#louis hartz

[oldsardens]

Louis Hartz - Portret van Catharina Margaretha van den Broek

[arcticdementor]

"The American Revolution has significance for American socialism. The long struggle against feudalism in Europe inevitably brought forth socialism with its emphasis on the class struggle. Mr. Hartz argues that because Americans at the start of their national history had only to liquidate the remnants of feudalism they have never produced a genuinely powerful indigenous socialist movement. The history of American political thought is, then, the story of Lockean liberalism moving through the decades without serious opposition from either the feudal right or the socialist left."

—Ralph H. Gabriel, "Hartz on American Liberal Tradition"Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 17, No. 1, (Jan., 1956)

[oldsardens]

Louis Hartz - Hortensia's in vaasje

[utopologist]

Surely, then, it is a remarkable force: this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life. It is the secret root from which have sprung many of the most puzzling of American cultural phenomena. Take the unusual power of the Supreme Court and the cult of constitution worship on which it rests. Federal factors apart, judicial review as it has worked in America would be inconceivable without the national acceptance of the Lockian creed, ultimately enshrined in the Constitution, since the removal of high policy to the realm of adjudication implies a prior recognition of the principles to be legally interpreted…

If in England a marvelous organic cohesion had held together the feudal, liberal, and socialist ideas, it would still be unthinkable there that the largest issues of public policy should be put before nine Talmudic judges examining a single text. But this is merely another way of saying that law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy in America, for the settlement of the ultimate moral question is the end of speculation upon it.

Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America

[theglancereveals]

Law Has Flourished on the Corpse of Philosophy

Louis Hartz on America's elite liberal tradition and the strange power of the U.S. Supreme Court:

"Surely, then, it is a remarkable force: this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life. It is the secret root from which have sprung many of the most puzzling of American cultural phenomena. Take the unusual power of the Supreme Court and the cult of constitution worship on which it rests. Federal factors apart, judicial review as it has worked in America would be inconceivable without the national acceptance of the Lockian creed, ultimately enshrined in the Constitution, since the removal of high policy to the realm of adjudication implies a prior recognition of the principles to be legally interpreted...

If in England a marvelous organic cohesion had held together the feudal, liberal, and socialist ideas,  it would still be unthinkable there that the largest issues of public policy should be put before nine Talmudic judges examining a single text. But this is merely another way of saying that law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy in America, for the settlement of the ultimate moral question is the end of speculation upon it."