Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America
Author:
- 2 September 1993
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in American Political Science Review
- Vol. 87 (3) , 549-566
Abstract
Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic “liberal democratic” society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870–1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.Keywords
This publication has 26 references indexed in Scilit:
- DuBois's “Double Consciousness”: Race and Gender in Progressive Era American ThoughtStudies in American Political Development, 1992
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life.1992
- Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native AmericansAmerican Indian Law Review, 1991
- Legitimating Slavery in the Old South: The Effect of Political Institutions on IdeologyStudies in American Political Development, 1991
- Periodization and Historiography: Studying American Political Development in the Progressive Era, 1890s–1916Studies in American Political Development, 1991
- The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political DiscourseJournal of American History, 1987
- Political Culture and American Political Development: Liberty, Union, and the Liberal BipolarityStudies in American Political Development, 1986
- III. Liberty and UnionPolitical Theory, 1984
- The Strange Career of Jim CrowThe Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1955
- The Aims of AnthropologyScience, 1895