(DOWNLOAD) "Louis Hartz and the Liberal Tradition: From Consensus to Crack-up (Ets)" by Modern Age ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Louis Hartz and the Liberal Tradition: From Consensus to Crack-up (Ets)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 190 KB
Description
THE VIEW THAT LIBERALISM is the self-evident dominant ideology of democratic capitalism has been repeated frequently by many different social scientists and historians. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., declared this to be as a matter of American policy at the close of the 1940s in The Vital Center, (1) and it was declared to be an empirical reality in American history by Louis Hartz (1919-1986) in the early 1950s in The Liberal Tradition in America. (2) Indeed, this proposition was so much an article of political faith that it became, from a variety of vantage points, something of a mantra in normative circles. Even those in bitter opposition to liberalism accepted as a given its hegemonic status. From Russell Kirk (1918-1994) on the right to C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) on the left inadvertent tribute was granted to the unique status of liberalism in America at mid-twentieth century. Before engaging in the academic pastime of after-the-fact critiques, or attempting to update or to revise the tenuous situation of liberalism at mid-decade of the twenty-first century, it might be valuable to summarize the view of liberalism as the dominant ideological thread in American history. Professor Hartz's essential view is that the tradition that comes down to us from John Locke is one that respects individual property rights while at the same time honors the sanctity of the social contract, and everybody's inalienable right to participate in it. He further argues (and this is perhaps the source of the debate) that liberal democracy is essentially the only political tradition that the United States had ever known. The view of America as the "First New Nation," unencumbered by the feudal inheritance of Europe, was given substantial reinforcement and sociological support by Seymour Martin Lipset in his own outstanding work by that name. While Hartz never quite denies the prospects of any other ideological vision for America, it is fair enough to say that he postulated the idea of a liberal consensus, one that has served to unify and to purify the American imagination first through the revolutionary process, then through a Civil War, and finally, through two twentieth-century world wars fought on the basis of liberal persuasions and risks to their continuation.
 "Louis Hartz and the Liberal Tradition: From Consensus to Crack-up (Ets)" by Modern Age ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}