During the last few years, there has been much discussion about the role of liberalism in American politics. This discussion can be broken loosely into two camps. On one side are the pro-liberals. These public intellectuals, fearing that a rising tide of illiberalism threatens the core institutions and norms of the republic, have been penning defenses of the nation’s liberal tradition. A complete reading list of these works would be very long. The books alone would include Joshua Cherniss’s Liberalism in Dark Times (Reference Cherniss2021), Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents (Reference Fukuyama2022), Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities (Reference Gopnik2019), Jill Lepore’s This America (Reference Lepore2019), Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal (Reference Lilla2017), James Traub’s What Was Liberalism? (Reference Traub2019), and Michael Walzer’s The Struggle for a Decent Politics (Reference Walzer2023).
The fears animating those defenses of liberalism must not be entirely misplaced, because during the last few years other public intellectuals have been writing indictments of America’s liberal tradition. Anti-liberal arguments have been so much in fashion that one commentator calls this America’s “anti-liberal moment” (Beauchamp Reference Beauchamp2019). Today’s critics of liberalism cover wide ideological territory but share the conviction that what ails the nation is not rising illiberalism, but its opposite: liberalism run amuck. Here, too, you could assemble a long reading list, including books such as Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread (Reference Ahmari2021), Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party (Reference Dean2016), Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (Reference Deneen2018) and Regime Change (Reference Deneen2023), Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option (Reference Dreher2017), Raymond Geuss’s Not Thinking Like a Liberal (Reference Geuss2022), and Tony Smith’s Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism (Reference Smith2018).
Perhaps needless to say, there is a lot at stake in these debates. In a nation that has always defined itself by reference to the concept of liberty, the status of liberalism is of the utmost importance. Certainly, the tone of today’s liberalism debate is existential, as are many of the claims made by people who participate in it.
There are many things to say about these debates over liberalism, but what seems noteworthy to me is the general agreement—both among liberalism’s proponents and opponents—about what American liberalism is. Generally, all these thinkers concur that American liberalism is focused on the individual, articulated in terms of “rights,” and associated with a modern project of mastery over nature. In this liberalism, which has its roots in the Enlightenment, government exists and is constructed to protect rights and to respect the equal moral autonomy of individuals. This liberalism is secular in spirit and practice, aimed toward an ideal of free markets in both goods and ideas.
This depiction of American liberalism is nothing new in political science. At least since Louis Hartz published The Liberal Tradition in America in 1955, political scientists have found it very hard to shake the “Hartz thesis”: that American political development has happened within a pervasive Lockean, liberal consensus, one that became wedded to Horatio Algerism in the nineteenth century (Hartz Reference Hartz1955; Nackenoff Reference Nackenoff2005). For Hartz, American political thought is homogenous, defined by “the universality of the liberal idea.” Ultimately, Hartz (Reference Hartz1955, 6, 62) writes, “the master assumption of American political thought” is “atomistic social freedom” (Kloppenberg Reference Kloppenberg2001).
Many scholars have taken aim at the Hartz thesis over the years. Hartz’s critics have argued that his story fails to account for competing intellectual traditions in American history, among them Protestantism, republicanism, romanticism, racism, socialism, fraternalism, and feudalism (Bailyn Reference Bailyn1967; Bellah Reference Bellah1985; Kloppenberg Reference Kloppenberg, Jacobs, Novak and Zelizer2003; McWilliams Reference McWilliams1973; Pocock Reference Pocock1975; Shain Reference Shain1994; R. Smith Reference Smith1993; Wood Reference Wood1969). But Hartz’s argument still holds sway in the discipline; The Liberal Tradition remains on graduate-school reading lists and shapes scholarly debates in political science. As one commentator puts it, “Hartz is dead. Long live Hartz” (Furstenberg Reference Furstenberg2012, 319). Today, 70 years after Hartz wrote his book, his central argument remains with us, both in the discipline of political science and beyond it, as all those new books about American liberalism attest.
There is at least one good reason to explain Hartz’s staying power: his argument is largely true. American politics has been defined, in no small measure, by individualist, Anglo-Enlightenment thinking—a fact that most of his critics acknowledge. But while Hartz’s past critics are right to see many aspects of American political thought missing in the Hartz thesis, I think most have erred in accepting Hartz’s definition of liberalism, or at least in not challenging it openly. To give a few examples, Bernard Bailyn (Reference Bailyn1967, 367) hints that he finds Hartz’s definition of liberalism wanting, referring to it not as liberalism as such but as “something modern scholars would call liberalism.” J. G. A. Pocock (Reference Pocock1975, 527, 552) seems to resist Hartz’s definition of liberalism, sometimes describing Hartz’s argument without using the word “liberalism,” instead referencing “a paradigm, supposedly Locke’s,” and other times putting “liberalism” in scare quotes while alluding to Hartz. But despite their clear apprehensions about Hartz’s definition of liberalism, neither Bailyn nor Pocock challenge that definition directly. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Wilson Carey McWilliams (Reference McWilliams1973, 96), in a book that seeks to articulate alternative intellectual traditions in American life, still calls Hartz’s work “seminal” and agrees with Hartz that Enlightenment liberalism has “nearly unchecked dominance” in American life.
In this article, I do want to challenge Hartz’s description of American liberalism, and to do so unambiguously. My challenge is a challenge by addition. I believe that political scientists would do better to understand American liberalism as born of intellectual hybridity, not realized in the triumph of a singular liberal tradition but rather in the messy interplay between multiple liberal traditions. One of those traditions is Enlightenment, individualist liberalism. But there is another American liberal tradition that has always existed in conversation with that Enlightenment liberalism. I call that tradition Exodus liberalism: a liberal tradition that is rooted in the Exodus story and expressed primarily (though not exclusively) in African American political thought.
In making this argument, I intend to do many things at once: (1) to complicate the reigning equivalence of Enlightenment liberalism with American liberalism; (2) to provide a brief sketch of the tradition of Exodus liberalism in the United States, with a focus on its prevalence in African American political thought; (3) to make a case that Exodus liberalism deserves to be called liberalism; (4) to explore the reasons why political scientists have neglected Exodus liberalism, and why political scientists have neglected to call the Exodus tradition a liberal tradition; and (5) to suggest what might be at stake in a reconsideration of what constitutes—and how we as political scientists talk about—the liberal tradition(s) in America.
Part of my aim here is to cast a critical eye on the historical development of the discipline of political science. I argue that political scientists have neglected the possibility of Exodus liberalism because certain developments in the history of political science have obscured it. In my story, Louis Hartz remains a key figure, but as a symptom as much as a cause. I do think Hartz’s work narrowed and fragmented the study of American liberalism, but largely because there were forces in political science demanding narrowness and fragmentation. In addition, Hartz was working at a time when considerations of African American political thought were essentially absent from the power centers of the discipline. While Hartz really did set terms for later political science, his work also reflected dominant disciplinary blind spots and appealed to dominant disciplinary enthusiasms. This account helps to explain why political scientists have had trouble displacing the Hartz thesis and Hartz’s relatively narrow definition of liberalism. The subsequent history of political science has been path dependent, to its detriment. I hope to point toward a better practice of American political thought: a desegregated American political thought.
Let me acknowledge at the outset that my argument against Hartz’s reductionism risks its own reductions. Any story that leans on a dichotomy or dualism does, and I am mindful of Tom Robbins’s (Reference Robbins2003, 77) dictum that “there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.” My wager is that this article’s reductive qualities in the present point toward less reductive work in American political thought in the future. In focusing here on Exodus liberalism, I do not want to exclude the possibility that there may be other intellectual traditions in American political history that could be understood as part of an even more complex liberal inheritance. I also do not want to imply that an intellectual tradition must be called liberal to have power in American politics; there are of course nonliberal strains of thought in American history that have been shaping if not definitive. That said, as I suggested above, the centrality of the term “liberty” in American self-understanding suggests that there is special weight to what gets included and excluded by our definition of American liberalism. It thus behooves scholars of American politics to interrogate how our conventional definitions of liberalism shape or distort our thinking.
I focus here on Exodus liberalism because it has had distinctive purchase in American politics. I also hope its recovery might play a small role in helping to correct the racial exclusions—particularly the explicit and implicit forms of anti-Blackness—that underlie dominant categories in American political science. (I will have more to say about that below.) In unsettling the discipline’s settled ideas about what constitutes American liberalism, I hope to provoke greater reflection on the processes by which political scientists—through acts of definition and categorization—may have limited our ability to understand the hybridity of American politics, particularly but not exclusively with respect to race. I believe that in beginning to appreciate the complex interplay between Enlightenment liberalism and Exodus liberalism, we might open new possibilities for scholarship (or at least open new ways of thinking about old scholarship) in the discipline. In all these ways, I believe that in considering Exodus liberalism, we might orient ourselves toward a better understanding of the nature of, and the possibilities for, American liberalism and American politics.
In this article, I start by arguing that the US has a second liberal tradition, rooted in the Book of Exodus. That argument contains both a broad description of the tradition of Exodus liberalism, focusing on its place in African American political thought, and a defense of the use of the word “liberalism” to define that tradition. Toward that end, I share two brief examples—David Walker’s Appeal and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower—to demonstrate that the distinction between, and the admixture of, Enlightenment liberalism and Exodus liberalism has been a conscious and meaningful distinction in African American political thought, one that reveals the broader complexities of American liberalism. I then describe the forces that converged in twentieth-century political science around Louis Hartz to obscure Exodus liberalism. I conclude with thoughts about what is at stake in complicating the reigning definition of American liberalism in political science. In those thoughts, I envision how American political science might improve, in the service of achieving better scholarship and, to paraphrase James Baldwin ([1963] Reference Baldwin1995, 86), achieving the country.
Exodus Liberalism: An Overview
On July 4, 1776, just moments after its members had approved the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress appointed a committee to design a “great seal” for the newly asserted republic. The three members of this committee—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson—had all been on the “Committee of Five” that drafted the Declaration. Given both its membership and the timing of its creation, the Great Seal Committee evidently was regarded by the Continental Congress as central to founding the nation.
In short order, Franklin pitched that the Great Seal should show “Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea.” Jefferson disagreed. He proposed that the Great Seal show “The Children of Israel in the Wilderness” (US Department of State 1909, 10). Although the Continental Congress would table the committee’s report, in large part due to that disagreement, it is not hard to see what is interesting about the Franklin and Jefferson proposals. These two children of the modern Enlightenment, offered their first chance to depict the political liberty they had just declared in writing, looked to the ancient Exodus story.
In looking to Exodus as a reference and guide for the new nation, Franklin and Jefferson were following an already long tradition in American letters and politics (Bercovitch Reference Bercovitch1975, 31). It is well known that the “Puritans considered themselves less a New England than a New Israel” (D. Davis Reference Davis2000, 140; emphasis in original; see also Cherry Reference Cherry2014). The Exodus theme was so pervasive in New England that by the revolutionary era, its imprint on American culture “can hardly be overstated”—though perhaps Franklin and Jefferson’s disagreement, taking place entirely within the terms of the Exodus story, is statement enough (D. Davis Reference Davis2000, 138–39). Or you could visit the Liberty Bell, which on its face tells us to “proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof”—the words that God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai (Lev. 25:10, KJV). Or you could consult Donald Lutz’s (Reference Lutz1984) epic survey of political citations in the early republic, which reveals that the most cited piece of literature during that period is the Book of Deuteronomy. In that founding-era literature, citations of the Exodus story far outnumber citations of Enlightenment thinkers, whose works collectively rank a distant second (Reference Lutz1984, 189–97).
It could be argued that so many thinkers cited Exodus in the early republic as a mere expression of hope for divine support, or as a mere rhetorical strategy to engage a biblically literate populace. Such arguments would have some truth to them, but they do not capture the whole story. For even as Americans found reassurance in the story’s idea that the providential hand of God would support their liberation, they relied on Exodus as a guide to political decision making, thought, and action. Notably, they relied on Exodus in specific instances where Enlightenment liberal teachings proved unsatisfactory (Byrd Reference Byrd2013, 45). As others have documented, there are an overwhelming number of speeches and writings during this period in which the Exodus story appears not just as divine hope or rhetorical trope, but as a practical model for the achievement of political freedom—as a liberal political vision (Coffey Reference Coffey2014; Feiler Reference Feiler2009; Hill Reference Hill, Edwards and Valenzano2016). This is especially true among those in New England and the mid-Atlantic who grew up in and around radical Protestantism.
Consider, for instance, Samuel Langdon’s sermon, The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States (Reference Langdon1788), in which Langdon uses the Exodus story to illustrate the dependence of liberalism on constitutionalism. Langdon would go on to become the president of Harvard College and, as a New Hampshire state leader, to play a key role in securing the Constitution’s adoption. Or consider Nathaniel Niles’s Two Discourses on Liberty (Reference Niles1774), in which Niles uses the Israelites to exemplify civil liberty, and in particular the idea that liberty is realized communally, not individually. Niles would go on to become a member of the Vermont House of Representatives, a justice of that state’s supreme court, and one of seven US Congressmen to vote against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. Or consider that in 1777 John Adams worried to Benjamin Rush that the Continental Congress was making George Washington into a golden calf—one of many worries at the time about fleshpots and false idols, the temptations that Exodus identifies as destructive to liberal projects (Richard Reference Richard2016, 89). As these cases suggest, many of the key debates about liberalism in the early republic happened—as in the debate between Franklin and Jefferson—within the terms of the Exodus story.
But as other scholars have documented in great detail, nowhere has the Exodus story been more important than in the history of African American political thought (Callahan Reference Callahan2006, 83–137; Cohen Reference Cohen2021; Glaude Reference Glaude2000; Marbury Reference Marbury2015; Thomas Reference Thomas2013).Footnote 1 To paraphrase Albert Raboteau (Reference Raboteau1989, 34), if whites saw America as the new Israel, Blacks knew that it was the new Egypt. African American leaders, starting in the eighteenth century, ritualized the Exodus story to provide an account of the condition of Black Americans, to articulate the promise and possibility of human liberty, and to convey the moral and political stances required to achieve and maintain that liberty, even when the odds seem stacked against its realization. As Melvin Rogers (Reference Rogers2023, 15–16) puts it, the Exodus story allowed African American thinkers to “enter the discursive field of America’s ethical and political life” as a “first step to transforming the reach of society’s discursive and practical symbols.”
In the early republic, the Exodus story was the central reference point for African American thought. For early leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church such as Richard Allen (Reference Allen and Allen1833, 45), the Exodus story did more than provide resonant biblical imagery: it allowed them to make explicit political critiques, especially of slavery (Newman Reference Newman2009).Footnote 2 It also enabled a broader theoretical framing of discrete political events, such as in Absalom Jones’s Thanksgiving Sermon, which focuses on Exodus 3. Jones delivered that sermon on January 1, 1808—the day the transatlantic slave trade ended—and locates that day within a larger liberal project, outlined in the Exodus story (Jones Reference Jones1808).
But Exodus imagery also dominated African American imagination beyond sermons in this period. From Phyllis Wheatley’s (Reference Wheatley1774) first writings to Caesar Sarter’s “Essay on Slavery” (Reference Sarter1774) to slave spirituals like “Let Gods Saints Come In” and “Brother Moses Gone” (Allen, Ware, and Garrison Reference Allen, Ware and Garrison1867), the Exodus story articulated an African American sense of peoplehood and pointed toward the possibility of collective liberation (Raboteau Reference Raboteau1989, 34). Importantly, the Exodus story also provided standards by which other American visions of liberalism could be interrogated: the most familiar example here is David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (Reference Walker1829), though there are many others (Apap Reference Apap2011).
What is even more telling about the dominance of Exodus liberalism during the antebellum period is that even those leaders who took issue with it—such as the abolitionist leader Henry Highland Garnet (Reference Garnet1865, 49)—felt compelled to speak within its terms. In arguing that “it is impossible to make a grand exodus from the land of bondage” because “the Pharaohs are on both sides of the blood-red waters,” Garnet’s rejection of Exodus politics still depends on Exodus imagery (Glaude Reference Glaude2000, 156).
Even after the Civil War, in both the North and the South, the Exodus story remained a key referent for African American political thought and action. From Benjamin “Pap” Singleton and his Kansas “Exodusters” (Painter Reference Painter1992), to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s (Reference Harper1869) Victorian poetry, to W. E. B. Du Bois’s (Reference Du Bois1903) account of African Americans as “wearied Israelites,” to Frederick Douglass’s (Reference Douglass1881, 528–32) anxieties about the ways in which the Exodus story was spurring Black migration during Reconstruction, the Exodus story shows up again and again as a touchstone in African American thought (Marbury Reference Marbury2015, 51–52; Rutkowski Reference Rutkowski2008).
In the first half of the twentieth century, the era of Jim Crow inspired new and often more critical retellings of the Exodus story (Lackey Reference Lackey2009; Pederson Reference Pederson2012). For instance, Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (Reference Hurston1939) subverts the Exodus story by blending the biblical story of Moses with African American folklore—involving subversions that prefigured her later expression of discomfort at the way Exodus stories figure in American politics. Even in her discomfort about its usages, though, Hurston (Reference Hurston1945, 47) herself turned again and again to the Exodus story—arguing, for instance, that Jim Crow laws served to convince white children they had a place “first by birth … like the place assigned to the Levites by Moses over the other tribes of the Hebrews.”
Of course, Exodus imagery figured prominently in the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s use of the Exodus story is well documented (Miller Reference Miller2007; Selby Reference Selby2008). But other civil rights leaders, such as Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Fannie Lou Hamer, also used the Exodus story as a political template (Houck and Dixon Reference Houck and Dixon2006). It is telling that Hamer could send a crowd in Mississippi into peals of laughter by riffing on the name of the student leader who had come south to organize Black voter registration. “We have prayed for change in the state of Mississippi for years, and God made it plain, he sent Moses down in Egypt-land to tell Pharaoh to let my people go,” said Hamer. “And he made it so plain in here in Mississippi, the man that has the project, his name is Moses. Bob Moses” (Coffey Reference Coffey2014, 194). That play on words was not a one-off; other civil rights leaders, like Dave Dennis, had their own variations on it (Houck and Dixon Reference Houck and Dixon2006, 635–36).
Since then, the Exodus story has remained a template for key works of African American political imagination. The most obvious case here is that of President Barack Obama, who has often invoked Exodus—as a candidate, as president, and in his postpresidential life (Hartnell Reference Hartnell2011; Murphy Reference Murphy2011; Tell Reference Tell, Vaughn and Mercieca2014). But the Exodus story remains prominent in African American literature as well. For instance, the Exodus story provides the backbone for Octavia Butler’s Parable books (Reference Butler1993; Reference Butler1998), which reenact and reenvision an Exodus politics (Lucas Reference Lucas2021).Footnote 3 Toni Morrison’s Paradise (Reference Morrison1998) also uses Exodus to ground a liberal political vision (Hartnell Reference Hartnell2011, 171).Footnote 4 Exodus is the story that, in African American political thought, has shaped most stories about political liberty.
Exodus Liberalism versus Enlightenment Liberalism
An exhaustive documentation of the ways that Exodus liberalism has functioned in American politics, especially in traditions of African American political thought, is beyond the scope of this essay. But let me suggest a few of the features that distinguish Exodus liberalism from Enlightenment liberalism. (On the whole, I will assume that my readers have a working sense of what I am calling here “Enlightenment liberalism” and will mostly speak about Exodus liberalism by comparison to it.) This endeavor involves some degree of generalization. Just as Enlightenment liberalism encompasses a range of authors and interpretations of some central tenets and ideas, Exodus liberalism encompasses the same.Footnote 5 I will then use two brief examples—David Walker’s Appeal and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower—to demonstrate that the distinction between, and the admixture of, Enlightenment liberalism and Exodus liberalism has been a conscious and meaningful distinction in African American political thought, one that reveals the broader complexities of American liberalism.
In comparing Enlightenment and Exodus liberalism, it is hard not to notice that both traditions involve an origin story about humans in nature—a condition in which humans create the legal and political foundations that can support and sustain liberty. In the Enlightenment story, at least in the versions articulated by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, we are encouraged to imagine human beings ahistorically. The imaginary “state of nature” is one in which human beings exist without reference to history or preexisting relationships. But in the Exodus story, the Israelites arrive in the wilderness after generations of collective enslavement in Egypt; their place in the wilderness is only explicable and meaningful by reference to that history. Exodus liberalism is accordingly less abstract and ahistorical in its inclinations, resisting the idea we can or should apprehend politics (or pursue liberal ends) by stipulating a standpoint outside lived history, absent the realities of historical inequalities and distributions of power.
Following from those differences in narrative foundation, Enlightenment liberalism tends to focus on the individual, while Exodus liberalism tends to focus on the collective—both as a means and as an end. While the story of Exodus does not discount the likelihood of individual antagonism when people are in a stateless condition, it focuses on the attempt to establish friendship and solidarity under such conditions, rather than reconciling itself to the Hobbesian inevitability of war: “[F]ar from suggesting the end of power, exodus seeks a transformation of power into a mechanism of ‘acting-in-concert’” (Mazzocchi Reference Mazzocchi, Carson, Halligan, Penzin and Pippa2022, 56). In that way, as Glaude (Reference Glaude2000; Reference Glaude2007, 57) argues, analogical readings of Exodus allowed African Americans to construct a collective identity that did not depend on racial essentialism but in a common history of slavery and discrimination. Exodus teaches that freedom is only collectively achieved and sustained; the Israelites conceived of true freedom as a collective concept, not expressed by reference to individual subjects but to a communal whole (Kaye Reference Kaye2019, 40). It is a theme common in African American political thought: that freedom requires collective effort, focus, and action and cannot be fully captured by reference to “rights” (Bromell Reference Bromell2013, 55). In Exodus liberalism, this collective is multigenerational and unfolds across time; Exodus liberalism teaches that liberty cannot be meaningfully conceptualized or pragmatically achieved in individual terms.
Accordingly, Exodus liberalism tends to value strong or even heroic political leadership; to keep the collective from breaking apart into incoherence, the Exodus story foregrounds the need for a leader who commands respect (Segall Reference Segall2003, 106). This emphasis likely explains why there has been a premium on charismatic, masculine leadership in African American political history—a premium that has been acknowledged, and sometimes critiqued, in recent scholarship (Carby Reference Carby1998; Edwards Reference Edwards2012, 84; Patterson Reference Patterson2013). By comparison, Enlightenment liberalism tends to envision leadership grounded in rational deliberation, where good leadership is marked by the ability to do that deliberation quickly. Enlightenment liberalism tends to emphasize speed as opposed to strength or charisma; the importance of “dispatch” in executive authority is almost universal among Enlightenment liberal thinkers (Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2004, 40).
Enlightenment liberalism, that is, sees less need for heroic leadership in part because of the emphasis it places on human reason and in its faith in the emancipatory potential of that reason. Exodus liberalism adopts a more skeptical position toward rational deliberation—or, at least, sees rational deliberation as only one small part of liberalism. As Michael Walzer (Reference Walzer1985, 149) says, Exodus underscores the “hard and continuous work” that is required for the maintenance of liberty, work that goes far beyond providing structural supports for rational deliberation. That this skepticism has been picked up in African American political thought should not be surprising; after all, to some degree it was the very “ruthless rationalism” of Enlightenment thinking that fostered exhausting plantation work regimes and encouraged planters to treat humans as depersonalized units of production—what Justin Roberts (Reference Roberts2013, 6) calls the “dark side of the Enlightenment.”
More profoundly, Exodus liberalism forces us to confront the horror that people may not always want to be free. At the very least, the Exodus story teaches that there is “alienation and ambivalence” in the choice of freedom, and sometimes the experience of freedom is painful (Schneidau Reference Schneidau1976, 64). In Exodus liberalism, freedom is never to be taken for granted—even after shackles are broken, laws are enshrined, covenants are established, and territory is gained. Exodus liberalism teaches that securing and maintaining freedom are hard tasks, and they require more than human reason for their achievement. Exodus liberalism thus casts doubt on John Locke’s (Reference Locke1689) idea that the “law of reason,” the law of nature, and the will of God are united in ways that point toward liberal ends (Ryan Reference Ryan2012, 524). As Exodus liberalism teaches, liberal projects and polities are subject to backsliding—to murmuring in the wilderness. Liberal orders are threatened not just by illiberal tyrants but by weary liberal citizens. That theme is central in the post-Emancipation period of African American political thought, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on the vicissitudes of the Exodus, on the flare-ups of resistance and dissent “that threaten to derail the march toward liberty” (Sundquist Reference Sundquist2005, 249).
Relatedly, Exodus liberalism emphasizes the moral content of, and moral preconditions for, liberal politics. Exodus liberalism is not just a politics of statecraft; it is also a politics of soulcraft (Glaude Reference Glaude2000, 7). The crucial struggle in Exodus liberalism, as Glaude (Reference Glaude2000, 162) puts it, “is not in quests for land or in efforts to eradicate demonized enemies,” but “to live up to the moral principles that signify the best way of living”—a quality that, among other things, helps to explain the place of respectability politics in African American history. Character formation is understood, in Exodus liberalism, as a critical part of political struggle (Reference Glaude2007, 57). This moral focus also shows the extent to which political liberty depends on extrapolitical moral authority. Exodus liberalism is concerned with the creation of self-respect and insists on moral autonomy outside formal structures of recognition (Rogers Reference Rogers2009). For instance, as Farah Griffin (Reference Griffin, Rogers and Turner2021, 320) points out, Zora Neale Hurston uses the Exodus story to highlight the internal struggles of freedom; “Moses is a liberator of a people, but only the individual can truly free herself.”
In all these ways, Exodus liberalism emphasizes, in a way Enlightenment liberalism does not, the fragility of liberal political orders. Exodus liberalism points, then, to the critical need for liberal education—a connection made explicit in rereadings of the story by African American thinkers like Harper (Marbury Reference Marbury2015). The tradition’s emphases on the importance of memory, literacy, and storytelling all suggest the enduring importance of schooling in the liberal arts—as in Du Bois’s subtle use of the Exodus story to critique what he saw as the diminished political vision of Booker T. Washington’s leadership and educational program (Gooding-Williams Reference Gooding-Williams2009, 164). The “liberal learning” that is central to the Exodus story is a central component of the character of its liberalism (Fant Reference Fant2012, 107).
Finally, Exodus liberalism—in one of its most meaningful departures from Enlightenment liberalism—teaches that liberal learning is not a top-down process, one slowly bestowed by the more privileged or better educated onto others, as in the understanding of John Stuart Mill (Reference Mill1869, 23). To the contrary, the Exodus story teaches that “people who have suffered estrangement and deprivation are more likely to feel sympathy for strangers and compassion for the needy than are those who have known only prosperity” (Kass Reference Kass2021b, 602–3). As such, the people who treasure liberty the most, and who theorize and teach it the best, are often people who have been denied it. In other words, liberal education cannot be understood in terms of, or limited to, formal processes or structures of learning; liberal education is often realized in bottom-up assertions of equal dignity or demands for justice.
None of this is to say that Exodus liberalism and Enlightenment liberalism exist merely in tension. Not so. Like Enlightenment liberalism, Exodus liberalism entails some suspicion of the state, envisions a limited role for government, and makes room for civil disobedience (Hazony Reference Hazony2012, 143). Also like Enlightenment liberalism, Exodus liberalism involves constitutionalism and insists on the importance of written law in ordering a free political community (Kass Reference Kass2021a).Footnote 6 And Exodus liberalism, like Enlightenment liberalism, is underscored by a vision of equal human dignity. This begins to explain why, throughout American history, Enlightenment liberalism and Exodus liberalism have been locked in a complex dance, affirming and complicating and challenging each other.
Two Brief Examples: Walker’s Appeal and Butler’s Parable of the Sower
In the interest of being more specific about how that complex interplay between Enlightenment and Exodus liberalism reveals itself in American political thought, let me turn briefly to two examples: David Walker’s Appeal and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. I have chosen two works of African American political thought here because I think—for reasons that W. E. B. DuBois (Reference Du Bois1903, 3) would call double-consciousness—that complicated interplay has been apprehended more consciously by African American thinkers. Despite their historical distance and difference in literary form, both Walker and Butler articulate a vision of American liberalism that is a complex admixture of Enlightenment and Exodus traditions—and one far more complex than the Hartz definition would allow.
David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)
In 1829, David Walker published his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World as a series of essays—eventually a pamphlet—meant both to critique the colonization movement and call for the abolition of slavery. In doing so, Walker carefully and consciously assumed a public voice that he hoped would speak to educated and uneducated Black Americans alike (Dinius Reference Dinius2022, 29; McHenry Reference McHenry2002, 23). He offered up the Appeal as, in Melvin Rogers’s (2015, 213) words, “a vehicle through which blacks might perform their freedom and thereby lay claim to it more fully.”
To achieve those ends and articulate that freedom, Walker drew on his two formative influences: African Methodist Episcopal theology and Anglo-American political philosophy (Cohen Reference Cohen2021, 32). From its beginnings, Walker’s Appeal blends what I have here called Enlightenment liberalism and Exodus liberalism in ways that complement and complicate each other. For instance, early in part 1 of the Appeal, Walker (Reference Walker1829, 14) speaks of “those enemies who have for hundreds of years stolen our rights” and tells his readers to “fear not the number and education of our enemies, against whom we shall have to contend for our lawful right” (emphasis in original)—making recourse to the Enlightenment language of natural rights (Cohen Reference Cohen2021, 32). But the Appeal’s first reference is to the Exodus story, to the “Israelites in Egypt,” and he speaks often in terms of the Exodus narrative (Walker Reference Walker1829, 3). Walker’s indebtedness to both traditions is evident.
Yet throughout the Appeal, Walker suggests that both the Enlightenment tradition’s account of freedom and the Exodus tradition’s account of freedom are inadequate on their own to speak to the American condition and to the problem of unfreedom—particularly the problem of slavery—in the US. Even as he speaks within the rationalist language of Enlightenment discourse and accepts the Enlightenment emphasis on thinking about liberty through the idea of human nature, Walker argues that Enlightenment thinkers have largely gotten their accounts of human nature wrong (Finseth Reference Finseth2001). Nowhere is this more evident than in Walker’s reading of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. In his Appeal, Walker engages in a line-by-line analysis of the Notes with two apparent aims. First, he wants to show that Jefferson’s understanding of human nature—like the dominant Enlightenment understanding of human nature—has been corrupted by dominant understandings of race in ways that make it insufficient for confronting the problem of unfreedom in America. “Remember, Americans,” Walker (Reference Walker1829, 72) says, “that we must and shall be free and enlightened as you are.” While Walker draws on Enlightenment modes of inquiry and argumentation, he suggests repeatedly that Enlightenment liberalism needs to be extended and transformed to achieve the liberty of all people of African descent (Dinius Reference Dinius2022, 32; Jarrett Reference Jarrett2011; Thompson Reference Thompson2017).
But if Walker finds Enlightenment liberalism inadequate to the problems of unfreedom in the US, he does not find Exodus liberalism to be a sufficient alternative. Turning to the Exodus story is insufficient for Americans, he says, because the sufferings of the Israelites—one of many enslavements in “those heathen nations of antiquity”—can be “no more than a cypher” in a nation that professes itself to be Christian (Walker Reference Walker1829, 3). Walker also argues that Pharaoh never denied the Israelites’ humanity in the way that American whites often deny Blacks’ humanity (Cohen Reference Cohen2021, 33). Moreover, while Walker’s Appeal relies on the Exodus story, it also disrupts—through its commitment to democratic rationality—any commitment to messianic leadership (Rogers 2015, 212). Finally, Walker resists the idea that the Promised Land for American Blacks might be somewhere else. As J. Laurence Cohen (Reference Cohen2021, 35–36) writes,
Despite relying on Exodus motifs, Walker resists the idea that Africa is the Promised Land for free Blacks. … Walker retains some aspects of exodus typology while transforming or dispensing with others. Most importantly, Walker does not advocate a physical exodus in terms of Black migration to Africa, but rather a figurative exodus in terms of a transformed U.S. society that grants Blacks equal rights.
Even if Exodus liberalism has a kind of native appeal, Walker makes clear that it, too, needs to be extended and transformed to serve the ends of a true American liberalism.
Walker shows, in the form and argument of his Appeal, what that extension and transformation of Enlightenment and Exodus liberalism might look like. In the Appeal, Walker depends on both traditions even as he identifies their limitations—when taken separately—for achieving freedom in the US. Walker suggests that a better American liberalism, like his own work, will draw on both Enlightenment and Exodus liberalisms while also acknowledging their limitations in the service of a transformed American nation—and a transformed American understanding of liberty.
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993)
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower tells the story of Lauren, a 15-year-old girl in an apocalyptic California. Climate change, economic crises, and corporate greed have wrecked the land and the society. Violence and desperation are widespread. Outside the fragile gates of her neighborhood, something like a Hobbesian state of nature reigns. It is the war of all against all. Ordinary people seem to have two choices: (1) to submit to a repressive corporate employment structure that looks a lot like slavery; or (2) to hunt and thieve and murder and hope to survive another day. People have the choice, that is, is between two kinds of unfreedom—what Aristotle ([1905] Reference Jowett1926, 112, 118) would define as conditions of “mere life,” as opposed to the “good life” that is constitutive of politics and the possibility of freedom.
As others have said, Butler was surely influenced by Hobbes’s description of the state of nature in imagining this American future (Phillips Reference Phillips2002, 304–5). Yet Butler’s novel critiques Enlightenment understandings of the state of nature and the theories of liberalism that emerge from them (Curtis Reference Curtis2010, 136). Lauren can literally feel the pain of others, a condition that makes it impossible for her to imagine herself as a detached individual actor. Through Lauren’s hyperempathetic vulnerability, Butler complicates Hobbes’s account of humans as motivated primarily by the fear of violent death. First, she suggests that the fear of violent death is at root a fear of our own vulnerability. Then, even as Butler acknowledges that fears of violent death and vulnerability are powerful, she emphasizes that humans have choices about how to respond to those fears. We need not be driven by those fears, as Hobbes suggests. We might even embrace our vulnerability, and in so doing free ourselves from the fears that can lead us to Hobbesian subjection. Butler suggests that the central task for those who would pursue freedom is “to seek out those who neither ignore nor feel shamed by their vulnerability” (Curtis Reference Curtis2010, 141–42).
In any case, Lauren does want to pursue freedom. She travels north, where she has heard there is less violence and more land. Lauren has spent much of her life studying survival techniques. She has read copiously to prepare. She expects to strike out on her own. To this extent, she looks a lot like a Lockean liberal subject: rational, individual, and focused on property acquisition.
But from the very beginning, Lauren knows that this sort of preparation—preparation tied to Enlightenment liberal understandings of what it means to seek freedom—is inadequate. She tells a friend that although she has tried to imagine the journey to a better life, she knows she cannot do it on her own; she needs to embrace a more collective understanding of liberation. “I realize I don’t know very much,” she says. “But … we can teach each other” (Butler Reference Butler1993, 101). Lauren will go on to travel with a group of other freedom seekers she meets along her way, moving “from the individually oriented property seeker of Locke to a position where many (not all) individuals are connected through chosen and sometimes compelled linkages” (Curtis Reference Curtis2010, 136). Lauren often makes sense of that position by reflecting on and reinterpreting her father’s Old Testament sermons. In writing Lauren’s character this way, Butler “heralds the liberatory power of tools used by African Americans to prevail over ‘conquest and empire’: the Bible and religion,” embracing the power of Exodus liberalism at the same time she echoes the vision of Enlightenment liberalism (Ruffin 2006, 99). At the same time, Lauren finds her father’s religion wanting; she thinks that taking the tradition of Exodus liberalism on its own terms has proven insufficient.
In fact, Lauren crafts her own religion, “Earthseed,” which might be understood as an admixture of Enlightenment and Exodus liberalism. Lauren’s journey in some ways looks like a recapitulation of the Exodus story, but as Soyica Diggs Colbert (Reference Colbert2017, 131–32) says, in contrast to that story’s focus on a benevolent outside force, “Lauren’s prophetic vision locates the force to compel individual action within the actors themselves.” The resources she will need to survive and thrive—to be free—in the American future come both from Enlightenment and Exodus liberal traditions.
Learning from Walker and Butler
While these two brief examples are limited in their depth and their range, I use them to illustrate my broader argument: that Exodus liberalism and Enlightenment liberalism are conceptually distinct but historically mixed in American political thought, locked in a conversation that lends to American liberalism a hybrid quality. These two liberalisms have a kind of awkward sibling relationship—each imported from other places and times, but shaped and transformed by the conditions of American existence. In these works, Walker and Butler show that Enlightenment liberalism and Exodus liberalism are central to American thinking, but that each on its own is insufficient for understanding the American present and for charting a course for the American future. Only in understanding the complex liberal inheritance of American politics, Walker and Butler suggest, is it possible for those who think seriously about American politics—about both the idea and practice of freedom in the US—to understand the true nature of American liberalism.
Exodus Liberalism as Liberalism
Again, I am far from the first person to identify the importance of the Exodus story in American political thought. And in writings outside political science, scholars have been willing to classify Exodus politics as a form of liberalism (Boyarin Reference Boyarin1996, 48; Frank Reference Frank1999; Horbury Reference Horbury, Aitken, Dell and Mastin2011, 150; Nahme Reference Nahme2024, 136). But when political scientists have talked about Exodus and its American political legacy, they have avoided the word “liberal.”Footnote 7 The greatest treatment of Exodus in political science is surely Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution (Reference Walzer1985). But Walzer figures Exodus politics as “revolutionary” rather than liberal, even as Walzer’s critics—like Edward Said (Reference Said1986)—have accused him of trying to assimilate Exodus into an Enlightenment liberal narrative (Hart Reference Hart2000).Footnote 8 Aaron Wildavsky (Reference Wildavsky1984) holds up Moses as a model of political leadership whose strength lay in his willingness to learn from and care for others, but he does not describe those qualities as liberal. Other political theorists, like David Gutterman (Reference Gutterman2005), have figured American Exodus politics as “prophetic” or covenantal, but not liberal. So, though it feels strange to argue that an intellectual tradition focused on the achievement of human liberty should be called a liberal tradition, I want to make a brief case for using the word “liberal” to describe the Exodus tradition in American politics by considering what I take to be the two main objections to the use of that term.
First, like all foundational or mythic stories, the Exodus story might be used toward a variety of ends and support different kinds of political projects, not all of them liberal (Boyarin Reference Boyarin1992, 532). Stephen Whitfield (Reference Whitfield1999, 200) calls the narrative of the Exodus “a hermeneutic playground,” a story that allows for a wide range of moral and political interpretations. That is, one might worry that to call the Exodus tradition liberal is to overlook many of its political dimensions. But even if that worry might be apt in the abstract, it seems odd to apply that worry to the Exodus tradition in the US. For in the US—and in African American political thought in particular—the Exodus story has been used consistently if not exclusively to ground projects aimed at political liberty. (Because I illustrate that argument elsewhere in this article, I resist making it again here.)
And while it might be tempting, given that this pursuit of liberty has often involved a fundamental critique of the status quo, to call the Exodus tradition in American politics revolutionary or radical, I think preferring those terms cedes critical intellectual and political turf. Those terms imply, I think, that the status quo of American politics has had a right to its liberal self-definition—and that Exodus politics are somehow upsetting a standing liberal order. But the Exodus tradition in American politics has gained its power from pointing to the illiberal nature of American political practice, particularly in its racial hierarchies and unfreedoms. It is the Exodus tradition that has often articulated the liberal case against an illiberal and exclusionary status quo.
One might also worry that an intellectual tradition grounded in a piece of scripture—an intellectual tradition that emerged from a theological tradition—cannot properly be called a liberal tradition. In many places and times, the Exodus story has been used to support a messianic politics that justifies violence and tribalism in the name of the divine. But, as Walzer (Reference Walzer1985, 146) points out, the Exodus story also “provides the chief alternative to messianism,” because its focus on storytelling, discussion, and ongoing struggle undermine absolutist, messianic readings. As Bonnie Honig (Reference Honig and Lloyd2012, 199) argues, this reading of the Exodus story is inflected by Walzer’s own experiences with African American traditions of its reception—a “secular Exodus politics” that “is energized in ways it does not fully avow by this magical, enchanted, sacred text.” Walker’s Appeal, with its resistance to messianic politics, is only one example of the ways in which the American uses of the Exodus story are transformations of the original. American uses of the Exodus story do not, to revisit Glaude’s (Reference Glaude2000, 162) description, focus on “efforts to eradicate demonized enemies” but “the effort to create a free people”—in, that is, a liberal project.
Moreover, it seems worth noting that Enlightenment liberalism, perhaps particularly in its Lockean variations, has been used to justify violence, particularly in the form of colonialism (Morefield Reference Morefield2016; Pitts Reference Pitts2005). Some of that justification involved its own theological grounding and tribalism. This is perhaps most evident in the use of social contract theories to legitimate rule by white Christian men as “‘natural’ and part of the path to civilization” (Mills Reference Mills1997; Moon Reference Moon2023, 31; Pateman Reference Pateman1988). If modern social contract politics, despite this history of reception and practice, still have a claim to be called liberal, it seems strange to argue that Exodus politics do not have a similar claim.
In short, I think any serious treatment of Exodus politics—especially in terms of its reception and use in the US—suggests that it has a strong claim to be called a liberal politics. In the US, Exodus politics might even best be described as a liberal politics.
But if my arguments are even lightly persuasive on those terms, that raises another question: given the Exodus story’s evident political importance in American history, and given its evident focus on political liberty, why have American political scientists not been inclined to name Exodus liberalism as liberalism? To answer that, I think we must return to Louis Hartz.
The Tradition behind Hartz’s Liberal Tradition
When Hartz set to work on The Liberal Tradition, political scientists were actively casting about for a new, narrow definition of liberalism. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the words “liberal” and “liberalism” were new in American political discourse; these words only started appearing in American politics during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency (Roazen Reference Roazen1988). If you look at political science journals in the late 1940s for discussions of liberalism, just about all you will find are articles lamenting its ill-defined nature. A 1948 article by Stanford political scientist Boyd Martin is emblematic. In it, Martin worries that broad interpretations of liberalism are both conceptually and geopolitically problematic. They are conceptually problematic because it seems difficult to study a thing if it is not narrowly defined. They are geopolitically problematic because it seems difficult to distinguish liberalism from communism if you are not strictly defining liberalism (Martin Reference Martin1948).
Those questions express, almost perfectly, the anxieties that defined political science in the postwar period, as political scientists struggled to define the field as a “real” discipline (Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015, 7). Political scientists wanted to establish a systematic terminology, both to try to gain scientific credibility and to deal with new political realities. “The increasing concern of many within the discipline with establishing a systematic terminology and operational definitions was in part a consequence of attempts to be scientific,” as John Gunnell (Reference Gunnell2003, 185) says, “but it was also a way of dealing with the breakdown of old concepts” and world orders. The emergence of the Cold War catalyzed political scientists to (1) emphasize rigorous term defining and (2) distance themselves from anything that smacked of socialism (Desch Reference Desch2019, 75).
Whether Hartz intended this or not, his “single factor” thesis, as well as his argument that “socialism was … a national heresy” in America, served both those disciplinary enthusiasms (Hartz Reference Hartz1955, 211). Hartz gave political scientists a way to talk about the history of American political thought that fit their immediate imperatives, in large measure because of its narrowness.
But how did Hartz himself come to define liberalism in ways that, among other things, excluded Exodus liberalism? To answer that, we need to go back to a more distant and seemingly unlikely character: the nineteenth-century French political thinker Benjamin Constant. When Hartz penned The Liberal Tradition, Constant was enjoying a major American revival, one led by Helen Byrne Lippman (the wife of Walter Lippman) and Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian-British economist. Both Lippman and Hayek championed Constant as a thinker whose emphases on resisting dictatorship and socialism were crucial in the mid-twentieth century (Rosenblatt Reference Rosenblatt and Rosenblatt2009).
Like others, Hartz had Constant on his mind. While other scholars have failed to make this connection—it is easy to miss how much Hartz’s thesis owes to Constant because Hartz only mentions him once in The Liberal Tradition, albeit admiringly—Constant was foundational for Hartz.Footnote 9 Constant was a focus of Hartz’s teaching, and Hartz ([1990] Reference Hartz and Roazen2015) liked the way Constant had narrowed the definition of “liberalism” (Barber Reference Barber1986).
This was the narrowed definition that Hartz had in mind: In an 1819 address to the Royal Atheneum of Paris, Constant distinguished between the “liberty of the ancients” and the “liberty of the moderns.” According to Constant ([1819] Reference Constant and Fontana1988), ancient freedom consisted of participation in collective power. By contrast, modern liberty inheres in peaceful enjoyment of private independence—and, Constant argued, is the only kind of liberty that can be realized in modern times. Note how Constant’s argument defines “modern” liberalism as rights based, focused on the individual, and so on. In so doing, it prefigures the Hartz thesis and the idea that Enlightenment liberalism is the only operative form of modern liberalism.
Constant also excludes the Exodus story from his entire discussion of liberalism. Even when he talks about the liberty of the ancients, mentioning “the Persians, the Egyptians, Gaul, Greece, and Italy,” Constant ([1819] Reference Constant and Fontana1988, 323) leaves out the ancient Israelites. Constant’s exclusion of the Exodus story did not happen because Constant had failed to think about the ancient Israelites. To the contrary: Constant writes about the ancient Israelites a great deal, especially in On Religion ([1824–31] Reference Constant and Seaton2018). But in that discussion, Constant goes out of his way to reject the idea that Exodus is liberal. While this might seem curious, scholars agree that Constant had strategic political reasons to do this. For one thing, Constant objected to the legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose admiration of the Exodus story, Constant believed, was partly to blame for France’s slide into Napoleonic tyranny (Brint Reference Brint1985). Constant also worried that French political factions in his own day were invoking Exodus to dangerous ends. He wanted to impede the counterrevolutionary program of François-René de Chateaubriand and Louis de Bonald, which was explicitly grounded in an appeal to Mosaic law (Ribner Reference Ribner1993, 45). Constant also wanted to halt the rise of French socialists, whose “priestly methods,” in his words, seemed to him Mosaic (Garsten Reference Garsten2010). Constant’s exclusion of the Exodus tradition from liberalism was tactical, a product of interpretations he made that were specific to his time and place.
But the upshot is that 130 years later, when Louis Hartz echoed Constant’s definition of liberalism, he echoed this strategic exclusion of Exodus liberalism, without considering the very particular role that Exodus had played in American as opposed to French political history. And it is worth saying again: Hartz ([1990] Reference Hartz and Roazen2015, 169) was unequivocal in his respect for Constant’s narrowing definition. “It was good,” Hartz writes, “that the idea of ancient liberty was put to rest by Constant.”
Of course, the exclusions of mid-century political science were not merely intellectual and tied to nineteenth-century French politics. In the early 1950s, when Hartz was writing The Liberal Tradition, almost no one in American political science was studying African American political thought—no one, that is, outside historically Black colleges and universities and the “Howard school” of political science. And the work of those thinkers was systematically sidelined by the agenda-setting leaders of political science, implicitly for racial reasons but explicitly for ideological reasons. This sidelining of the Howard school fixed American political science within what Bob Vitalis (Reference Vitalis2015, 179) calls an “Anglosphere,” an ecosystem that privileged Anglocentric definitions. In that Anglosphere, as Jessica Blatt (Reference Blatt2018) documents, the only time African Americans appeared in political science scholarship was in behavioristic work, focused on racial attitudes and relations. All this suppressed the study of African American political and intellectual traditions.
With all this converging in American political science in 1950—a disciplinary interest in corralling and narrowing the definition of “liberalism”; the Benjamin Constant revival in American social science; and the sidelining of the Howard school within the formal, national organizations of political science—it is hard to imagine Louis Hartz doing anything other than overlooking America’s second liberal tradition.
The Tradition Enshrined by The Liberal Tradition
The irony—maybe it is even a tragedy—is that although Hartz was alarmed by the hegemonic liberalism he described, his book did a great deal to enshrine it in political science. As Rogers Smith (Reference Smith2006, 6) argues, Hartz’s thesis “served the political concerns of an unusually wide range of analysts,” and as it gained traction Hartz’s thesis shaped the terms of future scholarship. Relatedly, Hartz’s narrowed definition of liberalism powered political science forward but compromised the ability of those in the discipline to look backward. The price political scientists paid for the appearance of professional rigor was impaired intellectual vision. Sometimes sharp focus—or disciplinary legibility—looks a lot like tunnel vision (Scott Reference Scott1998, 13). It seems that, because political scientists have been trained to look for Enlightenment liberalism, political scientists have only found Enlightenment liberalism. And when something does not fit that mold, political scientists exclude that thing from the category of “liberal.” But that does injustice both to the full complexity of American political thought and to the true range of liberal thought in the US.Footnote 10 And given the centrality of Exodus liberalism to African American political thought, the discipline’s tendency to equate Enlightenment liberalism with American liberalism surely has contributed to racial exclusions within political science.
The dominance of the Hartz thesis has also encouraged those political theorists who do study African American political thought to portray their subjects—many of whom dedicated their lives to the pursuit of political liberty—as somehow not liberal. These thinkers tend to get portrayed as critical, as prophetic, as radical, or as revolutionary, largely because those thinkers questioned the terms of Enlightenment liberalism or pushed their readers to see beyond it. But given the centrality of liberalism to American politics and self-understanding, this pattern of defining African American thinkers as somehow not liberal (or other than liberal) may exaggerate the marginality of African American political thought to American political thinking writ large. And, as the examples of Walker and Butler only begin to suggest, our disciplinary resistance to seeing forms of liberalism other than Enlightenment liberalism may not allow us to see the true intellectual complexity of specific thinkers or the history of American political thought.
As a final piece of my plea for a reconsideration of what should count as American liberalism, I would like to suggest some of the ways the discipline of political science might be changed—and bettered—by desegregating American political thought, and seeing American political thought as a tale of two liberalisms.
Most immediately, desegregating American political thought would open new conversations in the study of African American thought. Too often, scholars in this field have struggled to situate their subjects with respect to a narrowly defined liberalism. Embracing a “two liberalisms” model would expand the study of African American political thought and provoke new discussions within the broader field of American political thought.
Desegregating American political thought would also underscore the fact, too long overlooked by political scientists, that American political thought has not just been shaped by treatises that are explicitly political and philosophical, but also by scriptures and stories and songs and other cultural works—so often the vehicles for Exodus liberalism.
Perhaps more than anything else, desegregating American political thought would allow us to appreciate that American liberalism has never been a hegemonic business. American liberalism has always involved a complex interplay between overlapping but contesting liberal traditions. I suspect that dialogic quality is what has given liberalism in the US its flexibility and its fragility, its dynamism and its danger.
Finally, today’s debates about American politics would be improved if both the proponents and opponents of Enlightenment liberalism could acknowledge that the broader prospects for American liberalism do not depend entirely on it. In fact, Exodus liberalism has always worked, in American political history, to interrogate and mitigate some of the excesses of Enlightenment liberalism: its atomism, its materialism, and so on. Even if Enlightenment liberalism has been America’s dominant mode, it has not been its only mode, and there is an infinite difference between dominance and totality.
Americans have inherited both Enlightenment liberalism and Exodus liberalism. These two liberalisms exist in constant conversation, shaping laws and norms, conversations and contests, language and lives. All Americans have, to some degree, been schooled by both liberal traditions. Especially now, when conflict between Americans feels pervasive, understanding the complex, bimodal nature of our liberal inheritance reminds us of the old truth that Americans are a complex, bifarious people (Kammen Reference Kammen1972). As such, American political thought is often best understood as determined not just by the conflict between Americans, but also by the conflict within Americans.
Finally, in this age of academic hyperspecialization, desegregating American political thought reminds us of the dangers that attend the impulse to narrow definitions and our scopes of attention, especially when studying politics. Even as we respect disciplinary conventions and forms, we should always be mindful of how those conventions form—and sometimes deform—our work. Good political science, I am certain, always involves some reformation—the willingness to look outside the definitions that have been passed down to us, imagine them differently, and in so doing reconceive of the past and better conceive of the future.
Acknowledgments
I owe, here as elsewhere, limitless gratitude to Lorn Foster—in this case because he would not let me put down Exodus when we cotaught “African American Political Thought” at Pomona College. I am also grateful to Nicholas Buccola, Daniel Carpenter, Oona Eisenstadt, Eddie Glaude, Geoffrey Kurtz, Jared Loggins, Harvey Mansfield, Luke Mayville, James Read, Melvin Rogers, Emma Rodman, John Seery, David Siemers, Natalie Taylor, Chip Turner, and Robinson Woodward-Burns for conversations that have informed this paper, directly and indirectly. In addition, I thank the anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics who have helped me refine this piece, as well as the colleagues at Harvard University, Mercer University, Skidmore College, and the University of Washington who gave me opportunities to present and discuss earlier drafts of this essay.
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