The Liberal Tradition in American Politics

Reassessing the Legacy of American Liberalism

David F. Ericson, Louisa Bertch Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135270957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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

1

Liberalism and Racism: The Problem of Analyzing Traditions

Rogers M. Smith

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Louis Hartz said America was a liberal society.¹ In those same years, Malcolm X said America was a racist society.² There was substantial evidence for both claims. More than a generation later, we have yet to achieve any broadly persuasive understanding of whether and how both claims can be true.

In this essay I work toward a view of the character and relationship of liberalism and racism in the United States that builds not only on my discussions of America’s multiple traditions but also on the insights of colleagues who employ different frameworks. My conclusion—that it all depends on how we define liberalism and racism, and that different definitions are defensible for different purposes—seems almost too bland to advertise in advance. I hope, however, that the specifications of the different definitions and aims developed here will usefully illuminate what some of our options are. And fear not: I will provoke disagreement by suggesting that though it’s not plainly erroneous to use the term liberalism as expansively as many scholars now do, and as I have sometimes done myself, it’s not clear what good is accomplished by doing so. Ironically, perhaps, I will endorse using Hartz’s definition of liberalism, though not his portrait of American political culture as a whole. By so doing, we can have a definition of liberalism that does most of the work Hartz wanted it to do while not being handicapped in our efforts to address other issues as well.

THE DOUBLE CONSTRUCTION OF TRADITIONS

I must begin with the problem of defining “isms” and traditions generally, and liberalism and racism in particular. An introductory anecdote, revealing one source of my past errors: When I was refining the topic of my dissertation, which became the book Liberalism and American Constitutional Law, I raised with my supervisor, Judith Shklar, the problem of how to define liberalism. She told me, “Rogers, don’t read a hundred books. Lean back, close your eyes, and think what you believe is most fundamental to liberalism, reflecting on all you know about its history and philosophical defenses. Then use that.”

I was shocked. Shklar was known above all others for insisting that students must read a hundred books, and do so within a week. As many panel participants and job-talk givers knew to their sorrow, she was also a relentless stickler for historical accuracy, especially in the history of political ideas. Her advice seemed startlingly unprofessional and un-Shklarian.

But I took it, eventually deciding that for me, the deepest, most compelling value of liberalism was a concern to enhance the powers for rational, reflective self-governance, personal and political, of all humanity. It was not Shklar’s definition of liberalism—too “positive liberty” for her, at least at that time—but she still urged me to use it.

Why? How could it be methodologically correct for a green graduate student to rely on his own definition of a key term such as liberalism? Shklar recognized that for my purposes, I didn’t really need to find the quintessential definition of liberalism, should there be such a thing. She knew I wanted to argue that what I saw as the deepest problems and aspirations of liberal theory played significant roles in the concrete problems of American constitutional governance. She also knew I wanted ultimately to consider how those specific constitutional and theoretical problems could be better addressed.

In order to do so, I first needed to spell out, not what liberalism truly was, but rather what were the beliefs, values, and philosophical and normative difficulties in which I was really interested. With that account in hand, the next task would be to see whether those beliefs, values, and difficulties were as manifest in American constitutional discourse as I thought. But although it was very important for me to provide evidence that the notions I identified were indeed significant factors in the legal realms I was studying, so long as that evidence was there it did not really matter much whether or not I called these notions features of “liberalism.” That was just a convenient label for the collection of concepts I was examining, and it was as plausible a label as any. So Shklar thought, and I agreed.

I still stand by most of the resulting analysis. Yet I regret that it was cast so as to imply, as I then unthinkingly believed, that the values and problems I designated as features of liberalism were also the overwhelmingly dominant values and problems of American political thought. That implication now seems to me to be wrong. In one sense, this misleading implication doesn’t matter. I was chiefly concerned with those particular problems, and much of the analysis of them holds even if they haven’t been as hegemonic as I thought. In another sense, however, the implication does matter. Not only does it suggest a claim I did not mean to defend and now think indefensible, but, more important, it arose because I did not adequately see how much other basic problems in American thought and politics, especially problems of political identity, race, and gender, were crucially interwoven with the issues I was addressing.³ Still, the definition facilitated some work that was useful, at least to me, and that’s not bad.

Indeed, that’s what definitions of isms do, or ought to do. The broader point of this story is that isms and traditions are always human creations or constructions, crafted for particular purposes. If they are sufficiently well fabricated, they may help accomplish those purposes; but at the same time, they are likely to be less useful for other goals, just as a hammer is ill suited to serve as tweezers. To understand and evaluate a tradition, like any other human creation, it is helpful to know who made it and why.

Toward that end, we can analytically distinguish two categories of such creators, though these categories are best conceived as two ends of a spectrum rather than as wholly distinct entities. Isms and traditions are constructed both by primary actors and by later interpreters of those actors.

The elements of an ism or a tradition are in the first instance past human words, documents, and deeds—all human constructions. That does not mean they are purely subjective. These constructions are real historical events that, to a considerable degree at least, later scholars can reasonably be said to discover and study, not create themselves. The primary actors who first make a tradition, moreover, always feel themselves to have intellectual and political affiliates of some sort on whose words and deeds they are building and to whom they are speaking and acting, although they may not think of that set of affiliates, past and present, as constituting a tradition. Alasdair MacIntyre suggests in fact that participants in traditions “in good working order” are ordinarily not “aware of them as traditions.” The members of a tradition carry on activities and discourses shaped by partly unarticulated, unexamined presuppositions—theological, intellectual, political, social—that they regard as simply the way things are. MacIntyre’s claim may be overdrawn, at least in the contemporary world. Many who sincerely espouse particular religious, moral, and political views today are accustomed to presenting themselves as dwelling within and advocating a certain tradition, be it Christian, Platonic, or liberal. MacIntyre also portrays participants in a tradition as conscious that they have “critics and enemies external to the tradition” as well as “internal, interpretive debates” with those they recognize as fellow adherents. Hence the primary actors carrying on a tradition do have some kind of notion of their membership in an ongoing collective endeavor, even if tradition is often not their term for that endeavor.⁴

But regardless of how self-conscious participants in a tradition may be of it as a tradition, there can be no intellectual and political tradition without identifiable primary actors engaging in discourses and practices shaped by past and present persons of whom they have some awareness. Hence evidence of who and what primary actors knew as well as what they said and did is always relevant to any claim that a past tradition existed. Unless we can show that some group of people spoke, wrote, and acted in ways we claim to be elements of an ideological tradition, and that they did so with at least some knowledge of each other, then there probably never was any such tradition.

Yet the very fact that participants in a tradition may not conceive of it as such calls our attention to the reality that traditions are often constructed by a second category of persons. The isms we commonly call traditions are frequently constructions made by later interpreters of the thought and actions of others. Today such interpreters are usually professional scholars, such as Louis Hartz or John Pocock, though influential accounts have also come from political journalists, public intellectuals, and even active politicians, figures such as Edmund Burke, Herbert Croly, William F. Buckley, and today perhaps Michael Lind.

The contrast between these two categories of tradition constructors should not be understood as an absolute distinction between those who are the true creators of a tradition and those who merely interpret a tradition created by others. For one thing, the primary participants in a tradition must themselves also regularly make interpretive judgments about which people, beliefs, values, and practices they really feel affiliated with and which are external to them. Furthermore, later constructions of a tradition by scholars or political writers may have considerable influence in shaping how that tradition is perceived and developed by its bearers. Sometimes that contribution to the evolution of a tradition is a goal of writers sympathetic to it, as in the case of the writings of Croly and Lind on liberal nationalism or Michael Sandel on republicanism.⁵ But even analysts who conceive of themselves as outside the tradition they study may nonetheless become influential elements in its development. They may be taken up in one way or another by persons who do identify with that tradition and seek to extend it, as arguably occurred with Hartz.

Still, a contrast remains. Primary actors are chiefly concerned to carry on the human ways of thinking, arguing, valuing, and living that constitute the tradition in which they participate, even if they must to some degree interpretively define what those elements are in order to continue them. Later interpreters are chiefly concerned to identify the character and content of the tradition as a tradition, even though they may do so with further ends in view. Hence the interpretive component of their constructions of traditions predominates more than with primary actors, for whom a performance component is central. The main work of later scholars or other interpreters is to decide rather self-consciously what texts, statements, and actions to include as parts of the various traditions they identify, and how to expound the content and relative importance of those elements within the traditions so identified. Even so, such interpreters always make their judgments about what belongs to a tradition and what is most definitive of it with certain problems and purposes in mind. They would not engage in such a rarefied human activity if they did not have concerns prompting them to do so.

It will probably be rather obvious that primary actors in a tradition, who usually conceive of it as at least a fairly close approximation of what is true and good in human life, may well construct it differently from later interpreters, who normally have much more critical distance from it even if they are sympathetic to it. It may be less obvious, but it is equally important to see, that constructions of traditions by later interpreters can also vary quite widely, for good reasons as well as bad. Some analysts are doing essentially the same task more poorly than others. For example, two interpreters might agree that liberalism has been, at core, a set of propositions by certain writers about property rights. One might elaborate this liberalism in ways that plausibly accounted for everything pertinent those writers penned, while the other might ignore large numbers of apparently contradictory passages (including passages that deny that some people can possess those rights). Clearly, the first is doing a better job of interpreting the tradition than the second, at least by one important measure.

More interesting, however, is that some later analysts may interpret an ism or tradition differently than others because they are undertaking quite different but equally defensible tasks. One may be most concerned to explore how far expressive liberties can moderate religious conflicts, instead of how far certain property rights can spur productive market forces. In the course of her inquiry, the first analyst may be led to construct a canon she calls “liberalism” that includes different writers than the property-centered scholar’s account and that understands some of the same writers, indeed some of the same passages, in ways that have a different emphasis and content. She will thus probably construct a significantly different understanding or definition of liberalism, which may or may not be generally compatible with the property-oriented one. To be sure, it might help the rest of us if these two writers chose different terms for the canons they construct. Yet liberalism may seem the most natural term for the products of both efforts, and we have no reason to assign either one greater title to it. Instead, we just have to pay attention to how they are using the term and why.

We have good reason to be vigilant in that regard because no definition of any ism is likely to be adequate to all purposes. Although there are things “out there” to be discovered when we discuss historical ideologies, isms, or traditions, they are never simply in plain, undeniable, and relatively unchanging view, like the Great Wall of China seen from the sky. Even isms that have had proponents who have actively tried to identify and police their affiliates, such as Marxism, display far too much diversity and contestation to make any single definition either wholly authoritative or equally instrumental for all purposes.

Some isms, moreover, are much more plainly “out there” than others. Let me suggest that, building on the contrast between the two categories of constructors of traditions, we can make a further rough-and-ready distinction between a tradition that is openly viewed as such by most of those whom we might reasonably identify as participants in or bearers of that tradition, and a tradition that is identified chiefly by scholars or other interpreters looking backward. Such scholars might well discern deep continuities among political thinkers and actors who may not have consciously recognized themselves as part of any distinct tradition, even though they had some awareness of continuities and commonalities amongst themselves. We might call the first sort of tradition explicit, the second implicit.

The distinction can never be more than approximate. Again, anything we are likely to label a political tradition, including explicit traditions, will probably display much historical contestation over its content, so that who is “in” and who is “out” will have long been disputed even among those who self-consciously identify themselves as acolytes of that tradition. Conversely, even in constructing an “implicit” tradition, scholars are not likely to link together in purely arbitrary fashion people who would utterly deny that they have anything in common. Credible scholarship builds on connections that many of the people we place in a tradition either did acknowledge or might well have acknowledged had the question been raised. Yet it can still be said, I think, that some traditions are more clearly matters of self-conscious identification by the bearers of those traditions than most, while some traditions are much more matters of later interpretive construction, usually scholarly construction, than most. And when a tradition is closer to the latter end of the spectrum, I submit, we should regard it chiefly as a heuristic device suitable for clarifying some issues and not others, rather than as a brute fact of social experience waiting to be discovered and explained from different points of view.

LIBERALISM AND RACISM

What, then, of American liberalism and racism? The initial historiographical argument I want to make is that, unlike, say, the rather explicit Thomist tradition MacIntyre invokes—a tradition he describes as originating in Aquinas’s deliberate construction of a system integrating Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions—Hartz’s “liberal tradition” belongs more on the implicit, “scholarly construction” end of the spectrum.⁶ That fact can be overlooked because liberalism is now such a familiar term in academic and political discourse that it can seem to have always been “out there.” Racism, in contrast, belongs somewhere in the middle—between explicit and implicit—even though it is now so politically disapproved that we tend not to think of it as a full-fledged ideological ism or tradition at all.

Let us begin with Hartz’s liberalism. Far from being conventional wisdom, the construction of a Lockean (or, as Hartz preferred, “Lockian”) liberal tradition into which he could plausibly place most American political thought was one of the two most striking arguments of his 1955 book (the other being the “no feudalism” explanation for the pattern he observed).⁷ To be sure, much of his argument on both points was anticipated by (more truthfully, derived from) Tocqueville and others. But though Tocqueville saw democratic-republican principles and commitments to individual liberties as pervasive features of American political thought, he did not call them part of a tradition of “liberalism.” That was simply not a label he employed. Although the struggles leading up to the revolutions of 1848 may soon have popularized cognate terms i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Liberalism and Racism: The Problem of Analyzing Traditions
• 2 In Search of Political Development
• 3 The Liberal Tradition in American Politics: A Slow Boat to Democracy
• 4 Dew, Fitzhugh, and Proslavery Liberalism
• 5 A “Guiding Principle” of Liberalism in the Thought of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois
• 6 Liberal Equality and the Civic Subject: Identity and Citizenship in Reconstruction America
• 7 Gendered Citizenship: Alternative Narratives of Political Incorporation in the United States, 1875–1925
• 8 Liberalism, Political Culture, and the Rights of Subordinated Groups: Constitutional Theory and Practice at a Crossroads
• 9 Situated Rationality: A Preface to J. David Greenstone’s Reading of V. O. Key’s The Responsible Electorate
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index