Locke, alger, and atomistic individualism fifty years later: Revisiting Louis Hartz's liberal tradition in America

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 206-215

  Nackenoff, Carol ^a  

^a SWARTHMORE COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33644905339     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X05000131     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), 286, 288, 305-6.
2. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 18, 805, 809-12, 832-35; qtd. on 833.
3. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, esp. 62-63 arid 203-5.
4. See the discussion in Carol Nackenoff, The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 264-66.
5. Is this arguably linked to the zeal with which civil liberties can be offered up, and highway signs urge us to report, suspicious persons and activity, in the search for terrorists?
6. Sean Wilentz, "Uses of The Liberal Tradition: Comments on 'Still Louis Hartz after All These Years,'" Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005): 118.
7. 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;
8. and the posthumous Lincoln Persuasion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
9. see also David F. Ericsori, The Shaping of American Liberalism: The Debates of Ratification, Nullification, and Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
10. On feudalism, see Karen Orren, Belated feudalism: Labor, the Law and Liberal Development in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
11. On republicanism, see, for example J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975)
12. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
13. For example, Carol Nackerioff, "Economic Dualism and What It Means to American Labor Force Participants," Journal of Politics 45 (1983): 110-42.
14. Nackenoff, Fictional Republic.
15. The works of Theda Skocpol, Ira Katzrielson, arid Charles Tilly are among those that have been particularly influential in this regard.
16. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, "Institutional Intercurrence: Theory Building in the Fullness of Time," in Political Order [Nomos 38], ed. Ian Shapiro and Russell Hardin, (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), 140.
17. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, "In Search of Political Development," in The Liberal Tradition in American Politics: Reassessing the Legacy of American Liberalism, ed. David F. Ericson and Louisa Bertch Green (New York: Routledge, 1999), 39.
18. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, "In Search of Political Development, "The Liberal Tradition in American Politics: Reassessing the Legacy of American Liberalism, 1999, 39, Ibid.
19. Orren and Skowronek, "Institutions and Intercurrence," 140.
20. Orren and Skowronek, "Institutions and Intercurrence," Ibid., 139.
21. Nackenoff, "Gendered Citizenship: Alternative Narratives of Political Incorporation in the United States, 1875-1925" in The Liberal Tradition in American Politics, ed. David F. Ericson and Louisa Bertch Green (New York: Routledge, 1999), 137-69.
22. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 260-66.
23. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
24. Richard Itori, "The Sound of Silence: Comments on 'Still Louis Hartz after All These Years,'" Perspectives on Politics3 (2005):114.
25. Nackenoff, Fictional Republic, 53.
26. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Pew Global Attitudes Project Report, "What the World Thinks in 2002: How Global Publics View Their Lives, Their Countries, the World, America," 4 Dec. 2002: 10-11, 19-26. http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/165.pdf (accessed 7 Mar. 2005). Among Americans surveyed, one-quarter reported they had occasionally been unable to afford health care in the past year, arid one-third reported they had been occasionally unable to afford health care, clothing, or food at some point in the past year.
27. Paul Krugman, "The Death of Horatio Alger," Nation, 5 Jan. 2004, 16-17.
28. Aaron Bernstein, "Waking Up from the American Dream," Business Week, 1 Dec. 2003, 54-58.
29. David Wessel, "The Future of Jobs: New Ones Arise, Wage Gap Widens," Watt Street Journal, 2 Apr. 2004, A1, A5. According to the Economic Policy Institute figures cited by Wessel, the "premium for a college diploma" in terms of wages has jumped to 41 percent for similar men from 21 percent twenty-five years ago; for women, those with a four-year college degree earn 46 percent more than those with a high school diploma, a jump from 25 percent twenty-five years ago.
30. Jane Bryant Quinn, "Colleges' New Tuition Crisis," Newsweek, 2 Feb. 2004, 49.
31. Jane Bryant Quinn, "Colleges' New Tuition Crisis," Newsweek, 2004, 49, Ibid
32. David Leonhardt, "As Wealthy Fill Top Colleges, Concerns Grow over Fairness," New York Times, 22 Apr. 2004, A1.
33. David Leonhardt, "As Wealthy Fill Top Colleges, Concerns Grow over Fairness," New York Times, 2004, A1, Ibid
34. Beth Shulman, "Low-Wage Work-America's Broken Promise," Poverty & Race (2004) http://www.prrac.org/full_text.php?text_id=989&item_id= 9309&:newsletter_id=74&header=Poverty+%2F+Welfare (accessed 9 Mar. 2005).
35. Beth Shulman, The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans (New York: New Press, 2003)
36. Joan Oleck, "Horatio Alger in Trouble, " Ford Foundation Report, fall 2003, http://www.fordfound.org/publications/ff_report/ view_ff_report_detail.cfm?report_index=456 (accessed 8 Mar. 2005).
37. See also Bernstein, supra n.16.
38. Shulman, Low-Wage Work, 82,
39. citing Richard B. Freeman, "Is the New Income Inequality the Achilles' Heel of the American Economy?" in The Inequality Paradox: Growth of Income Disparity, ed. James A. Auerbach and Richard S. Belous (Washington, DC: National Policy Association, 1998);
40. and Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America 2000-2001 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
41. Bob Herbert, "Theory vs. Reality," New York Times, 23 Feb. 2004, A21.
42. James Kuhnhenn, "Minimum-wage Hike Defeated," Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 Mar. 2005, A3.
43. Stephen Labaton, "Senate Re jects 2 Proposals to Raise Minimum Wage," New York Times, 8 Mar, 2005, C2.
44. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).
45. David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Knopf, 2004).
46. Shipler discussed by Ron Suskind, New York Times Book Review, 15 Feb. 2004.
47. Eileen Appelbaum, Annette Bernhardt, Richard J. Murnane eds., Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003).
48. Appelbaum, Bernhardt, and Murnane, "Low-Wage America: An Overview," Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace, ibid, 1-29.
49. Wessel, "The Future of Jobs," A1.
50. Wessel, The Future of Jobs, Ibid., A1, A5.
51. Herbert, "Theory vs. Reality," A21.
52. Christopher Jencks, "Who Should Get In?," New York Review of Books, 29 Nov. 2001, 57-63.
53. In this review of Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy by Harvard economist George J. Borjas, Jencks reports Borjas's statistic that the wage gap between immigrants and native-born workers was, by 1998, three times as large as it was in 1910.
54. Appelbaum, Bernhardt, and Murnane, Low-Wage America, chap. 1.
55. David W. Wright arid colleagues, cited in Bernstein, "Waking Up from the American Dream," 58. For the 1990s, the measure was the economic standard of the parents.
56. This according to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez and confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office, cited in Krugman, "Death of Horatio Alger,"16.
57. James J. Heckman as quoted by Bernstein, "Waking Up from the American Dream," 56.
58. Jacob S. Hacker, "Call It the Family Risk Factor," New York Times, 11 Jan. 2004, A15.
59. Hacker, "Middle-Class Tightrope: It's More Dire Than the Numbers Show," Washington Post, 10 Aug. 2004, A19. He finds, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, that in the past three decades, family incomes have become two to three unies more unstable. This is true even for well-educated workers and families with two earners.
60. Hacker, "False Positive," The New Republic, 16-23 Aug. 2004, 14-17.
61. Michael Moore, Dude, Where's My Country?(Warner Books, 2003).
62. Michael Moore, Dude, Where's My Country, Ibid., 144, 138.
63. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "Among Wealthy Nations . . . U.S. Stands Alone in its Embrace of Religion," The Pew Global Attitudes Project. Report released 19 Dec. 2003, intro. and summary, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?Report.ID=167 (accessed 7 Mar. 2005).
64. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "The 2004 Political Landscape: Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized," Report released 5 Nov. 2003. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=196 (accessed 7 Mar. 2005).
65. Some of the important contributions to this literature include Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)
66. and Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975);
67. Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (New York: New American Library, 1970)
68. and Under God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990);
69. Michael Kammen, People of Paradox (New York: Vintage, 1972);
70. John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1984);
71. Robert N. Bellah, Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
72. Robert Booth Fowler, Religion and Politics in America (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1985);
73. Wilson C. McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
74. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 81 and passim; 185.
75. James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), esp. Intro. andpt. 5.
76. James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, Ibid., 7.
77. James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, Ibid., 11, 32.
78. James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, Ibid., 13.
79. James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 3, 15-18, 28, 30, and chap. 4.
80. James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society, Ibid., 22-23.
81. James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society, Ibid., 5-9, 29.
82. James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society, Ibid., 1, 33.
83. James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society, Ibid., 1-2.
84. Nackenoff, Fictional Republic, 8 and chap. 3.
85. Lionel Trilling, Liberal Imagination,
86. qtd. in John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 43.
87. Micklethwait. and Wooldridge, Right Nation, chaps. 12-14.
88. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. (New York: Holt, 2004). See esp. chap. 6.
89. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Ibid., 113-14.
90. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Ibid., 127.
91. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Ibid., 128-29.
92. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).
93. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 295, 57, 139, 177, 831-32.
94. Philip Abbott, "Still Louis Hartz after All These Years: A Defense of the Liberal Society Thesis," Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005): 96.
95. Abbott, "Still Louis Hartz," 105.