properties that in every other respect were described as an extraordinary strength:
namely America’s solidity as a social order embedded in liberalism.
When it came to the United States’ relationship with the world outside its own
new world experience, Hartz declared that the depiction of liberal exceptionalism
could cut both ways. The final chapter of The Liberal Tradition in America provided
a sting in the tail. It offered a powerful critique of the United States’ position towards
the international sphere. Far from confirming its position as a mature world power,
the Hartzian view was that the Cold War had merely thrown the fundamental
ambivalence of this most liberal of cultures into high relief. The thrust of the
argument was that America had developed a liberal absolutism that was not only
unaware of its conformity but was quite incapable of comprehending a world which
had not undergone the formative conditions of the United States. The tenets of
liberalism may have been universal in theory but in the American context they were
conjoined to a compulsive and largely ingrown set of attachments.
The net effect was that the United States had a highly volatile view of the world
that fluctuated between the bipolar positions of withdrawal and engagement. In
essence, the US still proceeded to determine its relationship with the world on the
basis of a choice undertaken as an autonomous agency. The impulse towards
withdrawal and retreat was based upon the republic’s escapist past from European
decadence and its subsequent suspicion of that which lay beyond the sanctuary of
its own liberal terms of reference. This ‘liberal absolutism’ was described as having
a strong tendency towards ‘identifying the alien with the unintelligible’ and towards
turning upon perceived incursions with a liberal hysteria that is born out of ‘our
own antiradical fetishism’.^13 American engagement abroad was similarly rooted in a
narrowly conceived liberal impulse that justified engagement only through the
unsustainable rationale of international transformation. Hartz concluded that the
continual shifting between these two poles was the uncomfortable consequence of
America’s rootedness in liberal fundamentalism.
In the portraiture of an avowed liberal consensus, this difficulty with the rest of
the world amounted to a significantly problematic disjunction. It might have been
constructed as an expression of liberal choice on the part of an autonomous agency.
But Hartz chose not to take this course. He conveyed it as something akin to a deep
division – not in any material sense that may have been construed as a form of class-
based or material dispute. Instead, he presented it more in psychic terms. It was the
sheer orthodoxy of American liberalism that rendered the US susceptible to dramatic
swings in outlook and posture towards the world and therefore towards international
relations.
This could not simply be attributed to a simple crisis of adjustment occasioned
by the onrush of a Cold War. It indicated a much more deep-set and systemic
problem that amounted not merely to a state of disequilibrium but to a volatile and
arguably dysfunctional condition. ‘An absolute national morality’ Hartz recorded ‘is
transpired either to withdraw from “alien” things or to transform them: it cannot
live in comfort constantly by their side’.^14 This is the outlook that is derived from
the ‘absolute perspective’ of America’s liberal community and the ‘peculiar link that
40 Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment