Description
Book SynopsisLouis Hartz is best known for his classic study, The Liberal Tradition in America. At Harvard University, his lecture course on nineteenth-century politics and ideologies was memorable. Through the editorial hand of Paul Roazen, we can now share the experience of Hartz's considerable contributions to the theory of politics.
At the root of Hartz's work is the belief that revolution is not produced by misery, but by pressure of a new system on an old one. This approach enables him to explain sharp differences in revolutionary traditions. Because America essentially was a liberal society from its beginning and had no need for revolutions, America also lacked reactionaries, and lacked a tradition of genuine conservatism characteristic of European thought.
In lectures embracing Rousseau, Burke, Comte, Hegel, Mill, and Marx among others, Hartz develops a keen sense of the delicate balance between the role of the state in both enhancing and limiting personal freedom. H
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Benjamin R. Barber
Introduction, by Paul Roazen
Part I: The Revolutionary Background
1 Origins
2 The Religious Problem
3 The Economic Question
4 Culture and Tradition: Condorcet
5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau
6 Rousseau and Our Constructive Problem
Part II: Reaction and Authoritarianism
7 The Setting
8 Romanticism
9 Edmund Burke
10 Joseph de Maistre
11 Louis de Bonald
12 Auguste Comte
13 Georg W. F. Hegel
14 A Free Society and Its Relation to the State
Part III: Liberalism
15 The Problem of Industrial Society
16 Bentham's Utilitarianism
17 John Stuart Mill
18 Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard
19 Benjamin Constant
20 Italy and Mazzini
21 Historic Success and Failure
Part IV: Socialism
22 Robert Owen
23 Francois Fourier
24 Karl Marx
Conclusion
Index
