while they valued direct civic engagement in public life more than liberals, their expectations and standards for that participation were much less strenuous than those of ancient Greece or Rome. They were certainly more amenable to commerce, and, although they lauded it when it appeared – in the courage and sacrifices of George Washington, for example, as a citizen and soldier – they lowered their expectation of the manifestation of heroic virtues by ordinary citizens in mundane times. Modern republicans certainly placed a much greater emphasis on individual liberty than did classical republicans. For these reasons, many of those moderns whose writings are considered core texts of American political thought, like Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexis de Tocqueville, are classed by some, sometimes, as republicans and by others, at other times, as liberals. The truth is that they drew from the well of both political thought traditions, which, moreover, cross-pollinated, and were far from static. The same was true for less well-known thinkers, and, indeed, of ordinary Americans as they have thought about and participated in public life over the course of American history.
Republican Foundations, Themes, and Political Preoccupations
1 Devotion to the common good
2 Pursuit of moral and civic virtue
3 Idea of a morally aspiring free state
4 Patriotism and sacrifice for the community
5 Valorization of public duties over private rights
6 Civic commitments/civic religion given priority over theistic private faith
7 Concern with decline, decay, or defeat through internal corruption or foreign subversion
8 Call for renewal through return to founding principles
Complications and Refinements: Other Liberalisms, Other Republicanisms, and Other Thought Traditions
It is hard to deny the remarkable ability of the Lockean liberal and republican frameworks to illuminate longstanding patterns in the way that Americans from the country’s inception have tended to think about, and practice, politics. In addition to arguing about the respective influence of one framework versus the other, generally, among different groups and actors, and across time, some scholars who broadly subscribe to the Hartz thesis positing Lockean liberal hegemony have suggested that it might be either more accurate or more helpful to look at American political thought through the prism of other American liberalisms that, in a positive sense, have served as foundations for American political thought, and/or, normatively, should serve as the basis for that thought.
In A Theory of Justice (1971), the Harvard analytic philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002), for instance, following liberal philosophers before him, including John Locke, but also David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, explicated a new social contract considered and agreed upon, as he imagined it, by individuals in an “original position” under a “veil of ignorance” about how well they would fare in the new society, economically and in social status. The liberal Rawls posited that these hypothetically contracting individuals would place surpassing value on liberty and equality, via limited constitutional government by consent committed to the appropriate guarantees for individual rights. Rawls argued, broadly speaking, moreover, that in addition to securing these foundational guarantees, individuals operating behind a veil of ignorance would insist that the new political order be just, with what is just defined as what is fair (“justice as fairness”). This, Rawls argued, entailed not simply a commitment to maximizing individual liberty (so long as that liberty did not infringe upon the equal liberty of others – Mill’s “harm principle”). It further entailed a certain level of distributive justice – a floor, guaranteed by the liberal state, that set limits to the level of economic and social status inequality. Rawls enlisted the “minimax” principle (minimizing the maximum possible loss) in specifying how his theory of justice would ensure the realization of basic individual freedoms and equal opportunity of access to offices and positions. In this way, his liberalism sought to model a just political order that offered the fullest possible commitment to liberty and equality (equal rights to basic liberties), under conditions of universal access to power consistent with the full civic membership of free and equal citizens. This liberalism, unlike Locke’s, provided a clear justification for the modern redistributive (liberal) social welfare state.
For her part, Judith Shklar (1928–1992), a Harvard political scientist, argued, at least implicitly, that Rawls’s grand theoretical bid for an intricately constructed systematic liberalism in A Theory of Justice (and his other books offering refinements of his initial model) was perhaps a bit illiberal in its totalizing ambitions. Informed by her direct encounters with the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, including Nazism and Stalinism, Shklar, a Latvian-Jewish refugee, eschewed efforts to forge grand systems. Ever alert to the menace of overwrought utopian ambitions – even in pursuit of ostensibly noble ends – Shklar’s liberalism spent less time positing first principles, and then constructing an elaborate theory of government on those foundations, than focusing our attention on attending to the greatest danger and problem in collective life: human cruelty. Putting “cruelty first” entailed what Shklar called a “liberalism of fear.” Such a liberalism was decidedly non-perfectionist – it held to a (seemingly) modest, but firm, commitment to the project of staving off, to the maximum extent possible in an imperfect world, the greatest ravages and evils of human societies.
While retaining the schematic ambitions of Hartz, and retaining his emphasis on the importance of liberalism, two frameworks of American political thought with ties to the University of Chicago posited the thought tradition of the United States as essentially plural, and contested. The University of Chicago political scientist J. David Greenstone (1937–1990) accepted Hartz’s thesis about the predominance of liberalism in the United States. Greenstone, however, rejected Hartz’s view that this had entailed an American “consensus” – to a one-dimensional hegemonically liberal political culture. Where Hartz had posited widespread and reflexive agreement among Americans, Greenstone found a history of political conflict. Taking Abraham Lincoln’s thought as his point of entry, Greenstone proposed that, if one looked at the nation’s actual politics over the long term, one could discern two different and distinguishable (“bipolar”) liberalisms that were offered in opposition to each other in contests for political power. One emphasized “negative liberty,” or freedom from coercion by government. The other promised “positive liberty,” or the purposive and affirmative direction of public power to expand the scope of individual freedom, in a practical, real-world sense, in everyday life. This concrete contestation over the meaning of liberty, with divergent views over the legitimacy of the enlistment of government power to achieve it, Greenstone argued, was a defining feature of American politics.
Although he wrote almost nothing about American political thought, the German-Jewish émigré University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) sired a line of scholars who came to write extensively about American political thought from a “Straussian” perspective. Contemporary Straussians – a mostly conservative cohort – have their own distinctive take on, idioms concerning, and disputes over the nature of the American political “regime.” In Natural Right and History (1953), Strauss drew a fundamental distinction between the “ancients” and the “moderns” in political thought. The former, he argued, were devoted to understandings of political communities as committed to knowing and, in turn, pursuing the highest substantive philosophical ideals of truth, virtue, and justice. The latter, Strauss argued, as exemplified by Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, in formulating their theories of political life, set these normatively desirable philosophical ideals to the side, and focused their attention instead on the “low but solid” goal of establishing social peace among members of a polity, who, in the nature of things, disagreed about the content of those ideas, and, indeed, had a tendency to go to war over them. While
