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Concept
Louis Hartz
Summary
Louis Hartz (April 8, 1919 – January 20, 1986) was an American political scientist, historian, and a professor at Harvard, where he taught from 1942 until 1974. Hartz’s teaching and various writings —books and articles— have had an important influence on American political theory and comparative history.
Hartz was born in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, but grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. After graduating from Technical High School in Omaha, he attended Harvard University, financed partly by a scholarship from the Omaha World Herald.
Hartz graduated in 1940, spent a year traveling abroad on a fellowship, and returned to Harvard as a teaching fellow in 1942. He earned his doctorate in 1946 and became a full professor of government in 1956. Hartz was known at Harvard for his talented and charismatic teaching. He retired in 1974 because of ill health.
Hartz is best known for his classic book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), which presented a view of the United States’s past that sought to explain its conspicuous absence of ideologies. Hartz argued that American political development occurs within the context of an enduring, underlying Lockean liberal consensus, which has shaped and narrowed the landscape of possibilities for U.S. political thought and behavior. Hartz attributed the triumph of the liberal worldview in America, amongst other reasons, to:
its lack of a feudal past (and which would account for the absence of a struggle to overcome a conservative internal order);
its vast resources and open space;
the liberal values of the original settlers, who represented only a narrow middle-class slice of European society.
Hartz also wanted to explain the failure of socialism to become established in America, and he believed that Americans' pervasive, unthinking consensual acceptance of classic liberalism was the major barrier.
Hartz edited and wrote substantial sections of The Founding of New Societies (1964), wherein he developed and expanded upon his “fragment thesis.
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