Shifting terrain: Styles of liberalism, periodization, and levels of analysis

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 405-426

  Perusek, Glenn ^a  

^a ALBION COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

American exceptionalism; Burke; Greenstone; Hartz; Levels of analysis; Lockean liberalism; Periodization; Wittgenstein

Indexed keywords

EID: 1442268966     PISSN: 08914486     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1014041625946     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. J. David Greenstone, The Lincoln Persuasion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
2. Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978).
3. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962).
4. The English word "scene" comes from the classical Greek, σκηνη, for "tent," or more generally to refer to abode, a place to inhabit, dwelling. A dwelling place, therefore, a mobile abode.
5. Aristide R. Zolberg, "Moments of Madness," Politics and Society 2, 2 (Winter 1972): 183-207.
6. The literature on neoliberalism is voluminous, interdisciplinary and international. Valuable critical entry points in English include Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1995);
7. Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996);
8. John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: New Press, 1998)
9. and the succinctly stated, trenchant position in Pierre Bourdieu, "The essence of neoliberalism," Le Monde Diplomatique December 1998), accessed from 〈www.mondediplomatique.fr/en/1998/12/08bourdieu〉 on 22 March 2001.
10. A superlative review essay is Eric Foner, "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984): 57-80.
11. G. D. H. Cole, The Second International, 1889-1914 (A History of Socialist Thought, vol. III, pt. I) (London: Macmillan, 1956), 249-50.
12. On the trajectory of the SPD, the classic work by Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955) still repays study.
13. Werner Sombart, Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (P. Siebeck), 1906),
14. trans. Patricia M. Hocking and C. T. Husbands, Why is there no socialism in the United States? (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1976).
15. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches (New York: Pantheon, 1980);
16. Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Free Press, 1997).
17. James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967) argues that leftism and faction decimated the SP;
18. Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952) decries the SP's conservatism.
19. As Zolberg persuasively argues, Lipset ultimately contends that "the single most important determinant of variation in the pattern of working-class politics ... is simply whether, at the time this class was being brought into being by the development of capitalism it faced an absolutist or a liberal state." Although not the same as Hartz's struggle against feudalism factor, I would contend that this is a species of the same argument. Working classes facing hardened absolutism (Germany) fought sharper class polarization as the environment for social democratic organizing. See Seymour Martin Lipset, "Radicalism or Reformism: The Sources of Working-Class Politics," American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 1-18;
20. Aristide R. Zolberg, "How Many Exceptionalisms?" in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 450. In fairness, it should be pointed out that the whole thrust of Zolberg's argument is against the "exceptionalist" paradigm.
21. Greenstone, Lincoln, xix.
22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), sec. 30.
23. Wittgenstein, Investigations, sec. 85.
24. Wittgenstein, Investigations, sec. 60.
25. Wittgenstein, Investigations, sec. 70.
26. Wittgenstein, Investigations, sec. 85.
27. Carla M. Hess, "Introduction to the Book," in Greenstone, Lincoln, xxv. It is worth noting, in passing, the somewhat singular history of Greenstone's manuscript. Greenstone worked for more than a dozen years on The Lincoln Persuasion before succumbing to cancer in 1990. A team of scholars in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, Greenstone's intellectual home since the 1960s, took up the task of editing the manuscript for final publication. Several of Greenstone's graduate students, including Carla M. Hess, Louisa Bertch Green and Dave Ericson, made valuable contributions to the work, even though they sought to edit delicately.
28. Greenstone, Lincoln, 60.
29. Greenstone, Lincoln, 61-2;
30. quotes from Hess, "Introduction," xxii; xxv.
31. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 12.
32. Wittgenstein, Investigations, sec. 85: "A rule stands there like a sign-post. Does the sign-post leave no doubt open about the way I have to go? Does it shew which direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country? But where is it said which way I am to follow it ... And if there were, not a single sign-post, but a chain of adjacent ones or of chalk marks on the ground-is there only one way of interpreting them?"
33. As Katznelson argues, this difference in policymaking helps to account for the Reaganite backlash against the Great Society: social state liberalism was vulnerable to political attack because its coalition was divided by the kind of policymaking done under the Great Society. Ira Katznelson, "Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?" in Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 185-211.
34. It is true that by the end of the 1960s, all of the new social movements had developed important elements that were engaged in often dogmatic, ideologically rigid organization- or movement-building projects. Here they parted ways with the tolerant ethos of the civil rights movement up to 1965. For a careful treatment of these developments in SNCC, see Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
35. However, there do appear to be very brief moments when social movement liberalism seems to be the predominant force determining the character of politics: the wave of sitdown strikes in 1937, or the protest spirit of 1968, for example. Zolbergian "moments of madness" are such participatory crescendos.
36. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 18-19.
37. Although, as Hartz himself pointed out in an early work, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), businessmen themselves saw partnerships with the state as natural and unobjectionable before the Civil War.
38. See also Andrew Shonfield, Modern Capitalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 301-4.
39. William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 98-9.
40. A strong, comprehensive treatment of the history of European socialism is Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism (New York: The New Press, 1996). Although the "third way" appears to constitute a left liberal convergence between Europe and the United States, it should not be a surprise that the greatest resistance has been in Germany, the country with the strongest residue of traditional social democratic politics.
41. Succinct theorization and defense of this new course for social democracy is provided in Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1998)
42. and The Third Way and its Critics (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 2000).
43. Or family of traditions-different strains of republicanism bear internal similarities but are related as members of a family are related. Classical republicanism, in Aristotle and Cicero, bears a resemblance to modern republicanism, whether articulated by Rousseau or Hegel. But with the development of radical or progressive interpretations of republicanism, we can see significant differences arise. See for example Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), chapter two;
44. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965).
45. In the United States, we must assume that business-oriented interest organizations and the media will establish major obstacles to progressive change.
46. Walter Reuther, "This is Your Fight," Nation, January 12, 1946, p. 36.
47. See James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (New York: Macmillan, 1972);
48. Theodore Draper, The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism (New York: Viking, 1970);
49. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975).
50. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985) develop the concept of hegemony from the Italian marxist,
51. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
52. See also Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000).
53. The head of the KPD, Thälmann, argued that "in Germany the two [the SPD and the Nazis] appear in their true colors as 'twin brothers.'" The main enemy of the working class, in the KPD's distorted view, was social democracy. Quoted in Duncan Hallas, The Comintern (London: Bookmarks, 1985), 135.
54. See also Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 150-4.
55. As Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 61, puts it, "class is invariably named but rarely theorized or developed in the multiculturalist mantra, 'race, class, gender, sexuality.'"