This paper compares and contrasts two ruminations on the American experience. The first, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, looks at the uniqueness of American history through the concept of the nation's liberal tradition, while the second, Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom, examines the changing meanings of freedom throughout history. Both try to consider the uniqueness of the American experience through the prism of the word they have chosen as most useful to an examination of history. Both words are variations on the same approach, an attempt to consider American history by looking at one key concept that has shaped that history and been influenced by it.
Louis Hartz first published The Liberal Tradition in America in 1955, during the heart of the Cold War. His exploration of the word "liberal" is, therefore, written during a time before its meaning had evolved into a more pejorative term. He is, in fact, using the word in one of its older senses, "the classic Lockian sense" (4), that of an openness to political, religious, and economic freedom. This was the general sense of the word when the nation was founded, before it became "clouded as it is by all sorts of modern social reform connotations" (4).
"Liberal" has become something of a negative label, one that often accuses its followers of a sloppy disregard for social responsibility and tries to provide government solutions for situations that ought to instead be taken care of on an individual level. "Liberal" has come to connote those who go against the idea of the American Dream, in which the pursuit of happiness is promised but in which happiness itself is up to the individual to actually achieve or avoid. The original concepts on which the nation was founded were liberal in the oldest, most classic sense of the word; in recent times, the word has come to mean virtually the complete opposite.
The 1991 edition includes an introduction ...