Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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American political thought from

Jeffersonian republicanism to

progressivism

jame s p. young

1 Introduction

One of the peculiarities of nineteenth-century American political thought

is that it exists on a relatively low level of abstraction. There is no American

equivalent to Rousseau or Hegel or even John Stuart Mill. Of course all

important political theory has historically been related to the great events of

the time when it was produced. But though thinkers like Plato and Thomas

Hobbes were responding to contemporary politics, they still often relied

extensively on ontological, metaphysical or epistemological arguments in

trying to deal with them. But in nineteenth-century America the debates

over political ideas were as a rule conducted on a level much closer to day-

to-day political action, due perhaps to the fact that the polity was closer to

democracy than any other at the time. In any case, until after the Civil War

much of the most important work was produced by major political actors.

Even then, the t hought of academics like William Graham Sumner remained

fairly close to the ground. For much of the century, if one wants to explore

the nature of American political thought one turns to the same thinkers

who created the politics they theorised.

Therefore, methodologically one

must pay unusually close attention to ongoing political events if one is going

to understand the ideas surrounding them.

But this characteristic need not lead to the deprecation of American

political thought. One could argue, in common with such recent Amer-

ican theorists as Michael Walzer and Judith Shklar, that political ideas are

enhanced when conducted on a lower plane, not reaching far out of the Pla-

tonic cave and displaying a principled aversion to metaphysics (Walzer 1983,

p. xiv). Shklar’s position is well described by Rogers Smith. She distrusted

I would like to thank George Kateb, Carey McWilliams, Gregory Claeys, Gareth Stedman Jones,

Bob Harris, and Larry Berlin for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.

1 Of course this is much less true of the twentieth century.

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

‘metaphysical pretensions’ and found them to be ‘politically pernicious’.

Shklar studied political thought, Smith says, ‘chieﬂy as a way of revealing

the characteristic meaning that different political institutions, commitments,

and ways of life expressed and fostered’. Like Tocqueville, ‘she believed that

in America, more than anywhere else in world history, one could discover

the human fruits and perils of living within broadly democratic institu-

tions, trying to make them work, and trying to make sense of the lives

they shaped’. Shklar was sometimes less than enchanted with the results,

but she did think that American political thought contained many insights

into what democrats ‘can and cannot hope for’ (Smith 1993,p.188). Such

an approach provides a useful context within which to consider American

political ideas.

The nature and sources of the characteristic style of American thought

has been the subject of much spirited discussion. It has long been recognised

that liberalism occupies a central place in American thought and politics. My

own view of liberalism is that it is a rather loosely structured body of ideas

that stresses the right of putatively equal individuals to pursue their own

self-deﬁned interests within a framework that guarantees these rights and the

rights of other members of society. In 1948 Richard Hofstadter published

his paradigm-setting work, The American Political Tradition. In this revisionist

study, he rejected the reigning theory of American history dating back to the

progressive movement of the early twentieth century which saw a constant

battle between haves and have-nots, agrarian versus commercial interests,

Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians. Instead he saw a wide consensus embracing

these contestants. What bound Americans together was an ‘ideology of

self-help, free enterprise, competition, and beneﬁcent cupidity’, which, in

spite of all differences, led to a shared belief in ‘the rights of property, the

philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition . . . and an

acceptance of the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities

of man’. There was, said Hofstadter, ‘a strong bias in f avor of equalitarian

democracy, but it has been a democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy

of fraternity’ (Hofstadter 1973, pp. xxiii, xxix, xxx).

This is a theory of a

liberal American consensus that has the great merit of placing the values of

liberal capitalist political economy at its centre, where, I think, they properly

belong. The central, indeed virtually unchallenged, faith in capitalism is

2 For an interesting earlier discussion of this issue see Diamond 1957 and McCloskey 1957.

3 It should be noted that twenty year s later Hofstadter retreated from his emphasis on consensus

on the ground that it merely outlines the limits of conﬂict in American politics (Hofstadter 1968,

pp. 450–5). Even in this weakened form, the theory is a useful contribution.

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James P. Young

indeed a facet of what is often termed American ‘exceptionalism’. There

are other, and more controversial, dimensions to this term, but it is important

to insist on the validity of this aspect.

Equally notable, and more controversial, was the attempt to interpret

American thought and politics in Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in

America (1955). Combining Tocqueville with Marx, Hartz argued that,

since Americans were born equal rather than having to become so, as

Tocqueville had observed, they had escaped feudalism and had been born a

liberal capitalist nation (Tocqueville 1968,p.509).

In Hartz’s view, American thinkers were in the grip of an ‘irrational’

commitment to the thought of John Locke, taken as a symbol of middle-

class, liberal, capitalist individualism. The key to American thought was its

acceptance of ‘atomistic social freedom’, as its ‘master assumption’ (Hartz

1955,p.62). Hartz’s sense of Locke’s thought is not well developed, but

he certainly intended the notion to include some form of individualist,

rights-based, egalitarian democracy. This view of Locke is oversimpli-

ﬁed and it clearly cannot be made to account for everything in Ameri-

can political history. There are powerful currents of non-Lockean thought

in the American tradition. For example, Hartz ignored the inﬂuence of

seventeenth-century Calvinism, and, in f act, religion in general, always a

powerful force in American life and politics.

Moreover, eighteenth-century

variants of ancient republican thought were an inﬂuence as well, though

on this last point it must be said in his defence that he wrote before the

assertion of the importance of civic humanist republicanism by Bernard

Bailyn, J. G. A. Pocock and Gordon Wood (Bailyn 1992; Pocock 1975;

Wood 1969). Moreover, no theory of an overriding consensus can explain

the Civil War, which is, by any standard, the central event in American

history.

4 Some writers attribute to the United States a special historical mission, as in the P uritan idea of

the ‘city on a hill’, or see in American institutions the signs of providence working itself out in the

course of the national history. One need not endorse these conceptions of exceptionalism but still

see signiﬁcant differences between American ideas and practices and those of the rest of the world.

Kammen 1997 argues that ‘different’ is a better term than ‘exceptional’, since the latter suggests the

existence of a ‘norm’ from which the United States deviates. Without accepting this, he believes that

the United States is signiﬁcantly ‘different’, but that the differences become ‘less exceptional’ over

time. The literature is much too large to discuss here. For two good recent discussions see Kammen

1997 and Rodgers 1998b.

5 On religion generally see Morone 2003. The Puritans, who were neither democratic nor liberal,

historically preceded Lockean liberalism. On the complex relations between Puritanism and liberalism

see Young 1996,pp.13–21.

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

Still, in spite of the fact that the Puritans were by no means liberal, their

ideas contributed, even if unwittingly, to the emergence of an individu-

alistic, competitive capitalism and a belief in the rule of law, both closely

associated with liberalism (Young 1996,pp.13–21). Moreover, civic human-

ist republicanism never succeeded in dominating American thought to the

extent suggested by the more ardent proponents of the ‘republican synthe-

sis’ (Hulliung 2002). In addition, most supporters of the synthesis accept

that republicanism rapidly began to give way to a more completely liberal

political culture as the nineteenth century dawned; the only real question

is when the dominance of liberalism was established. Puritanism and civic

republicanism are still limitations on the theory of liberal domination, to

which must be added the continued and even more important presence of

a set of ascribed race and gender characteristics that undermine the the-

ory of a dominant liberalism and often led to sharp conﬂict (Smith 1997,

pp. 13–39 passim). And surely Shklar is right to point out that as long as

slavery existed, America was neither liberal nor democratic, though she

concedes that institutions were in place that were ‘capable of becoming so

and to an unequaled degree’ (Shklar 1991,p.92). However, if the early

triumph of liberalism in American politics cannot account for everything,

it can explain a great deal, in particular the failure of any signiﬁcant socialist

movement to take hold in the political culture, which was a major concern

for Hartz. Any full theory of this peculiarity of American history must take

into account a range of other factors including immigration, racial and eth-

nic conﬂict, the nature of the party system, and the relative success of the

capitalist economic system, but the depth of the liberal tradition is certainly

a major factor (Lipset and Marx 2000). And if socialism has failed in the

United States, traditional conservatism has not fared much better. What else

could be expected in a nation whose ‘ofﬁcial’ ideology is liberal? Reinhold

Niebuhr was not far from the mark when he commented that American

conservatism is ‘nothing more than a decadent liberalism’ (Niebuhr 1961,

p. 34).

During the 1960s, the high level of social and political conﬂict weak-

ened acceptance of the theory of liberal consensus, as did the discovery of

the ‘republican synthesis’. In his comprehensive interpretation of Amer i-

can political thought Russell Hanson (1985) focused on democracy more

than on liberalism, while Judith Shklar rejected the theory of liberal domi-

nance (Shklar 1998,esp.p.92). But in one version or another, particularly

among social scientists and political theorists, the theory of a liberal ideol-

ogy has been strongly reasserted in much recent scholarship. Wilson Carey

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James P. Young

McWilliams (1973) stresses the centrality of enlightenment liberalism, while

ﬁnding, below the surface so to speak, a tradition stemming from Puritanism

and nineteenth-century literature which is critical of liberal individualism.

J. David Greenstone (1993) also found a dominant liberalism, though a body

of ideas much more complex than what Hartz described. Isaac Kramnick

(1990) sees a mixture of ideas in the founding period, but his concept of

bourgeois radicalism is advanced as part of a critique of the republican syn-

thesis and leaves pride of place to liberalism. And with no little regret the

historian John Diggins (1984, 2000) repudiates the republican synthesis in

rather harsh terms. One of the strongest restatements of the theory of liberal

consensus, though oddly without reference to Hartz, comes from Michael

Zuckert (1996) who pushes civic republicanism into the background and

argues that the United States is a natural rights republic, stemming from

Locke by way of Jefferson. And more recently Mark Hulliung has argued

that in the United States ‘liberalism, not republicanism, is the master word

in our political vocabulary’, though he also, like Rogers Smith, ﬁnds a

‘deeply ingrained illiberalism’ in the American tradition (Hulliung 2002,

pp. 160, 183). Recent scholarship makes it clear that liberalism, though not

the only tradition in American thought, is certainly central, especially in

the nineteenth century.

The idea of consensus is not popular today and, at

present, is arguably crumbling, but as Clifford Geertz suggests, it is possible

to have ‘identity without unison’ (Geertz 2000,p.225). After all, demo-

cratic politics is about disputes and their resolution. Thus, consensus theory

should not be taken to mean that there is no conﬂict within the consensus.

Sheldon Wolin is right to argue that ‘This is the basic dilemma of politi-

cal judgments: how to create a common rule in a context of differences?’

(Wolin 2004,p.56). And, as Geertz asks, ‘What is a culture if not a consen-

sus?’ (Geertz 2000,p.224 and pp. 224–31 passim). In a different terminology,

this discussion points to a ‘collective identity’ (Wolin 1989,p.140), a set of

‘shared understandings, that shape American politics’ (Walzer 1983,p.xiv;

6 Cf. also Young 1996. There I also consider the complex fate of the tradition in the twentieth century.

See also Block 2003. This is an important study that appeared too late for me to consider fully. It

is likely to be the subject of much discussion and debate. The major recent attempt to reinterpret

the American political tradition in civic republican or communitarian terms is Sandel 1996.While

important and provocative, this study is unconvincing. Sandel basically ignores the Declaration of

Independence, which is a fatal ﬂaw by itself. Cf. Hulliung 2002,p.184. Hulliung argues that whatever

the intent of Bailyn and Wood, they have often provided inspiration for New Left, neo-conser vative

and communitarian critics of the liberal tradition (cf. p. xi).

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

cf. Young 1996,pp.1–2).

In the nineteenth century, perhaps more than

today, the liberal tradition, though constantly changing, serves, as suggested

above, as an ‘ofﬁcial’ ideology which can, and sometimes has, functioned

as the basis for a critique of the frequent deviations from that tradition.

What can be done here is to sketch an outline of the mainstream of the

liberal consensus, particularly as related to the seminal thought of Thomas

Jefferson, while giving some consideration to its main challengers.

2 Jeffersonian republicanism

To understand Jeffersonian politics, it is necessary to offer a brief sketch

of the political and constitutional situation at the time of his election in

1800. If we accept Abraham Lincoln’s word, the beginning of American

national history is signiﬁed by the Declaration of Independence of 1775.

The Declaration, with its insistence on the equality of all men and its indi-

vidualistic assertion of natural rights, notably ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit

of happiness’, is clearly liberal and essentially democratic by implication,

though it is clear that to its principal author ‘men’ meant white men

and not women, blacks or Native Americans. Jefferson had no thought

of extending those democratic implications to members of these groups.

And, since the Declaration says nothing about institutions, it needed to

be supplemented by a constitution. The constitution framed in 1787 is

also a liberal document reﬂecting a deep distrust of the powers of the

state in its elaborate institutional devices designed to make decision-making

extremely difﬁcult without wide-ranging support. The original document

contained a signiﬁcant set of rights, mostly unavailable elsewhere at the time,

prohibiting bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, requiring jury trials, carefully

7 This linkage should not obscure the fact that there are signiﬁcant differences between Wolin and

Walzer.

8 For the concept of ‘ofﬁcial’ as used here see Miller 1993,p.209. He suggests that the ofﬁcial claims a

privileged position for itself whether its description of a society’s values and norms is accurate or not.

It claims legitimacy and is often aspirational. It may sometimes be complacent, but it is more than just

a sham: ‘The ofﬁcial represents those kinds of public statements in which a culture images itself, and

as such it bears no small role in reproducing the culture that produces such ofﬁcial discourses.’ What

I suggest here is the sort of ‘connected criticism’ theorised in Walzer 1988. For another, not very

optimistic example, see Smith 1996. Of course someone who ﬁnds the ‘shared understandings’ of the

liberal tradition to be inadequate could argue that this form of political criticism is likewise inadequate

because it fails the test of universalisation. Walzer attempts to answer this criticism by contrasting

the thick description based on local understandings with a ‘thinner’ theory carrying higher level

meanings which are closer t o universal norms and those I have called ofﬁcial. Cf. Walzer 1994,esp.

pp. 1–20.

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James P. Young

deﬁning treason, banning religious tests for public ofﬁce, limiting the exec-

utive’s war power, etc. These rights were expanded by the adoption of the

Bill of Rights shortly after ratiﬁcation of the constitution, which included

rights of free speech and press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly,

a due process of law and fair trial guarantee, bans on self-incrimination,

double jeopardy, excessive bail, ﬁnes, and cruel and unusual punishment

(Kateb 2003,pp.585–6).

But the constitution fell short on a number of

liberal and democratic criteria. First, it tacitly accepted slavery, in violation

of any theory of natural rights, while at the same time counting three-ﬁfths

of all slaves in apportioning congressional representation among the states,

thus giving disproportionate power to the slave-holding southern states.

As Abraham Lincoln remarked in 1854, ‘The slaves do not vote; they are

only counted and so used as to swell the inﬂuence of the white people’s

votes’ (Lincoln 1989a, p. 331). There was no right to vote as such, with the

suffrage requirements being left to the states, nor was there any question

of women, African-Americans or Native Americans having the suffrage.

(In fairness, it should be added that such groups were not allowed to vote

anywhere else either.)

The President was chosen indirectly by an Elec-

toral College rather than by direct popular vote, and the Senate was initially

elected by state legislatures, again without a direct popular vote. All states

were given two votes in the Senate, thus giving another disproportion-

ate grant of power, this time to states with small populations. Moreover,

a complex and not very well-deﬁned separation of powers between the

legislative, executive and judicial branches made majority decision-making

very difﬁcult and the distribution of power between the nation and the states

was, if anything, even less well-deﬁned, a fact that contributed to the Civil

War and which continues to be a subject of contention to this day.

This

open-ended character of the constitution, the fact that its authors agreed

on the text but not the meaning of the document, makes it, as Sheldon

Wolin has argued, an invitation to hermeneutical politics (Wolin 1989,p.3).

And, as Abraham Lincoln under stood, one of the fundamental American

political problems is to reconcile the tensions between the Declaration of

9 There has even been a systematic interpretation of the constitution as a libertarian document with a

natural rights base, though it should be treated with caution. See Barnett 2004;cf.Lazarus2004.

10 The extent to which white males were entitled to vote is unclear and varied from state to state. The

suffrage was no doubt higher than in Britain at the same time. See Keyssar 2000,p.7.

11 Dahl 2003,pp.15–18. For a less institutional, more theoretical, critique see Wolin 1981,pp.9–24

and 1989,esp.pp.82–117.

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

Independence and the constitution.

In spite of these tensions, and with

some reservations, Jefferson accepted the constitution and its rather more

conservative theoretical justiﬁcation in the Federalist Papers whose principal

authors were his friend James Madison and his despised enemy Alexander

Hamilton (Jefferson 1984,pp.914–18, 479, 1176).

Jeffersonian liberalism is absolutely central to nineteenth-century Ameri-

can thought and politics. Whatever weight we might attach to the theory of

civic humanist republicanism as a force during the colonial and revolution-

ary periods, those ideas, without quite disappearing, rapidly receded into

the background with the dawn of the new century and Jefferson’s ascent

to the presidency. The society that emerged from the founding period was

individualistic, commercial, interest oriented, rapidly expanding in popu-

lation and territory, and on the road to liberalism and democracy, though

neither was close to full achievement (Appleby 2000; Wood 1992). The only

real issue is the question of precisely when this change occurred. A new

sense of national identity began to develop, though because of the sectional

divide over slave versus free labour, these characteristics gave liberalism a

strong northern cast (Appleby 2000,pp.239–66). Jefferson represented many

of these tendencies and his succession to the presidency, by undermining,

though not dissolving, the link between social and political power, fore-

closed the possibility of an entrenched upper-class Federalist elite controlling

the political system (Appleby 1984,p.104, 2000,p.6).

This transition took place peacefully, though not without danger of seri-

ous disruption. The leaders of the founding generation were a combative lot

and t here were deep personal rivalries among them. Only George Washing-

ton stood more or less above the battle. The other leaders of the founding

period often displayed ﬁerce personal antagonism to one another and the

emergence of a competitive political party system during the 1790stestiﬁed

to the growing tensions (Davis 2001,pp.165–77; Elkins and McKitrick

1993; Ellis 2000; Silbey 1999).

Richard Hofstadter was doubtless right

to claim that the crisis of 1794–1801 was ‘at least as real and decisive for

12 Wo l i n 1981 emphasises the tension between the Declaration of Independence and the constitution.

Cf. esp. 11–19.

13 In spite of Jefferson’s claim that the election of 1800 was a triumph of democracy, it has been alleged

that Jefferson won because of the extra electoral strength he drew from the three-ﬁfths clause noted

above. See Wills 2003,esp.pp.1–4. For a harsh critique of Wills see Wilentz 2004.

14 Silbey 1999 is an excellent collection of sources illustrating nineteenth-century ideological struggles,

often vituperative, but within the liberal capitalist framework.

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James P. Young

the early union as that which had been successfully passed in the 1780s’

(Hofstadter 1969, p. xi).

Jefferson himself was seen as a dangerous man by his Federalist opponents,

yet when the election of 1800 ended in an electoral vote tie between

Jefferson and Aaron Burr, the Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton put

aside his dislike and distrust of Jefferson and sided with him against Burr, thus

swinging the decision in the House of Representatives in Jefferson’s favour.

As Hamilton, writing to James A. Bayard, gauged Jefferson’s character, he

rightly saw that his rival would not be violent, but would be inclined to

temporise rather than risk his popularity by undermining the new political

system (Hamilton 2001,pp.977–8; cf. Hofstadter 1969,pp.134–40).

At least on the surface, Jefferson seemed to go out of his way to foster

harmony and put the Federalist opposition at ease. In his Inaugural Address,

Jefferson put on the mask of a consensual leader. ‘But every difference of

opinion is not a difference of principle’, he intoned. ‘We are all Republican,

we are all Federalists’ (Jefferson 1984,p.493). However, this conciliatory

language ought not to be taken quite at face value. Writing to Judge Spencer

Roane in 1819, Jefferson claimed that the election of 1800 was ‘as real a

revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in

its form’ (Jefferson 1984,p.1425). Or, as he put it more bluntly in an

1802 letter, ‘I shall . . . by the establishment of republican principles . . . sink

federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection for it’

(Elkins and McKitrick 1993,p.754). Doubtless this was closer to his true

feeling than was his public rhetoric. As Henry Adams wrote, ‘He wished to

soothe the great body of his opponents, and if possible to win them over;

but he had no idea of harmony or affection other than that which was to

spring from his own further triumph; and in saying that he was in any sense

a Federalist, he did himself a wrong.’ In Adams’ understanding, ‘The two

parties were divided by a bottomless gulf in their theories of Constitutional

powers’ (Adams 1986,p.136,p.140).

Jefferson’s thought is of great importance in the histor y of American

political culture because his ideas were sufﬁciently diffuse to be able to give

aid and comfort to a wide range of opposed political positions. This is partly

due to the fact that he did not have anything like a uniﬁed political theory,

in addition to which his actions frequently were in ﬂagrant contradiction

to his thoughts. He was a man full of ideas, but they did not coalesce into a

single, systematic, coherent form. He wrote only one book, the Notes on the

State of Virginia, and much of that deals with non-political matters. Aside

from that, we have a brief fragmentary autobiography, his state paper s and

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

a huge mass of letters. But his very lack of system makes it all the easier

for a wide range of Americans to draw on Jefferson and create an icon to

their own liking (cf. Peterson 1960).

The issues he raised are so central to

much of the subsequent thought and politics of the nineteenth century and

beyond that he requires special attention.

At the foundation of Jefferson’s beliefs are two ideas. One was the belief in

self-evident natural rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.

The inﬂuence of John Locke seems evident in his famous language about

the self-evident truth of a right to pursue ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness’. Judith Shklar is surely right to remark that, for all his confu-

sions and the deeply troubling departures from his principles, particularly

regarding slavery, he will be remembered as he wanted to be. ‘This is the

man who put human rights on the map forever’ (Shklar 1984,p.35). And

whatever we think of Jefferson’s apparent hypocrisy, the Declaration is at

the heart of what I have called the ‘ofﬁcial’ American ideology and as such

has real force. On this foundation of natural rights Jefferson built a large

syllogism in which the middle term is made up of a sometimes unfair series

of charges against George III, leading to the conclusion that the colonies

must declare their separation from the Crown (cf. Becker 1958). None of

this is terribly original nor did Jefferson claim it to be so. As he wrote in

a letter late in his life, his object was ‘not to ﬁnd out new principles’, ‘but

to place before mankind the common sense of the subject’ (Jefferson 1984,

p. 1501). The importance of the Declaration lay instead in its rhetorical

power, which fully justiﬁes Shklar’s encomium.

A second major key to Jefferson’s thought is a certain restlessness, an

impatience with any status quo, which is arguably an American characteris-

tic. This is clear in his frequent statement of the idea that ‘the earth belongs

to the living’, so that decisions of earlier generations have no binding force

(Jefferson 1984,pp.953, 963, 1401–2, 1493–4; cf. Matthews 1984,pp.19–

29). And pursuing the same line of thought, he advanced what Shklar rightly

called the truly ‘daft’ proposal there could be no perpetual constitution or

15 Jefferson’s reputation has declined sharply since Peterson wrote due to a renewed focus on his slave-

holding with its attendant hypocrisy and the now quite generally accepted evidence that he fathered

children by his slave Sally Hemmings. Cf. Onuf 1993a, 1993b. For a spirited rebuttal which admits

Jefferson’s ﬂaws but insists on his greatness see Wilentz 2004.

16 Pauline Maier debunks Jefferson’s claim to be the author of the Declaration of Independence and

stresses the extensive editing of his work by the Continental Congress. This seems part of the general

tendency to downgrade Jefferson’s achievements. On the other hand, Michael Zuckert argues that

the crucial phrases on natural rights are in Jefferson’s original draft. Cf. Maier 1997 and Zuckert

1998. Zuckert seems clearly correct.

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