Locke, Alger, and Atomistic Individualism Fifty Years Later: Revisiting Louis Hartz's Liberal Tradition in America

Extract

Louis Hartz asked some very important questions in The Liberal Tradition in America. One that seems especially relevant in the aftermath of invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and to which I will point only briefly, concerns America's relationship with the rest of the world. Hartz wrote that America's “messianism is the polar counterpart of its isolationism,” and that it had “hampered insight abroad and heightened anxiety at home.” He contended that America had difficulty communicating with the rest of the world because the American liberal creed, even in its Alger form, “is obviously not a theory which other peoples can easily appropriate or understand,” and that absence of the experience of social revolution in America's history lies at the heart of our inability to understand how to lead others. Henry Kissinger contends that, in a post-cold war era, American exceptionalism with its rejection of history, extolling “the image of a universal man living by universal maxims, regardless of the past, of geography, or of other immutable circumstances,” is a kind of innocence ill-suited to successful diplomacy in the emerging world order. We talk a great deal about bringing freedom, democracy, and self-determination to the Middle East, but this hardly seems an apt description of what is happening on the ground. Do we have anything to teach? Hartz, who was quite skeptical about our ability to export the American liberal tradition, might still have something useful to say about our interactions abroad, even in a post-cold war world.