bears little relation, if any, to its substantive content and which can only
survive if that content is ignored.
To that extent, the declining prominence ofAustraliareflects the renewed
acceptance of the radical-leftist view of Australian history. Perhaps the most
salient feature of that view is that instead of celebrating what Paul Kelly,
echoing Hancock’s‘three pillars’of the Australian Settlement (protection,
state socialism, and the White Australia Policy), famously but prematurely
described as the end of the Australian Settlement, it glorifies the continuing
validity of the Settlement’s underlying goals. Especially striking, in this
respect, is the appearance of significant works that cast important elements
of that settlement in favourable terms, with the relatively benign view of land
reform, income redistribution, and protectionism set out in a recent, as of yet
unchallenged, economic history of Australia (McLean 2013) contrasting
sharply with that presented in the economic histories of an earlier generation
of the Settlement’s Hancock-influenced critics (such as Butlin, Barnard, and
Pincus 1982, and Duncan and Fogarty 1984).
The American situation is entirely different. The debate about the American
prospect remains extraordinarily vigorous; and fuelling that vigour is the far
more even matching of rival intellectual camps that share a commitment to
scholarly rigour while diverging markedly in their intellectual premises. From
the date of itsfirst publication,Democracy in Americahas been a point of
reference and a critical resource for both sides of that debate. Just as both
the‘disenchanted classical liberals’(such as William Graham Sumner and
A. Lawrence Lowell) and the Wilsonian progressives drew on Tocqueville in
debating the nature and impact of the administrative state (see Adcock 2014,
pp. 173–234), so today both the disciples of Leo Strauss and their adversaries
do so in considering the fragility of freedom (Mitchell 1995; Mansfield and
Winthrop 2000; Mancini 2006, pp. 202–15).
There is no counterpart to those debates in Australia, bringing to mind
Hancock’s insight that any country which, because of an‘instinctive distaste
for the past’(Hancock 1930, p. 270), seeks to always live in the present, is
inevitably‘threatened with submergence by the more stupid ideas, credulities
and quarrels of the day before yesterday’(Hancock 1930, p. 287).
Hancock’s failure is, therefore, in many respects, his success. It is not his
work’sflaws that have condemned it; it is the endurance of the characteristics
it insightfully observed. Just asDemocracy in Americais still the book of a great
democracy that ‘often disappointed’ but ‘never discouraged’, ‘marches
indefatigably on towards the immense grandeur...at the end of the long
road that mankind has yet to travel’(DA, II.1.viii), soAustraliaremains that
of a nation that has not yet grasped the contours and limits of‘a destiny
beyond prediction’(Hancock 1930, p. 314).
Henry Ergas