primacy of the same. Contrasts between the two men can be pursued further.
To Ward, the material/economic was primary, and the historical/cultural
supplementary; Hartz supposed the reverse; Ward (like F. J. Turner) deemed
exceptionalism was functional; Hartz saw it as dysfunctional. More person-
ally, Ward’s path in life took him from a coastal city to the provincial
interior; Hartz journeyed from the interior to the metropolitan coast, and
thence to‘traversing random international roads in a disquieting quest
for the meaning of world history’(Barber 1986, p. 355). Ward took the
nation to besui generis, while Harz adopted a comparative method. Ward
wasfixated on Australia; Harz cultivated a general theory of New World
exceptionalism.
Hartz conceived New World societies, such as Australia, to be amputee Old
World societies (Hartz 1964). To Hartz the limbs of the Old World are
Marxian-like class categories: feudal, bourgeois, proletariat, and so on. But in
the creation of New World societies only one of these limbs is transferred.
Thus, what is important in the New World is not the new environment
confronted, but what travels to confront it; and what was left behind was as
important as what actually made the journey. In this passage—and this was
his key point—the dynamic of European culture was lost; the thesis had left its
antithesis behind in the Old World, and in the New World history ceases the
moment it begins, with the transplanted fragment in solitary and sterile
possession: ‘French Canada becomes more feudal than France ever was’
(McCarty 1973, p. 155).
In the specific case of Australia, R. N. Rosecrance, Hartz’s collaborator, con-
tended,‘Australia’s uniqueness is a result of settlement by a particular fraction
of British society’(Rosecrance 1964, p. 276). A‘fragment’of Great Reform Bill
England, Chartism,‘lodged in Australia’(Rosecrance 1964, p. 280), and‘in
isolation from social and political movements elsewhere, it congealed’, and
ruled through its‘philosophy of the alehouse bench’. Australia, then, was
‘born radical’and must remain so.
General theories invite general criticism. Might not an amputee social
organism reconstruct itself, as afish regeneratesfins and tail? Hartz’s thesis
denies the possibility. And his denial might be correct—the squattocracy did
not succeed in establishing itself as a ruling elite—but nothing in Hartz
explains why. Rosecrance proposed the explanation lay in the bourgeois
mentality of the squatters. This conjecture brings us to Hartz’s basic
presumption: ideas make the world go round. His three‘estates’are at bottom
ideologies—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism—with classes simply the
incidental material bodies of ideological soul. Ideas, then, are the inhabitants
of the world. These inhabitants contend, breed, and sometimes are stranded
solitary upon a far shore. On these far shores they may be accompanied by
matter in the form of other class categories, but these other forms lack soul,
Theories of Australian Exceptionalism