Contrasts on the American Experience

"Liberal" has come to entail those who go against the idea of the American Dream, in which the pursuit of blessedness is promised but in which happiness itself is up to the individual to rattling achieve or avoid. The original concepts on which the nation was founded were continuous tense in the oldest, most classic sense of the word; in recent times, the word has come to mean virtually the double-dyed(a) opposite.

The 1991 edition includes an introduction by Tom Wicker that attempts to shortly update the evolution that the liberal tradition has undergone since 1955, but the trends that Hartz initially outlined argon easy enough to extrapolate to a modern world in which "liberal" is sometimes apply as a dirty word, and not merely by strict conservatives.

Hartz makes a convincing argument for studying the droll situation of the American political establishment, one which grew from and was informed by European tradition but, in some respects, was born with the presentation of the country: "It has a quiet, matter of fact quality, it does not bring in the meaning of sovereign power, the bourgeois class passion is scarcely present, the sense of the past is altered, and there is about it all, as compared with the European pattern, a vast and almost charming innocence of theme" (7). In other words, the lack of political antecedents means that the American ashes began its life as a liberal society, earlier than evolving into one, making it unique among all the world's significant political sys

tems. Unlike the European model, the American system did not really grow out of feudalism. It had no keen-sighted-standing traditions to maverick against and overthrow. Although the American Revolution is often compared to its French counterpart, the two events are actually quite separate. France was overthrowing centuries of royal rule and the existence of an disconsolate class that oppressed the workers and considered them in many ways as subhuman. America was overthrowing traditions that had not been in place for very long and were, at best, imported and modeled on the traditions of entirely varied societies.

The nation that emerged had an entirely new, separate identity, while the new France excuse had ties in many significant ways to its royalist, class-dominated past.

It is an interesting concept. It argues that the conventional way of studying history - looking at American history as a separate entity, a polar curriculum entirely, usually studied at different points in an academic career - misses a full appreciation of this uniqueness. Without apprehensiveness how the American political evolution differs from those that began with a feudal system and eventually struggled to escape it, through their own forms of democracy or through various configurations of socialism, Marxism, and communism, the American system seems more fair and at the same time seems like a homophile(a) anomaly. It does not follow the other political models, a fact which can only be explained when the unique tradition from which it arises is clearly understood.

Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution. San Diego; Harvest, 1991.

Foner agrees with this assessment. He writes, "Despite the celebration of self-reliance as the foundation of the American way of life, the right to take issue inevitably came under attack as the Cold warfare intensified" (255). The Cold War made America loss leader of "the Free World," but iro
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