LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM
105
History since the late colonial days is merely implicitly condemned.
Nowhere does he recognize that the concentration of industry com–
pelled liberals to revise the assumptions of competitive laissez-faire, that
totalitarian imperialism forced liberals to abandon their pacifism and
isolationism, or that fifth-column conspiratorial groups made necessary
an examination of Jeffersonian dogmas about toleration of speech and
assembly. Ekirch stands outside all these historical problems and is
content to mark the distance we have travelled, not surprisingly, since
1776. He admits that the historian "cannot be positive that losses in
one direction are not matched by gains in another," but it is the effect
of his method to hide that possibility from view.
Hartz presents a much more sophisticated performance. He has a
stunning flair for the hidden harmonies and ironic incongruities that
come from juxtaposing political ideas, and his book is in one sense a
sustained piece of intellectual wit, a sort of comic ballet of ideas in
which American conservatives, liberals, and socialists are strangely
blinded by a society and culture permeated by individualistic assump–
tions. Playfully and ingeniously he explores the "liberal cosmos" of
America with a Hegelian love of dialectical paradox and a Freudian
eye for the compensations and anxieties ideologies express and allay.
Employing a comparative method of continual contrast with European
political thought and practice, he jumps from one historical reference
to another with the agility of Eliza crossing the ice. Hartz makes no
concessions to the slow, the literal, the uninformed, or the cautious, and
the results, if gay, can be a little bewildering. "America represents the
liberal mechanism of Europe functioning without the European social
antagonisms," he characteristically writes, "but the truth is, it is only
through these antagonisms that we recognize the mechanism." By way
of passing illustration he adds: "Remove Wellington from Macaulay,
and you have in essence Alexander Hamilton, but the link between the
two is not at first easy to see." Nor is it, indeed; but as Hartz runs his
course, the reader who enjoys the race gets his second wind.
For all his fancy footwork his basic premise is simple. Following
De Tocqueville, Hartz sees the American as having been "born free"
in
that he has never had to revolt against a domestic feudalism in order
to arrive at liberal democracy. By comparison with Europe the United
States was born a liberal country with limited government, social mo–
bility, and economic freedom. Without an aristocracy for an ally or a
proletariat for an enemy the American middle-class has perpetually
frustrated the growth of either a European-style conservatism or so–
cialism, which require the seed-bed of feudal hierarchy. Liberals, having
