Political culture, patterns of American political development, and distinctive rationalities

Review of Politics

Volumn 63, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 517-548

  Lockhart, Charles ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0042135245     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500030941     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. See Byron E. Shafer, "Political Eras in Political History: A Review Essay." Journal of Policy History 5 (1993): 461-74;
2. Calvin Jillson, "Patterns and Periodicity in American National Politics," inDynamics in American Politics, ed. Lawrence Dodd and Calvin Jillson (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), pp. 24-58;
3. Martin J. Sklar, "Periodization and Historiography: Studying American Political Development in the Progressive Era, 1890s-1916," Studies in American Political Development 5 (1991): 173-213;
4. Steven Hahn, "Response to Sklar," Studies in American Political Development 5 (1991): 214-20;
5. and Joel H. Silbey, American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
6. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "The Cycles of American Politics/' in The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), pp. 23-48;
7. Frank L. Klingberg, Cyclical Trends in American Foreign Polio/ Moods (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983);
8. Zvi Namenwirth, "Wheels of Time and the Interdependence of Value Change in America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1973): 649-83;
9. David Resnick and Norman C. Thomas, "Cycling Through American Politics," Polity 23 (1990): 1-21;
10. Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981);
11. and Steven Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership From John Adams to George Bush (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
12. Huntington, American Politics.
13. Schlesinger, "The Cycles of American Politics."
14. Prominent among these others are AlbertO. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982);
15. and Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
16. William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584-2069 (New York: William Morris, 1991), reveal hazards of basing historical cycles on generations.
17. Joshua Goldstein, Long Cycles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 176, distinguishes two types of cycles: one defined by intervals, the other by repeating sequences. To Schlesinger's credit, following sequences of specified activities would seem to be a more important focus of concern with respect to the patterns of American political development than adherence to strict intervals.
18. See J. David Greenstone, "Political Culture and American Political Development: Liberty, Union, and the liberal Bipolarity," Studies in American Political Development 1 (1986): 1-49;
19. and "The Transient and the Permanent in American Politics: Standards, Interests, and the Concept of Public," inPublic Values and Private Power in American Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3-33.
20. See Hirschman, Shifting Involvements;
21. and McClosky and Zaller, The American Ethos.
22. For a general discussion of difficulties in applying cycles to American political life see Resnick and Thomas, "Cycling Through American Politics." One difficulty with any scheme of national periodization is that it is apt to slight the degree to which, prior to the twentieth century, regionalism was more pronounced and national trends correspondingly less significant.
23. See Daniel H. Deudney, "The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States- Union, circa 1787-1861," International Organization 49 (1995): 191-228.
24. Richard J. Ellis, American Political Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 161.
25. Schlesinger, "The Cycles of American Politics," p. 39.
26. Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
27. Ellis, American Political Cultures, pp. 165-169
28. For sociological origins, see Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951 [1897]).
29. For anthropological refinement, see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of the Nilotic People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940);
30. and Mary Douglas, Cultural Bias (London: Royal Anthropological Society, 1978);
31. andHcw Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986).
32. For recent applications in political science, see Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990);
33. Ellis, American Political Cultures;
34. Richard J. Ellis and Fred Thompson, "Culture and the Environment in the Pacific Northwest," American Political Science Review 91 (1997): 885-97; (Pubitemid 127173828)
35. and Richard M. Coughlin and Charles Lockhart, "Grid-Group Theory and Political Ideology: A Consideration of Their Relative Strengths and Weaknesses for Explaining the Structure of Mass Belief Systems," Journal of Theoretical Politics 10 (1998): 33-58.
36. Aaron Wildavsky, "Why Self-Interest Means Less Outside of a Social Context: Cultural Contributions to a Theory of Rational Choices," Journal of Theoretical Politics 6 (1994): 131-159
37. By "legitimacy of external prescription" I refer to the varying ease with which persons accept that other persons' judgments are valid for and binding on them. For a career enlisted person in a military service, for instance, this legitimacy is apt to be high since he or she will have chosen a life that routinely involves accepting the orders of officers with few questions.
38. On the void, see Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 133.
39. For more on how gridgroup theory helps to fill this void, see Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson, Divided We Stand: Redefining Politics, Technology, and Social Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 49.
40. While this claim is controversial, it is obviously less limiting than the widely accepted notion that only variations on two ways of life-hierarchy and individualism-are socially viable;
41. see Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic, 1977).
42. Additionally, others have derived similar typologies, see Alan P. Fiske, Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations (New York: Free Press, 1993);
43. Mark Irving Lichbach, The Rebel's Dilemma (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995);
44. and B. Guy Peters, The Future of Governing: Four Emerging Models (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). There is also a fair amount of independent empirical analysis supporting this claim;
45. see Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer;
46. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont and Basia Gulati (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
47. Andrew Strathern, The Rope ofMoka: Big-Men and Ceremonial Exchange in Mount Hagan, New Guinea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971);
48. and Victor C. Uchendu, The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965). Finally, gridgroup theory includes a fifth, non-socially-interactive way of life-the hermit's-that I do not apply in this paper;
49. see Michael Thompson, "The Problem of the Center: An Autonomous Cosmology," in Essays in the Sociology of Perception ed. Mary Douglas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 302-327
50. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958). There are a few exceptions to fatalists' general reticence. See Ecclesiastes 9:11 and Schophauer's The World as Will and Representation.
51. See Gunnar Grendstad, "A Political Cultural Map of Europe: A Survey Approach/' Geojournal 47 (1999): 463-75.
52. Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and RaffaellaY. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
53. Elazar, American Federalism.
54. See Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky, Cultural Theory, chap. 13.
55. See Rebecca D. Klatch, Women on the New Right (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987).
56. Harry Eckstein, "A Culturalist Theory of Political Change," American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 789-804.
57. Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky, Cultural Theory, pp. 69-93.
58. The first of these processes (i.e., shifts in persons' cultural biases arising from changing social circumstances) is stressed by Douglas, How Institutions Think. The second (i.e., shifting coalitions among cultures) later came to be emphasized by Ellis and Wildavsky, Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership.
59. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).
60. Ellis, American Political Cultures;
61. Rogers M. Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz, the Multiple Traditions in America," American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 549-566
62. I focus on illustrating a novel theoretical application in this section without attempting exhaustive empirical support. I have drawn particularly on Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1967);
63. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969);
64. Donald S. Lutz, Popular Consent and Popular Control: Whig Political Theory in the Early State Constitutions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980);
65. Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788 (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1964);
66. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978);
67. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
68. Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);
69. and Jean B. Lee, The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (New York: Norton, 1994). Further, any form of abstract theoretical device, such as the conception of shifting cultural coalitions that I am employing here, necessarily misses and misinterprets specific aspects of empirical reality's daunting complexity. There are always reasonable questions as to whether the theoretical purchase such a device provides produces enough in benefits to outweigh the costs in terms of tortured or misleading fits for some range of facts that presses the device near or beyond its limits. I acknowledge that this application of grid-group theory suffers from such problems, but I think that its capacity for revealing a pattern to American political development overshadows these difficulties.
70. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
71. See Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Free Press, 1965 [1913]).
72. See Huntington, American Politics;
73. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements;
74. and McClosky and Zaller, The American Ethos.
75. See John Ashworth, "Agrarians" and "Aristocrats": Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837-1846 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
76. Daniel Walker Howe, ed., The American Whigs: An Anthology (New York: Wiley, 1973);
77. Martin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957);
78. Sydney Nathans, Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973);
79. and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).
80. In the two subdivisions of this section I am even briefer, sketching only the barest outlines of cultural coalition dynamics. For the late 1830s-early 1890s, I have drawn on Robert G. McClosky, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise: A Study of William Graham Sumner, Stephen J. Field, and Andrew Carnegie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951);
81. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in America (Boston: Beacon, 1944);
82. Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Knopf, 1952);
83. Chester Destler, American Radicalism, 1865-1901 (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1966);
84. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1800s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950);
85. and Silbey, The American Political Nation.
86. For the middle 1890s-early 1990s, I have drawn on Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1966);
87. Stanley Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917 (New York: Harper and Row, 1954);
88. Jeffrey R. Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of American Political Theory, 1890-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982);
89. Edward Moore, American Pragmatism: Pierce, James, and Dewey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961);
90. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933, vol.1 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957);
91. The Coming of the New Deal, vol.2 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959);
92. and The Politics of Upheaval, vol.3 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Miffllin, 1959);
93. Steven Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
94. Sklar, "Periodization and Historiography";
95. and John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994).
96. Ellis, American Political Cultures.
97. See Gary Lee Malecha, "A Cultural Analysis of Populism in Late 19th Century America," inPolitics, Policy and Culture, ed. Dennis J. Coyle and Richard J. Ellis (Boulder, CO, Westview, 1994), pp. 93-116;
98. and Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967).
99. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
100. Aaron Wildavsky, "Change in Political Change," Journal of the Australian Political Science Association 20 (1985): 95-102.
101. Persons with bifocal cultural biases perceive the world through two distinct lenses. Frequently they view various domains of life through different perspectives (e.g., applying individualism to workplace issues while relying more thoroughly on egalitarianism or hierarchy in family life). Yet "bifocals" are characteristically more sensitive to the limits of their perspectives even in their primary domains of application (e.g., more hesitant than purer individualists about overcoming the Great Depression through market means alone). See Charles Lockhart, Protecting the Elderly: Culture's Contributions to Explaining Social Policy Decisions (University Park: Perm State University Press, 2001), chap. 2.
102. See Skowronek, Building a New American State.
103. See Philip Abbott, Political Thought in America: Conversations and Debates (Itasca, IL: Peacock, 1991), p. 236.
104. With respect to Franklin D. Roosevelt's own HI bifocal cultural bias, see Daniel Roland Fusfeld, The Economic Thought ofF.D.R. and the Origins of the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956);
105. Thomas H. Greer, What Roosevelt Thought: The Social and Political Ideas of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958);
106. and Clinton Rossiter, "The Political Philosophy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt," Review of Politics 11 (1949): 87-95.
107. See Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1958).
108. Arthur Altmeyer, The Formative Years of Social Security (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968).
109. On culturally constrained rationalities, see Wildavsky, "Why Self-interest Means Less Outside of a Social Context;
110. " and also John Ferejohn, "Rationality and Interpretation: Parliamentary Elections in Early Stuart England," in The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action, ed. Kristen Renwick Monroe (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 279-305. Ferejohn uses the term "thick" rationalities.
111. These persons include Greenstone, "Political Culture and American Political Development";
112. and "The Transient and the Permanent in American Politics";
113. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements;
114. and McClosky and Zaller, The American Ethos.
115. Others have turned to two dimensions in order to capture variation conflated in a single dimension. See Milton Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values (New York: Free Press, 1973);
116. Shawn W. Rosenberg, "The Structure of Human Thinking," American Journal of Political Science 32 (1988): 539-66;
117. Harry C. Triandis, Individualism and Collectivism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995);
118. and Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
119. See Hirschman, Shifting Involvements;
120. and McClosky and Zaller, The American Ethos.
121. For more on these contrasting objectives, see David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), chaps. 2-3.
122. See Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996)
123. on the successes (and shortcomings) of individualism across American history; and his Continental Divide: Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1990), on the influence of individualists among early colonists.
124. In those relatively rare instances in other societies in which individualists are virtually eliminated from societal influence (e.g., the former Soviet Union), the prospects for long-term societal well-being are not encouraging.
125. See, for instance, Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (New York: Broadway Books, 1997).
126. See Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
127. See Ferejohn, "Rationality and Interpretation."
128. However, Gabriel A. Almond, "Rational Choice Theory and the Social Sciences," in The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Choice, ed. Rristen Renwick Monroe (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 32-52;
129. Roger G. Noll and Barry Weingast, "Rational Actor Theory, Social Norms, and Policy Implementation: Applications to Administrative Processes and Bureaucratic Culture," in The Economic Approach to Politics, pp. 237-58;
130. Mark K. Petracca, "The Rational Actor Approach to Politics: Science, Self-interest and Normative Democratic Theory," in The Economic Approach to Politics, pp. 171-203;
131. and particularly Shawn Rosenberg, "Rationality, Markets and Political Analysis: A Social Psychological Critique of Neoclassical Political Economy, " in The Economic Approach to Politics, pp. 386-404, especially 397-401, all contend that the egoistic and hedonistic economic-man (i.e., individualistic) values frequently employed by rational choice theorists are no more natural to humans than values deriving from love and duty.
132. Kristen Renwick Monroe suggests that, in political life, persons' objectives are frequently more appropriately conceived as socialized preferences integral to their identities, rather than as choices. Accordingly, she adopts the term "rational action" in place of "rational choice." See her "The Theory of Rational Action: Origins and Usefulness for Political Science," in The Economic Approach to Politics, pp. 1-31
133. Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967).