Louis Hartz (1919–1986)

If I had to sum up the operative theory behind this work, it would be something like "social Hegelianism". Without referring to Hegel too often, it uses his ideas of dialectical thesis-antithesis-synthesis to look at how the European colonies in the Americas and around the world differ from the home countries due to a different set of internal drivers of change. That may sound somewhat abstruse, and it is, but even though this book isn't written as clearly as it could be, and it's greatly showing its age in terms of political analysis, it offers valuable perspective in terms of why nations settled by the same people have very different politics.

Put briefly, when the settler societies of the Americas were founded, they were often cut off in some essential way from the social processes that operated back home. Whereas France, for example, went through the Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Bourbon Restoration, the Second Empire, and so on, French Canada had certain cultural characteristics "baked in" at the era of settlement, and without a direct connection to the tumult of the home country after its conquest by the British, Quebec society became extremely conservative about aspects that the French themselves gradually modified or abandoned. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for England and its colonies, or Spain and its possessions, and so forth. Home countries are freer, in a way, to innovate and alter parts of their societies that colonies hold onto either out of a defensive sense of ethnic identity (e.g. the siege mentality of the Quebecois surrounded by the richer and more numerous Anglophones), or because of the demographic qualities of the founder population (e.g. the radicalism of the working-class settlers of Australia dramatically reducing the aristocratic character of England).

This basic idea has a lot of merit to it. The United States was not settled by a representative sample of the English population, and even if it had been, its different location subjected it to completely different external pressures that drove its internal social evolution. David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed specifically deals with the United States' four different major English founder populations and their enduring influence today, and it's obvious that the same quirks of settlement and divergences with the metropole are present in every country that was once a colony of another country. Just think what a comparison of the Greek colonies around the Mediterranean like Alexandria, Syracuse, Marseilles, or Troy to their home cities would have been like, or the current non-mainland Chinese diaspora.

The book has two main flaws. The first, which is not really its fault, is simply that it was published in 1964. Fifty years is a long time, and the seismic events of the late 60s, while by no means completely invalidating its arguments, place a lot of its rhetoric about the inherent conservativism of colonies in a peculiar light. In both Canada and the United States, the two example countries with which I'm most familiar, the Sixties meant vast amounts of upheaval both politically and socially, and so the book's points about cultural inertia can't help but feel refuted even if they're merely out of date. So get ready to read a lot about political issues that simply don't much enter into today's public consciousness, like feudalism or the various Whig parties, in addition to sweeping statements about national character that might not be totally accurate. Martin Luther King is mentioned once, glancingly.

The second, which is certainly its fault, is that the prose is often fairly opaque in that stuffy, long-winded postwar academic way, and jargony terms like "fragment theory" get tossed around without much in the way of formal model-building or clear definitions. This means that it's easy to get confused when you're trying to compare the postwar attempts to build welfare states - how does fragment theory help us compare or contrast Truman with Attlee or De Gaulle? Additionally, the authors' various literary pretensions occasionally get in the way being clear to the reader, so hopefully you're familiar with long-dead figures like Portales, Lastarria, Dorion, Papineau, or Fisher Ames or else you'll spend a lot of time googling to unpack some cross-country comparisons.

I would love to read another edition of this book that was more up to date, as well as more clearly written. Fischer's work remains the superior resource for understanding the origins of the US' development path, but a comparative perspective is always valuable, and Hartz & co's writing is intriguing from that standpoint.… (meer)

Although its broad interpretation of American politcal culture has been overturned, the book remains essential for an understanding of the development of American historical writing since World War II. Its thesis that American politics has been characterized from the outset by broad agreement on a practical tolerance (the liberal tradition) was not only foundational for the "consensus school" of historians, but a touchstone for two generations of social and cultural historians whose writing worked to challenge its dominance.… (meer)