political development within the exclusive confines of liberal values and in particular
by reference to what he termed ‘democratic capitalism’. Hartz’s seminal work
reformulated American history and society into a culturally attractive depiction of
a continuity of American experience centred upon an organizing agency of
liberalism and capitalism. In Hartz’s work, all social conflict was necessarily reduced
to that arising from mere differences of emphasis or technique. Because of an
idiosyncratic collection of positional properties, the United States had become the
beneficiary of an all-embracing historical legacy that generated a static and timeless
world of capitalist harmonies, self-regulating balances and consensus politics. Hartz’s
sweeping study of American society and its usage of political ideas led him to
advance the proposition of an exceptional society in which there was only one estate
governed by a single and integrated set of core liberal values. The notion of an
inherently liberal moral consensus was not only presented as the only plausible
conception of the United States’ social evolution, but was regarded as instrumental
in consolidating the social cohesion and ideological mobilization necessary to engage
in the cold war.
The Liberal Tradition in America is often taken to be the archetypal Cold War
expression of American cultural integration. Its central thesis is that the initial
absence of a feudal order and an ancien regimein American society had permitted
liberalism to acquire an uncontested monopoly status in the public philosophy and
individual mindsets of an uninhibited bourgeois culture. Americans simply gravitated
to Lockean liberalism because there was nothing else to stop it. This allowed the
United States to avoid the intractable extremes of Europe’s left and right ideologies
and in doing so to emerge from its own idiosyncratic historical processes as a
thoroughly liberal entity with a self-evident attachment to freedom, individualism,
capitalism, democracy, egalitarianism, rights, and the rule of law.
In terms of explanation and normative affirmation, The Liberal Tradition in America
effectively conveyed the notion of a liberal society with a strong national identity
and an instinctive – and even compulsive – set of core beliefs that supported a
resilient framework of pluralist politics. For Hartz, this ubiquitous liberalism was
grounded less in the consequences of rational inquiry and analytical preference than
in the outcome of a visceral and reflexive traditionalism that in effect fused the
principles and spirits of both John Locke and Edmund Burke. The settlement of
deep moral questions on the basis of a ‘submerged and absolute liberal faith’^8 had
marked the end of speculation upon them. For Hartz it is ‘only when you take ethics
for granted that all problems emerge as problems of technique’.^9 The all-embracing
nature of liberalism in the United States, therefore, possessed a deterministic property
that proffered a social consensus with no serious means of, or instinct for, challenge.
Any attempt to use traditionalism to contest liberalism would be doomed to self-
contradiction. This is because ‘a society which begins with Locke, and... stays with
Locke ... has within it, as it were, a self-completing mechanism which ensures the
universality of the liberal idea’.^10
In many respects Hartz’s combination of historiography and political theory
amounted to a celebration of America’s sense of difference as a social and interpretive
Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment 37