The Necessity of Choice: Nineteenth Century Political Thought

201 Pages·1990·0.868 MB·English

by  Louis Hartz, Paul Roazen, Benjamin R. Barber

First paperback printing 2015
Copyright © 1990 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New
Jersey.
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 89-28039
ISBN: 978-0-88738-326-7 (cloth); 978-1-4128-5487-0 (paper)
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hartz, Louis, 1919-1986.
The necessity of choice : Nineteenth-Century political thought / by
Louis Hartz with an introduction and edited by Paul Roazen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-88738-326-2
1. Political science—History—19th century. I. Roazen, Paul, 1936–.
II. Title.
JA83.H28 1990
320.5’09’034—dc20 89–28039
CIP
Contents
Foreword, by Benjamin R. Barber vii
Introduction, by Paul Roazen xi
Part I: The Revolutionary Background
1 Origins 3
2 The Religious Problem 11
3 The Economic Question 19
4 Culture and Tradition: Condorcet 27
5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 35
6 Rousseau and Our Constructive Problem 41
Part II: Reaction and Authoritarianism
7 The Setting 51
8 Romanticism 57
9 Edmund Burke 63
10 Joseph de Maistre 71
11 Louis de Bonald 79
12 Auguste Comte 83
13 Georg W. F. Hegel 89
14 A Free Society and Its Relation to the State 95
Part III: Liberalism
15 The Problem of Industrial Society 101
16 Bentham’s Utilitarianism 105
17 John Stuart Mill 111
18 Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard 117
19 Benjamin Constant 123
20 Italy and Mazzini 129
21 Historic Success and Failure 135
Part IV: Socialism
22 Robert Owen 143
23 François Fourier 149
24 Karl Marx 155
Conclusion 161
Index 165
Foreword
On January 20, 1986, Louis Hartz, former professor of government at
Harvard University, died in Istanbul, Turkey. Despite a career abbrevi-
ated by illness (which compelled him to retire in 1974), Hartz had an
enormous impact on both American political theory and debates about
the nature and consequences of the American experience in his three
decades of teaching and research in Cambridge.
At Harvard, he was a teacher of such extraordinary talent and energy
and brought with him to the classroom a lecture style so charismatic
and enduring that students could find themselves initially too over-
whelmed to take very much in. I remember with pleasure Hart’s wry
if absent-minded blackboard doodlings that were meant to symbolize
some subtle point in Benjamin Constant’s liberalism or Frederick Jack-
son Turner’s frontier thesis but which seemed finally only to capture
the engagingly anarchic vivacity of his fast-moving mind.
Nor was he just a man for the classroom or a scholarly denizen of
Widener library’s well-furnished stacks. He felt the world deeply, and
engaged it no less than its literary surrogates in his work. His books had
so powerful an impact in part because one sensed their commitment to
and engagement in the real world. After his illness made it impossible
for him to teach and difficult for him to do archival research, he took
to traveling—traversing random international roads in a disquieting
quest for the meaning of world history. He was at work on a manu-
script aimed at explaining East and West in terms of a great historical
synthesis when he died. The project was of Spencerian ambitions and
was clearly beyond the powers left him by his uncertain health, but
that he aspired to it suggests something of the nature of his intellectual
fortitude in the face of momentous difficulties.
Hartz admired the French liberals of the early nineteenth century—
Constant, Comte, and above all Tocqueville—and, like Tocqueville, he
believed one had to see something of the world to understand any of it.
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The Necessity of Choice
When in the early 1960s I hesitantly proposed to him that I spend
some time in Switzerland to research a dissertation on the Swiss under-
standing of political liberty—he had originally consented to direct a
dissertation that had been conceived in purely philosophical terms—he
responded without an instant’s doubt: “Yes, yes, yes, of course, you must
go—go to the Alps, stay, live there, get a feel for the Grisons, you can
write me from time to time, but get over there until you have captured
what you see on paper.”
His writing demonstrated that he practiced what he preached. His
The Liberal Tradition in America, published in 1955 and the winner
in 1956 of the Woodrow Wilson Prize of the American Political Sci-
ence Association, offered a powerful explanation for the dominion
of Lockean consensualism in America, and set the parameters for a
historical and philosophical debate that was also profoundly political
and that in subsequent years was to be joined by such eminent histori-
ans as Bernard Bailyn, J. G. A. Pocock, and John Diggins—thoughtful
commentators who debated the nature of the American founding and
its impact on how we see ourselves as a nation in terms of problems
set by Hartz. Hartz used Tocqueville’s observation that the Americans
had “arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a demo-
cratic revolution” as the starting place for an argument focused on the
absence of a feudal tradition in the new world, and how that absence
explained the prevalence of a form of centralist consensualism that
would have been unthinkable in the old world. America’s exceptional-
ist experience endowed it with a certain immunity to radicalism in
general and socialism in particular, and made it a poor candidate for
socioeconomic explanations of the kind that flourished in the setting
of postfeudal European ideology. A people born into equality, Hartz
suggested, might perceive in peoples who were compelled to win
their equality by will and revolution only a profound mystery. What
distinguished the American from the European ideology was what
was missing in America: a heritage of feudalism. That absent heritage
rendered the ideological rhetoric of both feudalism and socialism, class
conflict and class hegemony, irrelevant to America. Locke’s American
meaning was given less by the empty places (Locke’s vacuis locis) of the
new world’s vast territory than by the empty pages of the new world’s
missing history.
In the 1960s, Bernard Bailyn responded to Hartz by arguing that
English dissent ideology had played a more prominent role in the
American founding than Hartz’s preoccupation with the absence of
viii
Foreword
feudalism could acknowledge. In the 1970s, J. G. A. Pocock and other
students of the Atlantic Republican tradition offered a portrait of
America in which classical republican virtue played a larger role than
either Lockean consensualism or dissent philosophy. Most recently,
John Diggins has refocused attention on Hartz by suggesting that a
rather Calvinist version of Locke played a crucial role in the constitu-
tional founding if not in the revolution, and that this splintered Lockean
inheritance, encompassing both interest and religious passion, can be
traced down to Lincoln where, unhappily for America, it begins to dis-
appear. The debate today has come full circle then, no longer confined
to Lockean consensualism, but its terms still largely defined by Hartz’s
brilliant portrait of the liberal tradition.
Yet what is perhaps most important about Hartz is not the particular
conclusions his analysis led to about the American experience, but his
insistence on a comparative method that looked at national experiences
in terms of comparative historical genealogy. As the comparison of
the American ideology with its European progenitors revealed what
was missing in America—the feudal experience—so Hartz supposed
that an examination of other “new “societies founded in the shadow
of colonial patrimonies might reveal certain secrets of their national
heritages. Thus, in a book Hartz edited in 1964 called The Founding
of New Societies, he and several colleagues subjected Latin America,
Canada, South Africa, and Australia, as well as the United States, to
the test of a comparison with the European cultures that spawned
them. There the specific thesis about America offered in The Liberal
Tradition in America was transformed into a general hypothesis about
new societies:
When a part of a European nation is detached from the whole of
it, and hurled outward onto new soil, it loses the stimulus toward
change that the whole provides. It lapses into a kind of immobility . . .
the fragments reflect every phase of European revolution, but they
evince alike the immobilities of fragmentation . . . their escape has
turned out to be an illusion, and they are forced now to transcend
the conservatism to which it gave birth.
From his early book on economics and democracy in Pennsylvania
(Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860)
Hartz had concerned himself with the interpenetration of old and new
cultures, of colonial nations and their elusive offspring, hoping thereby
to illuminate and strengthen the democratic experience. In that final
ix