HartzWnds Turner’s theory to be, simply put, wrong. Many nations have
frontiers; but what other republic is so dominated, what public arena so
monopolized, by one ideology as the United States had been by Lockean
liberalism (Hartz 1991 , 95 – 6 )? Tocqueville was correct, Hartz writes, in noting
that Americans are ‘‘born equal;’’ this experience of equality creates a society
of individual actors who do not perceive the political struggle involved in
creating equality. The classic American citizen is thus primarily concerned
with managing his private aVairs, an exemplar of rational bourgeois industry.
Believing in a natural and rational equality, Americans do not see politics as
the activity that creates or maintains equality or freedom and thus are likely
to treat government with suspicion while viewing popular opinion and law as
the immovable bedrock on which their social lives rest. Lacking the experi-
ence of struggle against feudalism and empire which deWned the revolutions
of England, France, and Russia, the American liberal is suspicious of any
militant movement except those that serve private security and lacks, despite
the American founding, any real revolutionary tradition.
Hartz has not, however, removed theWre and conquest, the fear and
insecurity, of Turner or Mather from American identity. ‘‘Even a good idea
can be a little frightening,’’ Hartz writes, ‘‘when it is the only idea a man has
ever had’’ (Hartz 1991 , 175 ). Hartz, following in the footsteps of Madison and
especially Tocqueville, sees a profound (if somewhat shapeless) threat in
American liberal democracy, a majoritarian and conformist democratic
mass that destroys or absorbs the individuals in whose name it ostensibly
speaks:
Actually Locke has a hidden conformitarian germ to begin with, since natural law
tells equal people equal things, but when this germ is fed by the explosive power of
modern nationalism, it mushrooms into something pretty remarkable.... I believe
that this is the basic ethical problem of a liberal society: not the danger of the
majority which has been its conscious fear, but the danger of unanimity, which has
slumbered unconsciously behind it: the ‘‘tyranny of opinion’’ that Tocqueville saw
unfolding as even the pathetic social distinctions of the Federalist era collapsed
before his eyes. (Hartz 1991 , 11 )
Why, according to Hartz, does American democratic culture pose such a
threat to its citizens? Because of the need for an exceptionalist America, the
desire to be able to identify what the republic is, and who its friends and
enemies are. ‘‘If you b’st he,’’ inquires Satan of Beelzebub; are even our allies
really who we think they are? And how do we even know (in contrast to the
spirit of eVortless self-deWnition in the Declaration) whom the true
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