lOb
PARTISAN REVIEW
no
ancien reglme
to attack, have been sober, moderate, and realistic.
American "conservatism" in a non-feudal society has been the bour–
geois gospel of work and success, reeking with liberal praise of mobility
and competition, or an obscurantist Americanism which, in its night–
marish fears of a radical bogey, has hugged to its breast in a blind
passion the fetishistic idol of a Constitution that is itself the product
of a liberal ethos. What threatens American culture, in Hartz's judg–
ment, is the universal implicit acceptance of a Lockeian vision of
indio
viduals with natural rights in an atomistic society where government
is
always the dread Leviathan. Culture-bound by the liberal realities of
American life, liberalism becomes innocent and dogmatic, only half·
conscious of itself for lack of an authentic, feudally based conservatism
with which to grapple.
To this extent Hartz's thesis illuminates the failure of political
philosophy in America. Liberalism is too pervasive to be clearly defined.
Begging all the philosophical questions, the American liberal of the
New Deal era could follow the President in a "happy pragmatism"
which in the guise of mere management of practical problems could
invent institutions and programs that strayed far from the Lockeian faith;
while the opposition, led by an engineer, ironically enough, was left to
suffer the onus of being doctrinaire visionaries, howling in the wilder·
ness for twenty years about the end of "the American way of life." The
lack of philosophical acuteness, bred by the success of liberalism, is not
without its uses. By Roosevelt's bland blurring of the issues, Eisenhower
could later swallow both the TVA and Social Security without having
to give much of an account of how he squared these devices with
his
piety to old-fashioned liberal values.
Just as clearly Hartz's thesis illuminates the dilemma of genuine
conservatives who reject the Whig democratic-capitalist ethos of a
Daniel Webster, a Herbert Hoover, or an Eisenhower. These consenra·
tives, who seek an alliance with philosophy rather than with the business
community, must either remain peripheral to the actual issues of Ameri·
can life or suppress their feudal-aristocratic orientation in order to join
forces with the practical "conservatism" of Whiggery. From this point
of view Hartz brilliantly exposes the frustrating dilemma of Calhoun
in the 1850's, and the same tensions could be found in the New
Humanists of the 1920's or in Russell Kirk today.
Hartz's analysis of America as a liberal society is less convincing,
however, when he attempts to explain the "redscare mentality" of the
1920's and our own time. How does a liberal society generate such
irrational obsessions with secrecy, publicity, and conspiracy at the ex·
