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GERTRUD LENZER
said or didn't say. Nevertheless, as if it all mattered, three pages further
on Lipset is reversing himself again:
Although these accounts of travelers and American essayists
cannot
be taken as
conclusive proof
of an unchanging American
character, they do suggest that the hypothesis which sees the
American character changing with respect to the traits "inner-"
and "other-directedness"
may be incorrect.
(Italics mine)
The "body of evidence" has vanished, and the "comparative mirror,"
like the mirror of the Lady of Shalott, has cracked wide open.
At just about this point, Plato is summoned to the bar. Lipset asks
him to bear witness to other-directedness as an essential element of
democracy, of
stable
democracy no less. "As Plato noted, and as the
foreign travelers testify" (here we
go
again) "democratic man is deeply
imbued with the desire to accommodate to others, which results in kind–
ness and generosity in personal relations...." But where does Plato note
this and how? Lipset presents a rather long quotation which would be–
had he quoted correctly-utterly useless for his purposes. For Socrates
describes how democracy (which in his opinion isn't something good to
begin with) deteriorates into despotism by its excessive emphasis on
equality, a
disease
which befalls democracy and makes its "way into the
home, until at last the very animals catch the infection of anarchy"
(Republic,
VIII, 562). Naturally, Lipset hasn't included the other–
directed, equalitarian, democratic and domesticated animal in his quota–
tion, for equality is one of the two value-pillars upon which his stable
democracy rests.
But the key to Lipset's thinking is in his interest in the "independent
explanatory power of value analysis"
and
stable democracy-somehow
the two seem inseparable. To demonstrate this power he chooses as his
foremost object "America's key values--equality and achievement." It is
these two values "which stem from our revolutionary origin"; they
determined the early history of American and continued "to influence
the form and substance of American institutions in later years." In Lip–
set's mind these two "basic values" have been and still are the generating
motor of American culture. By equality Lipset means that Americans
believe all persons must be given respect simply because they are
human beings ; we believe that the differences between high- and
low-status pople reflect accidental, and perhaps temporary,
variations in social relationships. . . .
[The value Americans] have attributed to
achievement
is a
corollary to our belief in equality.
For people to be equal, they
need a chance to become equal.
Success, therefore, should be
