civic Ideals it is an idealized and
purified, even essentialized liberalism that makes an appearance. Whenever racism rears
its ugly head, this showing is taken as confirmation of a nonliberal strand rather than as a
commentary on the liberal tradition itself.’ (Katznelson 1999, p. 568). Advocates of the
multiple traditions approach were thus said to display a ‘common failure to confront both
ascription and nation building in sufficiently thick and deep ways’ (Katznelson 1999, p.
566). The multiple traditions approach was mistaken in so far as it abandoned the earlier
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critique of Hartz which insisted that a ‘symbiotic relationship’ has continuously obtained
‘between American liberal thought and American racist practices’ (Iton 2005, p. 113).
This account, of course, faced an immediate problem: the apparent
incompatibility of liberalism as a public philosophy grounded in freedom, equality, and a
skepticism about state power, and the politics of exclusion. Smith, Hartz, and Myrdal had
all insisted that, at least at the level of abstract principle, exclusionary practices on the
grounds of race and other ascribed identities are necessarily anathema to liberalism.
Advocates of the liberalism as exclusion thesis had, therefore, to explain how a public
philosophy that apparently emphasizes one set of political ideals could motivate and
justify a seemingly directly contrary set of political practices.
This is not to suggest that such a task is impossible. Indeed, the idea that there
may have been a negative dimension to American liberal political thought was neither
new nor restricted to severest critics of Hartz. Seymour Martin Lipset, one of the ablest
exponents of the liberal tradition thesis, argued in the early 1970s that it was relatively
easy for the liberal creed to be twisted to provide ‘the substance of extremist threats to
[American] democratic life’ (Raab & Lipset 1971, p. 30). Similarly, in the early 1990s,
Byron Shafer noted that as the American political creed has necessarily played a
significant role in forging national unity in an ethnically diverse United States it has also
occasionally been employed to justify ‘less attractive’ political practices and outcomes,
including ‘intermittent nativist upsurges’ (Shafer 1991, p. 248). There was, however,
something qualitatively different about the accusations leveled at liberalism by the
proponents of the liberalism as exclusion thesis. For these scholars suggested that
liberalism’s collusion with the politics of exclusion was more systematic than any
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previous account had allowed. As this argument was developed it drew on three distinct
sub-arguments.
The first of these targeted the actual content of liberal political thinking, focusing
on the very ideas that compose the liberal creed. This account was initially advanced by
progressive historians in the early twentieth century who argued that the individualistic
ethics built into the heart of American liberalism are essentially exclusionary because
they are well suited to the powerful but ill-serve the requirements of weaker groups in
society; liberalism, in other words, works as an ideological justification for a competitive,
property-owning, free-market capitalism and overlooks the interests of those incapable of
flourishing in such an environment (see, for example, Beard 1934). The argument took a
new turn, however, in the 1960s and 1970s when the economic dimension was replaced
by the suggestion that the liberal emphases served the interests of a particular cultural
experience rather than an economic class: the experience of the white, male, and middleclass. Along such lines, Joyce Appleby claimed that liberalism’s individualist ethics
essentially ‘devalued the cohesion of ethnicity, class, and commitment’ and was therefore
incapable of valuing the experiences of those sections of the American community who
placed significant emphasis on these more solidaristic bonds (Appleby 1992, p. 11).
Insofar as liberalism shaped the public philosophy of the United States, then, it would
also (even if perhaps unwittingly) generate a series of political outcomes that prioritized
the interests of individuals who conceived of themselves as active, independent, and selfinterested and downgrade the interests of those who did not (see too Sandel 1996).
The second argument left the realm of philosophic essentials and concerned
instead the ways in which liberal languages have been employed (or misemployed)
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throughout much of the history of the United States intentionally to justify exclusionary
politics, including campaigns of disenfranchisement, inequalities in public service
provision, and racial segregation. In the appropriately titled In the Name of Liberalism
Desmond King thus argued that the forces of exclusion in American politics had
employed a variety of liberal tropes - including appeals to the value of human rationality
and to the idea of the social contract - to justify public policy measures that contradicted
liberal values as traditionally understood by Hartz and Smith. It was, King thus
suggested, identifiably ‘liberal’ claims and not the contentions of another more explicitly
ascriptive ideology that were employed by political agents wishing to justify exclusionary
policies such as immigration restrictions in the early twentieth century and the raciallybiased welfare regime of the century’s close (King 1999). Similarly, Laura Scalia’s
examination of the rhetoric used in campaigns to disenfranchise African Americans in
early to mid-nineteenth century New York argued that such campaigns ‘did not depend
on a theory of the innate superiority of white property holders’, as the multiple traditions
thesis would have suggested, but rather on ideas borrowed explicitly from Lockian
liberalism. Those arguing for disenfranchisement were able to do so, Scalia contended,
not by ascribing particular characteristics to specific categories of citizens - as Smith’s
thesis might suggest - but by invoking universalistic liberal notions of self-interest. They
thus argued that only citizens whose social and economic position would lead them
conduct themselves in the public interest should be allowed to vote: a criterion which had
the effect of excluding most African Americans, women, and the poor (see Scalia 1998,
esp. p. 372).
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The thesis’ third argument focused not on the role of liberal ideas or phraseology
but on the concrete political behavior of political activists who have traditionally been
labeled as ‘liberals’. A series of public-policy case-studies were employed to argue that
democratic success for liberal political movements has often been coincident with the
politics of exclusion. Developed most clearly in Desmond King’s analysis of employment
practices in the Federal government and Ira Katznelson’s attack on key elements of the
New Deal, this argument suggested that self-described liberals have frequently allowed
themselves to sacrifice commitment to non-exclusion in order to sustain their more
general political prospects (King 1995 and Katznelson 2005). The precise reason why
liberals believed such a sacrifice was required differed from example to example.
Sometimes the cause was said to reside in the apparent need to build electoral coalitions
or support in the legislature (demonstrating, perhaps, that others in the US are committed
to a more explicitly ascriptivist political agenda). At other times, it was blamed on the
power of inherited institutional practices to maintain themselves even when few political
agents are actually committed to the outcomes that they generate. But either way for its
advocates the crucial pattern has remained: identifiably liberal politicians rather than
subscribers to an explicit ideology of ascription have played a crucial role in maintaining
the politics of exclusion in the United States.
These three arguments - from liberal philosophical essentials, from the (mis)use
of liberal political languages, and from liberal political strategy - are, of course,
analytically distinct: the causal stories that they have offered differ in radical and
important ways. Yet despite this they clustered together in the years since Smith, often
being employed by the same authors in different works in order to pose a continuous
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challenge both to remaining Hartzians and to the multiple traditions thesis. The resultant
argument might be summarized thus: whereas Hartz and colleagues had once seen the
exclusionary elements of American politics as an anomaly in need of careful explanation,
and whereas Smith had blamed them on a hidden ideology of ascriptive Americanism, the
liberalism as exclusion thesis contends that they are, in one way or another, natural
outgrowths of the very liberalism that Hartz rightly said gave shape to the national
political psyche. Although the original liberal tradition thesis might have been wrong
insofar as it underestimated just how extensive practices of racial exclusion were in the
United States, for these scholars Smith’s rejoinder was also misguided in so far as it
sought to excuse liberalism from a central role in the creation and perpetuation of these
practices. The United States, according to the liberalism as exclusion thesis, might indeed
be liberal and exclusionary, even exclusionary because it is liberal.
THE LIBERAL MULTIPLICITY THESIS
Neat as that summary may seem, the loose sets of interrelated arguments that cluster
together as the liberalism as exclusion thesis leave a host of fundamental questions
unanswered. Most obviously, it is unclear what precise causal role ‘liberalism’ is thought
to play in the promotion of exclusion. It is unclear, that is, whether liberalism is directly
implicated as the set of ideas that actually generate exclusion (an exclusion that its own
terminology then helps to hide), as Appleby might be thought to suggest (1992), or
whether it is rather to be held more indirectly responsible, with liberal ideas and liberal
actors behaving as ineffective by-standers to the perpetuation of exclusionary practices.
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More worryingly, if we try to answer those questions it becomes increasingly obscure
what the term ‘liberalism’ actually refers to. For Hartz and for Smith, after all, liberalism
was defined relatively straightforwardly in ideational terms: it is a series of loosely
related philosophical claims to which many (or most) in the American public have
subscribed and which have thus regularly motivated and justified political action. There
may have been some argument between Hartz and Smith as to which particular ideas
count as liberal ones but there was at least agreement as to what ‘kind of thing’ liberalism
actually is. Advocates of the liberalism as exclusion thesis, on the other hand, have talked
about liberalism far less clearly. For them the term seems sometimes to refer to precisely
such a set of long-lasting, widely supported philosophic ideals but it has also occasionally
referred to a series of rhetorical strategies (including emotional or insincere appeals to
classic liberal ideals) and at other times just to a set of identifiable political actors
(including both actors who describe themselves as ‘liberal’ and those who have
consistently been identified as such by others.)
It is precisely these questions that have generated the third, and to my mind most
persuasive, of the recent responses to the Hartzian paradigm: a response which I call the
‘liberal multiplicity thesis’. Advanced in varying forms by scholars such as Eric Foner,
Gary Gerstle, and Carol Horton, this account has contended that it is a mistake to
approach the American liberal tradition as a stable, unchanging, political entity (see
Foner 1998, Gerstle 1994, Horton 2005). Rather, in Carol Horton’s words, it should be
seen as ‘a variegated, flexible, politically contested discourse’ (Horton 2005, p. 5). Seen
this way, the American liberal tradition is in essence a prolonged argument about a series
of shared but indeterminate ideals. The barest outline of these ideals - including ‘liberty’,
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‘equality’, a worry about excessive ‘power’ - is consistent over time, playing a vital role
in shaping the political identity of the nation and ensuring a remarkable continuity of
popular aspiration over time. But the precise meaning and concrete political implications
of them has been the subject of continuous contestation. Different social movements,
political groupings, individuals, and whole generations are thus seen to have employed a
vast range of argumentative strategies in order to prioritize their own interpretations of
these ideals and to try to realize their own preferred political consequences. As Eric
Foner explained, liberal ideals have ‘remained both a source of contention and a crucial
point of self-definition for individual and society at large’ across the history of the
republic (Foner 1998, p. 330. See too Freeden 1996).
When interpreted this way, it becomes possible to see that liberal ideas, liberal
rhetoric, and liberal political actors have all at various times been responsible both for the
perpetuation of exclusionary politics and for radical attacks on those exclusions. As Carol
Horton suggests, ‘powerful variants of American liberalism have endorsed the
maintenance of racial hierarchy’ whilst ‘alternative constructions … have combined the
goals of nondiscrimination and social equity to produce exceptionally radical visions’
(Horton 2005, p. 4). What this means is that both the multiple traditions thesis and the
liberalism as exclusion thesis are excessively one-dimensional in their interpretations.
According to the liberal multiplicity thesis, liberalism cannot be understood as either
innocent of blame for the exclusionary politics of the past nor can it be consistently
blamed for their propagation. The history of American liberalism is far too complex, even
internally contradictory, to pass such a judgment.
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This is not to deny, however, that liberalism has played an important role in
shaping the history of the politics of exclusion in the United States. Advocates of the
liberal multiplicity thesis perceive a role that consists in three elements. First, liberal
ideals have motivated reform movements across the course of American history: the
desire to make America ‘free’, to guarantee ‘equality’, or to prevent the abuse of ‘power’,
for example, have each continuously provided the inspiration for activists from across the
political spectrum and provoked them into political action. Second, those self-same
ideals, and especially widely inherited assumptions about their meaning and implications,
have provided the essential ‘frame’ within which political arguments, including those
about race and other exclusions, have had to be cast. For even though the ideals
themselves are not fully determinate they provide boundaries outside of which arguments
cannot travel; the peculiar shape of that frame has, therefore, influenced the precise
content of the arguments that can be made. Third, liberal ideals and the arguments that
flow from them have created a particular set of demands on their adherents - emotional,
intellectual, social, and economic - and as those demands interact with a shifting political
environment they help to determine the outcome of the struggles by setting the costbenefit calculations facing a whole host of political actors. According to the liberal
multiplicity thesis, then, liberalism is best understood as a set of general ideals that have
inspired on-going political argument, shaped the terms in which those arguments have
been held, and generated a series of demands which have affected the emerging
resolutions of those arguments.
Having outlined the ways in which liberalism could have influenced the course of
American political history, the further task is to employ this approach in explaining a
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range of vital moments in the politics of exclusion. Numerous such studies have recently
started to emerge, perhaps chief amongst which have been Eric Foner’s The Story of
American Freedom (1998), Gary Gerstle’s ‘The Protean Character of American
Liberalism’ (1998), and Carol Horton’s recent Race and the Making of American
Liberalism (2005). Although the emphasis in each of these works is different, taken
together they present a powerful interpretation of the pattern of relationship that has
obtained between liberal ideals and the politics of exclusion.
The interpretation begins with the relatively uncontroversial suggestion that
American liberal values have often successfully been employed to justify equal rights
agendas for African Americans, native Americans and immigrants: abolitionists and anticaste liberals in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, and early civil rights activists in
the 1940s and 1950s both widely employed traditional liberal tropes of rights, freedom
and equal citizenship. It then further suggests that these liberal ideals have also been
employed in calls for a more redistributive economic order. It shows, for example, that
both early twentieth-century progressives and New Dealers phrased their demands for a
more extensive welfare state in terms of well established American liberal ideals:
arguing, for example, that the social conditions generated by a rapidly industrializing
economy necessitated new understandings of the crucial ideas of liberty and equality,
new understandings which in turn legitimated interventionist economic programs (see
also Kloppenberg 1986, Rodgers 1998, Stears 2002.)
Most importantly, the case continues with the further contention that very few
reform movements, if any, have successfully crafted liberal justifications for egalitarian
action in the domains of racial and economic politics simultaneously. Instead, the two
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egalitarian demands have much more frequently been played off against each other, with
movements for racial justice often turning their backs on economic concerns and those
demanding greater fairness in resource distribution often condoning racial exclusion. The
causes of this incompatibility are complex: drawing both on the conceptual limitations
imposed by the liberal tradition itself and on the practical demands presented by the
unique social and political environment of the United States. At the conceptual level, the
fault partly lies with the deeply ingrained individualist assumptions of American
liberalism, which have acted to restrict the number of group-based grievances that can be
easily addressed (or even comprehended) at any one time. But it also results from the
precise legitimating strategies that reform movements themselves have chosen to employ:
appeals to ‘equal opportunity’ by race equality groups, for example, may have worked to
broaden their appeal but they have often also endorsed the workings of the capitalist ‘free
market’ thus limiting the rhetorical strategies open to advocates of state intervention in
the economy. Similarly, campaigns for such intervention have often sought to avoid
social complications by building coalitions of economic interest amongst the ‘white’
community in ways that exclude other more marginal racial groups (see Horton 2005,
Gerstle 1994).
These internal difficulties have been further exacerbated by the fact that
competing political movements - those campaigning for more inegalitarian positions have also continuously cast their arguments in liberal terms, just as the proponents of the
liberalism as exclusion thesis noted. Critics both of the New Deal in the 1930s and of
expansive programmes of racially inclusive civil rights in the 1960s, for example, are
thus largely seen to employ what Horton calls ‘the widely resonant language of American
20
liberalism’ (Horton 2005, p. 193). With each side, then, struggling to maintain ownership
over the same terminology, success has often been forthcoming to those who have stayed
closest to widely inherited ideological assumptions and who have placed the fewest
conceptual and political demands on the broader citizenry. To put that in other words:
American liberalism is capable of welcoming innovation and assisting both egalitarian
reform and inegalitarian reactions at different times, but such changes are not costless,
and they certainly do not come easy.
Clearly these arguments require far greater analysis before they can be fully
endorsed but what should be clear from this brief survey is the fact that the liberal
multiplicity thesis differs from the liberalism as exclusion thesis in two compelling ways.
First, it explains how liberalism has been a force for both inclusion and exclusion at
different times in American history: liberalism has served the cause of both egalitarian
and inegalitarian campaigns. Second, it provides a far more consistent account of the role
that liberalism has actually played in such politics. Seen as such, liberal ideals have
provided the motivation for a vast range of political actors, have determined the frame
within which arguments have generally been cast, and have helped set the tariff on the
cost-benefit calculations that have eventually shaped those arguments’ outcomes. It
should also be noted that such an interpretation of liberalism’s relationship with the
politics of exclusion is even further removed from the multiple traditions approach. The
United States’ history could, after all, be presented here in entirely liberal terms with little
(even no) reference to an inegalitarian ascriptivist tradition. In that way, at least, it seems
that the liberal multiplicity thesis takes us back to an era before Rogers Smith. It remains
to be seen whether it takes us all the way back to Louis Hartz.
21
CONCLUSION: THE LIBERAL TRADITION REVISITED
The liberal multiplicity thesis places liberalism right back at the heart of the American
story despite the challenge posed by the need to explain the politics of exclusion. Just as
with Hartz, liberalism, in various guises, can once again be said to generate the
inspiration for American reform, to provide the essential language of American political
argument, and to even help determine those arguments’ outcomes by shaping the calculus
of American political costs and benefits. Two crucial differences, however, separate the
liberal multiplicity thesis from the original account.
The first difference concerns the central place the politics of exclusion is
permitted. Whereas Hartz and other advocates of the liberal tradition generally
overlooked these concerns, seeing the case of slavery and its legacy in the South largely
as an ‘anomaly’, the new approach suggests instead that these questions have often,
perhaps always, been present in the politics of the United States. Arguments about which
sections of the American community should be entitled to the full rights and duties of
citizenship have thus helped shaped the character and identity of the United States in
ways that largely escaped the attention of Hartz. The second difference relates to the
internal divisions within American liberalism. On the new account, after all, liberalism is
essentially a loose-set of inter-related general ideals, the contents of which are the subject
of continuous contestation; the American liberal tradition, in other words, is essentially a
shared argument rather than a single, set of clear, coherent and consistent beliefs. Such a
view seems sharply at odds with that of Hartz. As Gary Gerstle suggests, an interpretation
22
of American liberalism which primarily emphasizes its ‘variability’ is clearly distinct
from a view of American liberalism as a stable, unchanging ‘creed etched in Lockean
stone’ (Gerstle 1994, p. 1045).1
But a questions remains: are these differences enough to enable the liberal
multiplicity thesis successfully to respond to the challenges which initially threw the
Hartzian thesis into doubt? Those challenges it will be recalled from the opening of this
essay were initiated by the apparent conservative turn, and especially the conservative
cultural turn, in American politics towards the end of the twentieth and the beginning of
the twenty-first centuries. Critics of the liberal tradition thesis have thus held that it is
simply impossible for the Hartzians to account for the bare-faced hostility that selfdescribed ‘liberals’ faced at this time nor could they successfully explain the exponential
increase of the political salience of religion, the increase in calls for the restoration of
traditional ‘family values’, the perceived hostility to rights for gays and other sexual
minorities, and the enhanced centrality of questions of foreign policy and ‘national
security’. These political developments, it has been charged, draw on alternative political
traditions to liberalism - traditions that have included conservatism and Rogers Smith’s
‘ascriptivist Americanism’ - and the existence of these traditions is all that is needed to
falsify the Hartzian hypothesis.
Faced with this charge, advocates of the liberal multiplicity thesis could respond
in one of two ways. First, they could simply accept the critique and suggest that the
United States is indeed characterized by ‘multiple traditions’, whilst also asserting that
the liberal tradition is larger or more expansive than Smith and his colleagues first noted.
There is nothing illogical in such an argument, even if it slightly diminishes the novelty
23
of the thesis itself. Alternatively, they could take the second, more difficult route and
contend that even the cultural conservatism of the late twentieth century is a variant of
the large family of ideas that comprises American liberalism: that it is, in Carol Horton’s
phrase, simply a new form of ‘right-of-center liberalism’ (Horton 2005, p. 223). Too little
time has elapsed since the emergence of the liberal multiplicity thesis for a decisive
answer to emerge to this question. But if recent work provides a reliable guide it would
appear that the second option is likely to emerge as the route most taken. Philip Abbott
(2005) has thus contended that the ‘culture wars’ of the 1960s and 1970s are best seen as
a rivalry within American liberalism on a par to earlier struggles for liberal identity;
Carol Horton (2005) has similarly argued that attacks on affirmative action have more
frequently been justified in the traditionally liberal terms of ‘equality of opportunity’ than
in terms of racist ascription; and Michael Ignatieff (2004) has shown that even the
expansive foreign policy of post 9/11 neo-conservatism can been cast in the language of
‘liberal intervention’, of ‘enduring freedom’, and of ‘promoting democracy abroad’.
Conclusive evaluations of this move are, of course, impossible. The historical
record of the late twentieth century is not yet fully mined; that of the early twenty-first
yet to be fully written. But what this critical overview of the arguments about the liberal
traditions shows is that researchers are now faced with two new fundamental questions.
The first concerns the boundaries of American liberalism. For if American liberalism is
now to be understood as a variable creed - its tradition best approached a series of
arguments about the meaning and implications of shared ideals - then we need better to
appreciate where liberalism stops and other political traditions start. If we do not do that,
after all, then the very idea of liberalism itself will cease to add anything of any analytic
24
value to our search for political explanations. Second, we need also better to understand
what has sustained American liberalism over time. According to the thesis that concludes
this essay, after all, liberalism has provided the dominant frame for American political
argumentation for more than two centuries. It has survived a Civil War, two World Wars,
the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, the coming of the welfare state,
and, perhaps, the rise of the cultural right. In explaining how it has done so we will
probably need to move beyond the world of ‘ideas’, and examine the place of political
‘orders’. As Hartz himself recognized, the political ideas of the United States are partly
responsible for and shaped by the nation’s unique institutional settlement and its
distinctive social, political and economic histories (see Hartz 1991). Understanding the
precise ways in which those ideas, institutions, and histories interact, and at what happens
in one domain when change occurs in another, is essential if we are both to appreciate
how liberalism has held such a grip on the American political imagination for so long
and, perhaps more importantly, whether it will be able to continue to do so in the future.
It is these questions which demand that we continue to revisit the liberal tradition and
continue to ask the questions that Louis Hartz set us over fifty years ago.
25
NOTES
1
Gerstle may have slightly overstated this difference in this formulation. Hartz was far
from blind to the fact that arguments within the liberal tradition were essential parts of
political thinking in America. Indeed, he generally insisted that American liberalism was
better understood as providing the frame for political argument rather than the guarantee
of a narrow set of political outcomes (see Hartz 1991, p. 20). But an essential difference
remains: Hartz’s interpretation of that frame was far narrower than the advocates of the
liberal multiplicity thesis contend, as can be clearly seen in attitudes to social welfare
reformers such as the progressives. For Hartz, the essentially free market cast of
American liberalism rendered their arguments ‘practically unintelligible’. For Foner,
Gerstle, Horton and colleagues, in contrast, their arguments were both identifiably liberal
and were often politically compelling. Compare, for example, Hartz 1991, pp. 232-255
with Gerstle 1998.
26
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