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American Conservatism and the Democratic Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Robert G. McCloskey
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Extract

In 1873, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court filed a memorable dissenting opinion. His brethren had upheld a state-granted monopoly against the charge that it violated the new Fourteenth Amendment. The substance of that majority judgment has never been reversed, and it stands today as one of the great milestones in our constitutional law. But the dissent of Mr. Justice Field, though unproductive as to the specific constitutional doctrine he there espoused, is, from another viewpoint, even more noteworthy. For it marks — or we can conveniently take it as marking — the point in our intellectual history at which the democratic strain in the American tradition begins its subservience to political conservatism.

The choice of a date is indeed somewhat arbitrary. A profound change in the national consciousness does not occur overnight, and the revision of the American ideology diat Field's dissent proclaimed was not yet complete in 1873. But Field was a child of his times, and he spoke with the voice of the new generation. His rambling discourse, with its moral overtones, is evidence that a new era in American political thinking had dawned.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , January 1951 , pp. 3 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1951

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References

1 Slaughterhouse Cases, 16 Wall. 36 (1873).

2 “The radicals felt that liberty is inherent in the fact of human existence as such, not, merely, in the man who can purchase it with property. They sought, therefore, to build a state in which, because the common man was sovereign, its power would be utilized to realize certain moral principles inherent in the nature of the universe.” Laski, H. J., The Rise of European Liberalism (London, 1936).Google Scholar

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