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The Character of Recent American Political Thought*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Philip Abbott
Affiliation:
Wayne State University

Abstract

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Type
Field Analysis/Orientations de la Science Politique
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1981

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References

1 See Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955)Google Scholar; Boorstin, Daniel, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar; McClosky, Robert, “American Political Thought and the Study of Politics,” in Young, Roland (ed.), Approaches to the Study of Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1958)Google Scholar; Drukman, Mason, Community and Purpose in America: An Analysis of American Political Theory (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).Google Scholar

2 See McLoughlin, William G., “Pietism and the American Character,” in Cohen, Hennig (ed.), The American Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 3963.Google Scholar

3 Many writers in the Marxist tradition fit the characteristics of the critical tradition. This essay, however, will not deal with current development in American Marxism.

4 Sheldon Wolin (discussed below), Theodore Lowi, Hannah Arendt, Michael Walzer and others share portions of the views expressed by the above. See my Furious Fancies: American Political Thought in the Post Liberal Era (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980).Google Scholar

5 Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little Brown, 1960), 293–94.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 294.

7 McWilliams, Wilson Carey, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 109.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 99.

9 Ibid., 149.

11 The Case for Patriotism,” New American Review 17 (1973), 60.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 62–63.

13 Ibid., 63.

14 Ibid., 64.

15 Ibid., 76.

16 Ibid., 63.

17 Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 50Google ScholarPubMed

18 Ibid., 221. Compare Daniel Bell on the same point (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism [New York: Basic Books, 1976]).Google Scholar

19 Ibid., xvii-xviii, 236.

20 Kristol, Irving, “‘When virtue loses all her lovliness’—Some Reflections on Capitalism and the Free Society,” Public Interest 21 (Fall 1970), 9.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 9–11.

22 Ibid., 9.

24 Ibid., 11.

25 Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 53.

26 Ibid., 77.

27 Kristol, Irving, On the Democratic Idea in America (New Yorit: Harper & Row, 1972), 30.Google Scholar

28 See Kristol's recent understatement: “The attitude of neoconservatives to bourgeois society and the bourgeois ethos is one of detached attachment” (“Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed—Perhaps the Only—‘Neoconservative,’” Public Opinion [October-November 1979], 51).

29 Schaar, John H., “Purity and Power,” New American Review 19(January 1974), 157.Google Scholar

30 Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind (South Bend: Gateway, 1953), 362–94.Google Scholar

31 McWilliams. The Idea of Fraternity in America, 155.

32 Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 236.

33 These views can be found in Steinfel's, PeterThe Neoconservatives (New York:,Simon and Schuster, 1979)Google Scholar; Coser, Lewis A. and Howe, Irving (eds.), The New Conservatives (New Yoik: Quadrangle, 1974)Google Scholar; David Vogel, “Clear as Kristol: Business's ‘New Class’ Struggle,” Nation (December 15, 1979), 609, 625–28.Google Scholar

34 Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 89–90.

35 Bell, Daniel, “Meritocracy and Equality,” Public Interest 29 (Fall 1972), 5859.Google Scholar

36 Bell, Daniel, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 358–67.Google Scholar

37 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, “The Professionalization of Reform,” The Public Interest 1 (Fall 1965), 610.Google Scholar

38 For impressive evidence of the existence of the “new class,” see Ladd, Everett Carl, Transformations of the American Party System (2nd ed.; New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 294–99Google Scholar; Liberation Upside Down: The Inversion of the New Deal Order,” Political Science Quarterly 92 (1977), 557600.Google Scholar

39 Kristol, Irving, “Corporate Capitalism in America,” Public Interest 28 (Summer 1975), 124.Google Scholar

40 See my “Understanding the New Conservatives,” Polity 10 (1977), 261–73.Google Scholar

41 Especially influential here is Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman; Pocock, , Politics, Time and Language (New York: Atheneum, 1971), chap. 3Google Scholar; Fink, Z. S., The Classical Republicans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962).Google Scholar For the influence of the Commonwealthmen in American political thought, see Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Colburn, H. Trevor, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Bailyn, Bernard, Political Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968).Google Scholar

43 J. G. A. Pocock has argued that this is the central focus of all republican thought in The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), Part 1.Google Scholar

44 Paine, Thomas, “Common Sense,” in Hood, Sidney (ed.), The Essential Thomas Paine (New York: New American Library, 1969), 5556.Google Scholar

45 Sidney, Algernon, Discourses Concerning Government, Vol. 2 (New York: Eaton, 1805), xxiii. On this point see Pink, Classical Republicans, chap. 6Google Scholar; Robbins, , “Sidney's Discourses,” William and Mary Quarterly Third Series (July 1947), 267–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 Paine, “Common Sense,” 56.

47 Adams, Charles Francis (ed.), Works of John Adams, Vol. 4 (New York: Little Brown, 1851), 199.Google Scholar

48 Butterfield, Lyman H. (ed.). Letters of Benjamin Rush, Vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 52.Google Scholar

49 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, in Hunt, Gaillard (ed.), The Writings of James Madison, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 208.Google Scholar

50 Rodger Parker demonstrates that the upwardly mobile would adopt a Defoe-Franklin individualism of prudential self-interest only to abandon it for a gentry style interpretation once successful (“The Gospel of Opposition: A Study in Eighteenth Century Anglo-American Ideology” [unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Wayne State University, 1975]). Jefferson's own vacillation is brilliantly exposed by Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 116–44.Google Scholar

51 People of Plenty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 9697.Google ScholarPubMed

52 The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 137.Google Scholar

53 The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 5.Google ScholarPubMed

54 Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955), 46.Google Scholar

55 Schaar, “Power and Purity,” 168.

56 Schaar, John H., “Legitimacy in the Modern State,” in Green, Philip and Levinson, Stanford (eds.), Power and Community (New York: Vintage, 1970), 317.Google Scholar

57 Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 227.

58 McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America, 74.

59 Karl A. Lamb argues this point in his study of twelve California families, As Orange Goes (New York: Norton, 1974), chaps. 9 and 10.Google ScholarPubMedSale's, KirkpatrickHuman Scale (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1980)Google Scholar is a fine example of pursuit of this alternative. But also see Walter Dean Bumham's scenario of a neo-fascist politics, Critical Elections (New York: Norton, 1970), chap. 7.Google ScholarPubMed For still another view (and I mention it to illustrate the failure of radical Whiggery to explore future contingencies), see Ladd, Everett Carl Jr, Where Have All the Voters Gone? (New York: Norton, 1978), chap. 3.Google Scholar

60 Cited in Persons, Stow, American Minds (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958), 9091.Google Scholar