18 III 2008
An interesting observation that Louis Hartz in his Liberal Tradition in America that shares with Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” is liberalism’s capacity for absolutism. Hartz notes that the American form of liberal absolutism lies with the mentality of “self-evident truth”, a fundamental basis of the 1776 revolution. Echoing Tocqueville, Hartz points out that American liberalism has never undergone a revolution in the European sense; it does not need to free itself from a preexisting order, manifested economically in feudal structure and politically in authoritarian monarchism (35). Hence, while the Europeans created the enlightenment project out of dialectical necessity against intolerance of its time and have their liberalism always a notion whose every advance is made through antithesis and synthesis from a conservative other, Americans need not face such ghost: its adaptation of enlightenment ideal in the form of the Lokean natural law is wholesale and natural, while the advance of liberalism faces no real conservative forces for its own self-reflection (58). Because America lacks a Hume-like figure to attack on natural law, it becomes indeed “self-evident”, the absolutist language in describing a set of beliefs forced onto an entire people. Hence, as Hartz states the mood of America’s absolutism is “the sober faith that its norms are self-evident”—and, with neither a critical tradition in dialectics and an economic-political need to do so, “the American absolutism, flowing from an honest experience with universality, lacked even the passion that doubt might give… it was so sure of itself that it hardly needed to become articulate, so secure that it could actually support a pragmatism which seemed on the surface to belie it” (58-59). Thus, a set of belief characterized as liberalism, ironically, is itself capable of oppression if it fails to examine the very root of its origins, and impose its ideology as an unconditionally accepted norm for an entire people—as Hartz puts it, “America’s experience of being born equal has put it in a strange relationship to the rest of the world” (66).
The absolutist tendency evident in Hartz’s characterization of American liberal tradition resembles Berlin’s criticism against the notion of positive freedom. Berlin distinguishes positive freedom from negative freedom, “a certain minimum area of personal freedom which must on no account be violated”, to categorize it as something that “derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master” (19, 22). This desire, however, is itself capable of oppression because the metaphor of self-mastery requires the distinction between lower and “real” self (23). Such distinction urges one to realize his own “real” self, and then from there, assign himself the role of a crusader who attempts to “free” others (24). By attributing reality to oneself through positive freedom, one gains a moral advantage even in coercion, for one claims that he knows better than others what others need, and that “they would not resist [him if they were rational and as wise as [he and understood their interests as [he does]” (24). The very liberal task of liberation, then, is itself capable of the worst kind of oppression. Hartz’s description of absolutist element in American liberalism reflects exactly this error of positive freedom: the enlightenment minded liberals, epitomized by well-versed Lokean Jefferson, acts and thinks for the entire American colonies that the freedoms they uphold are “self-evident” by nature. In this process, Locke’s particular endorsement of the natural law becomes a natural ideology beyond criticism; and, as the worst form of absolutism, it dominates man’s thought and welcomes no critique of its fundamental premises.
Although Hartz’s explanation of absolutist tendency in American liberalism describes the condition of American thought in its inception, it can be used to further analyze many distinctive American tendencies to reveal a distinctly American character. The red scare of Senator McCarthy, for example, clearly demonstrates this point: the notion of freedom and democracy should seem so “self-evident” that its opposite should be shunned and condemned as “un-American” betrayal. But perhaps we can find the traces of this absolutism-liberalism dialectics in the most profound American concerns in the period: the notion of autonomy and concerns of humanistic psychology—conformism is clearly a problem against the liberal tradition so that, “self-evidently”, everyone should have a normative autonomy in his mindset, or find a most suitable way to be himself. We must not forget, then, the very root of Berlin’s positive freedom is no different: the desire to be his own master. In each of these tendencies, the absolutist tendency in liberalism is latent, ready to manifest itself unless we always examine liberalism and its origins from a critical, dialectical perspective.
