Louis Hartz Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Louis Hartz (1919–1986), an American political scientist, had a major influence on how scholars of the 1950s and 1960s viewed American political culture. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, on April 7, 1919, Hartz was the third son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, where his father was a grocer. Hartz was accepted to Harvard in 1936 on a scholarship from a local newspaper. He completed his SB in 1940 and after a year of traveling returned to the university on a teaching fellowship for graduate study in government. Prior to completing his PhD in 1946, he married Stella Freinberg and they had one son. He then joined the Harvard faculty and quickly became a popular teacher and respected scholar.

Hartz’s first book, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (1948), challenged critics who claimed that government intervention in the economy violated America’s long tradition of free enterprise. Hartz presented evidence that early postcolonial Pennsylvania adopted considerable government legislation in response to the demands of vying business and labor groups. In fact, both businesses and workers benefited from government assistance in the areas of education and transportation. Contrary to the opinions of free market proponents, Hartz’s findings suggested that the New Deal was hardly a radical departure from the past.

A few years later, Hartz completed his most famous and widely discussed book. In The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), he argued that Americans never had to rid themselves of the feudal traditions and class hierarchies associated with the Old World of Europe, so never experienced a confining social order. Hartz found a liberal outlook—an outlook that was distrustful of any government not sanctioned by the people, that valued individual rights over duty, and that upheld the sanctity of private property—permeated American political thought and practice. Both major U.S. political parties, it follows, are liberal at their most basic level. This “consensus” thesis also explained why neither aristocratic conservatism nor a socialist movement had many followers in America. Hartz’s book was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Prize from the American Political Science Association in 1956.

Hartz would later extend and revise his argument to include an analysis of other new nations. In The Founding of New Societies (1964), Hartz maintained that former European colonies had adopted “fragments” from the whole of Europe’s political culture. American and English Canada, for instance, had adopted the liberal fragments, while French Canada embraced the feudal fragments. His fragment theory became influential in comparative studies of developing countries.

By the mid-1960s, Hartz began work on his most ambitious book, titled A Synthesis of World History (1983), which applied his colonial fragments theory to five great “cultural areas”: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, and African totemism. During the early 1970s, Hartz’s writing and personal life were disrupted by ill health. He became estranged from his family and friends and resigned from Harvard in 1974. Nevertheless, he continued his scholarly work, traveling frequently until settling in Turkey where he died from an epileptic seizure in 1986.

Bibliography:

Barber, Benjamin R. “Louis Hartz.” Political Theory 14, no. 3 (August 1986): 355–358.
Diggins, John Patrick. “Knowledge and Sorrow: Louis Hartz’s Quarrel with American History.” Political Theory 16, no. 3 (August 1988): 355–376.
Hartz, Louis. The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964.
The Liberal Tradition: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955.

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