Louis Hartz and the Liberal Tradition: from consensus to crack-up.(ets)

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…