freedom.” The belief in “American exceptionalism” – the idea that the United States as a polity is unique, and sui generis – has been closely (if not solely) associated with an understanding that the United States is quintessentially, and to a peerless degree, a Lockean liberal nation. By this, these scholars mean that the American people have defined themselves as a nation defined not, as other nations have been, by race or ethnicity, its people (volk), spirit (geist), or its primordial traditions, but rather by a pervading commitment to a set of political-philosophical ideas and ideals associated with Lockean liberalism or liberal individualism – by its foundational commitment to the political liberty of free and equal individuals.
The most prominent contemporary articulation of this view is known as the “Hartz thesis,” advanced by the Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). The Hartz thesis holds that the key to understanding how Americans think about political authority is that, as modern liberals, they collectively subscribe to the belief that all claims to political authority ultimately derive from the will of sovereign individuals. Acting of their own free will, in their own self-interest, these individuals chose to unite with others, via a social contract, to create a government to protect their foundational natural rights to “life, liberty, and property.”1 Hartz argued – critically, rather than in celebration – that, for the length of its history, American politics, and, indeed, the political imagination of Americans, has been fundamentally shaped and bounded by a consensus commitment to Lockean liberal premises and principles.
Liberal political thought as a genus is defined by a set of themes and touchstones. First, liberalism takes the individual as the foundational unit of analysis. It considers political questions initially from the standpoint of the individual, as opposed to, say, communal bodies or groups, like a tribe, family, or demos (the people, considered as a self-governing unity, and whole) – although, to be sure, each of these can be reimagined in accord with liberal premises. Second, liberalism posits that the chief purpose of government is to protect the rights of individuals. In line with liberalism’s a priori individualism, those rights are considered pre-political: they exist in nature, prior to the establishment of political society, by virtue of simply being human. Third, liberalism promises individual freedom, guaranteed equally to all individuals, under a legitimately authorized government limited by constitutional constraints and the rule of law (an understanding that political philosophers call “negative freedom”).2 Fourth, by necessary implication from its commitment to limited government under the rule of law, liberalism enacts a separation between the public and private spheres, and distinguishes the proper realms of state and civil society. While as a practical matter the boundaries can be disputed, liberalism tends to push, if not confine, matters of economic production, religion, and family to the private sphere, removing them from the purview of public concern and government policy. Liberalism, moreover, typically valorizes the private over the public sphere, the latter of which it tends to regard as a necessary evil. Finally, liberalism’s touchstone thinker John Locke placed special value within his framework on the duty to work, and the productive value of labor (“God gave the world … to the industrious and rational”) – the “producer ethic” – from which Locke derives the right to private property, the third of his posited troika of foundational natural rights (life, liberty, and property). Locke highly valued religious liberty, which he considered an essential sphere in which (most) individuals would be free to follow their inner lights and consciences in the private sphere, without interference from worldly governments. Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is a seminal argument for that fledgling commitment. Locke’s call for religious liberty and toleration reflected the incipient tendencies of liberal political thought to valorize secular government and the separation of Church and State.
While liberal individualism is a fairly abstract political theory, it has considerable real-world implications for how Americans think about politics. (Hartz considered Lockean liberalism to be a hegemonic political ideology that had lamentably circumscribed the collective aspirations and political possibilities of the American people.) While Locke’s social contract theory was designed to justify and legitimize government power (in Locke’s case, England’s Glorious Revolution, 1688–1689) – to put it on firm foundations derived from the free will of sovereign, independent individuals – it also has the perhaps ironic effect of simultaneously subverting that power by implication. It is potentially subversive of the power it legitimates by underlining that, if government does not serve the ends for which it has been created, the social contract has been violated, and, as such, is rendered null and void. A contract, in other words, can be broken. And, if it is, the parties are released from their obligations, and all bets are off. Pursuant to what Locke deemed the (natural) right of revolution, the people perpetually retain the sovereign right “to alter and abolish” the government for a failure to achieve, or for betraying, its contracted aims.
The Lockean liberal understanding of the origins of free governments holds that government powers are delegated by the sovereign people for specific ends – and those ends only. Any powers exercised by the government not directed toward those ends, or in violation of the rights for which government was created to protect, are, under the paradigm, considered illegitimate exercises of governmental power. As such, many attribute familiar features of American political thinking – the deep (and sometimes conspiratorial) suspicion that the government is exceeding its rightful powers (anti-statism); the persistent demands for the recognition of individual rights by proponents of civil liberties and civil rights; and hot-headed threats of rebellion and revolution in the name of freedom (think the recent militia or Tea Party movements on the Right) – to the Lockean liberal paradigm that has ostensibly held the country in its grip from its inception. Many have commented on what seems like the country’s congenital suspicion of authority, per se – the prickly affinity of Americans for the idea that nobody gets to tell someone what to do unless he or she has (expressly?) delegated that authority to that person. They have fingered that suspicion as the root cause of the much remarked upon sense of atomization and isolation in American life, arising out of the orienting liberal assumption that it is, in the end, everyone for him- or herself.
Surveys of public attitudes suggest that, in contrast to Western Europeans, most Americans believe that we are all free to rise by our own efforts. The sometimes unstated implication is that if someone fails it must have been for a lack of such efforts, a personal failing. By these lights, in a free country individuals are authors of both their own successes and their own failures. Society’s “losers” are not entitled to any assistance from the government, whose chief, and perhaps sole, purpose is to set the rules of the game for the free play of the ordered liberty of free individuals. This thoroughgoing individualism, Louis Hartz complained, made Americans especially resistant to any recognition of class consciousness, perhaps pre-eminently among the working class. The Lockean liberal framework may also be responsible for the generalized sense of anxiety, workaholism, and competitiveness, for the special attraction Americans seem to have for naming winners and losers, and even the culture’s running undertone of violence. A saying displayed in the entryway of a prominent American business school in Texas nicely captures the general mood, and anxiety: “There is no status quo in American life: you are either on your way up, or on your way down.”
Liberal Foundations, Themes, and Political Preoccupations
1 Individualism
2 Individual rights/rights consciousness, with special value placed on rights to labor, property, and religious toleration and liberty
3 Limited government, held to have originated by consent, pursuant to a social contract
4 Rule of law
5 [Liberal] constitutionalism
6 Separation of the public and private spheres
7 Right of revolution for violation of the terms of the original agreement upon which government was
