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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE REFORMER AS REACTIONARY
THE AGE OF REFORM. By Richard Hofstodter. Alfred A. Knopf. $4.50.
STRANGERS IN THE LAND. By John Higham. Rutgers University Press.
$6.00.
The use of such words as liberal and conservative, progressive
and reactionary not only as labels for political movements but also as
emotionally weighted slogans is a source of constant semantic confusion,
and during periods (like the present) when allegiances are no longer
crystallized around any clear-cut practical issues, it becomes almost
impossible to talk meaningfully about politics at all. One is tempted
to suggest that every twenty or thirty years a moratorium should be
declared on all the familiar words and a completely new vocabulary
adopted. This might have made it more difficult for the leftists of two
decades ago to sell totalitarianism as an up-to-date brand of liberalism
and for the rightists of today to repackage nineteenth-century laissez–
faire liberalism under the label of a new conservatism. This kind of
confusion has always been particularly prevalent in the United States
as a result of certain peculiarities in the American political tradition.
In America, unlike Europe with its feudalistic background, liberalism
has always retained a strong tendency to find its utopia
in
the past, in
the Jeffersonian myth of an agrarian and individualistic democracy.
The main dynamic force in American society, on the other hand, has
always been the capitalistic industrialism whose first great spokesman
was Alexander Hamilton. Jeffersonianism, liberal in its political ideals,
was economically conservative; Hamiltonianism, politically reactionary,
was economically progressive. The conventional political terminology,
minted in Europe, does not cover such phenomena.
Mr. Hofstadter's analysis of the ideology of Populism and Progres–
sivism presents a very necessary semantic clarification. While he is very
much aware of the dangers of oversimplification, his main emphasis
is on the reactionary elements
in
American reform movements, both
Populism and Progressivism being strongly influenced by an unrealistic
nostalgia for the Jeffersonian utopia. Populist thinking, as Mr. Hof–
stadter shows in detail, was permeated with the myth of the self–
sufficient agrarian individualist, while Progressivism appealed mainly
to various middle-class groups who had lost their traditional high status
in American society as a result of the rise of big business. Both move–
ments relied heavily on moralistic slogans derived from the ethos of
an earlier epoch. Mr. Hofstadter draws a contrast between the ineffec–
tiv~nes~
of the reformers as
Ion~
as they sought :primarily to reassert
