Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:59:58.433Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Uses of The Liberal Tradition: Comments on “Still Louis Hartz after All These Years”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2005

Sean Wilentz
Affiliation:
Program in American Studies at Princeton University ([email protected])

Extract

Phillip Abbott is too modest. His essay seeks to defend, against its many critics, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, which was published half a century ago. Abbott bases his defense mainly on his discovery that certain concepts of Hartz's—“the liberal enlightenment,” “the American democrat”—remain valid and helpful in explaining the politics of the 1960s and after. Yet the merits of Abbott's interpretation of that phase in our political history rise or fall on his own thinking, not Hartz's—his use of Hartz's book, and not Hartz's book itself. If Hartz's work gets him where he wants to go better than Judith Shklar's or Rogers Smith's does, that's fine. Gratitude is a worthy sentiment, too often forgotten in our narcissistic academic culture. But by now, Hartz is mainly a figure of historical interest. I'm less interested in whether Louis Hartz was right than in whether Phillip Abbott is right—not about Louis Hartz but about the events of 1960s and their legacies.Sean Wilentz is Dayton-Stockon Professor of History and director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University ([email protected]).

Type
COMMENTARIES
Copyright
© 2005 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Basler, Roy P., ed. 1953. The collected works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 7. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Hartz, Louis. 1939. Otis and anti-slavery doctrine. New England Quarterly 12 (4): 74547.Google Scholar
Hartz, Louis. 1940. Seth Luther: The story of a working-class rebel. New England Quarterly 13 (4): 40118.Google Scholar
Hartz, Louis. 1955. The liberal tradition in America: An interpretation of American political thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1955. The age of reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1968. The Progressive historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Kennedy, John F. 1963. Radio and television report to the American people on civil rights. June 11, 1963. Transcript. John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
Kraditor, Aileen S. 1969. Means, and ends in American abolitionism: Garrison and his critics on strategy and tactics, 1834–1850. New York: Random House.
Kraditor, Aileen S. 1981. The radical persuasion, 1890–1917: Aspects of the intellectual history and historiography of three American radical organizations. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
McPherson, James M. 1997. For cause and comrades: Why men fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.
McWhorter, Diane. 2001. Carry me home: Birmingham, Alabama: The climactic battle of the civil rights revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rieder, Jonathan. 1985. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against liberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Woodward, C. Vann. 1965. From the first Reconstruction to the second. Harper's Magazine. April, 12733.