Americans are? The struggle to identify not just un-American outsiders but
American insiders has been an important part of American law since the
Revolution, and Hartz here insists upon the centrality of this dilemma to US
politics. Massive conformity underscores the crisis of self-deWnition in
American democracy; not just in the sense of the coercive identity-work of
witch-hunts and red scares, but of the willingness of people to endure such
conformity or the lack of eVective defensive bulwarks against it. Americans
insist on knowing their ‘‘essential soul,’’ but this question of identity can
never be decisively answered. In a society of private economic and political
actors, after all, how does one ever know with whom one is dealing? Lockean
liberalism provides a larger descriptive deWnition for America while at the
same time undermining identity for individual Americans.
Insecure identity and the social contract have proven, writes Hartz, to be
an explosive combination. ‘‘God gave the world to men in common; but
since he gave it them for their beneWt, and the greatest conveniences of life
they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should
always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the
industrious and rational, (and labor was to be his title to it) and not to
the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious’’ (Locke 1988 ,
291 ). The American republic had no ‘‘covetous’’ or ‘‘contentious’’ aristocracy,
in Hartz’s account, but it did not lack a population barred from
public life; and Americans legally deWned African and African-American
slaves, women, Native Americans, and the poor as those radically unproduct-
ive and dangerously irrational forces to whom political action had to be
denied.
Transferring the accusations of instability and irrationality to their ex-
cluded others, American liberals maintain their belief in their own member-
ship in the company of self-governing individuals. The price of this security is
the demonization of anyone that stands outside the democratic conformity of
liberal society; American liberals, Hartz argues, are quick, when threatened,
to ‘‘transform eccentricity into sin, and the irritatingWgure of the bourgeois
gossip Xowers into the frighteningWgure of an A. Mitchell Palmer or a
Senator McCarthy’’ (Hartz 1991 , 11 ). And by categorizing the enemy as
lunatics and sinister agents of injustice, Americans can remain secure in
their Lockean faith; state power properly mobilized serves to protect the
‘‘essential’’ rational and industrious soul of the nation from the agents that
do not belong. Thus irrational purges may be represented as a rational
conWnement of the quarrelsome and contentious.
288 ronald j. schmidt, jr.