Louis Hartz

Louis Hartz (April 8, 1919 – January 20, 1986) was an American political scientist, historian, and a professor at Harvard, where he taught from 1942 until 1974.

Hartz’s teaching and various writings —books and articles— have had an important influence on American political theory and comparative history.

Hartz was born in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, but grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.

After graduating from Technical High School in Omaha, he attended Harvard University, financed partly by a scholarship from the Omaha World Herald.

Horowitz's use and interpretation of Hartz has been influential in Canadian political theory, and was still being actively debated well into the 21st century.

In Australia, Hartz's fragment thesis "received respectful attention, but ... did not win assent or committed followers", according to historian John Hirst.

Hartz graduated in 1940, spent a year traveling abroad on a fellowship, and returned to Harvard as a teaching fellow in 1942.

He earned his doctorate in 1946 and became a full professor of government in 1956.

Hartz was known at Harvard for his talented and charismatic teaching.

Hartz is best known for his classic book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), which presented a view of the United States’s past that sought to explain its conspicuous absence of ideologies.

Hartz argued that American political development occurs within the context of an enduring, underlying Lockean liberal consensus, which has shaped and narrowed the landscape of possibilities for U.S. political thought and behavior.

Hartz attributed the triumph of the liberal worldview in America, amongst other reasons, to:

Hartz also wanted to explain the failure of socialism to become established in America, and he believed that Americans' widespread and generally consensual acceptance of classic liberalism was the major barrier.

In 1956, the American Political Science Association awarded Hartz its Woodrow Wilson Prize for The Liberal Tradition in America, and in 1977 gave him its Lippincott Prize, designed to honor scholarly works of enduring importance.

The book remains a key text in the political science graduate curriculum in American politics in universities today, in part because of the extensive, longrunning criticism and commentary that Hartz's ideas have generated.

Hartz edited and wrote substantial sections of The Founding of New Societies (1964), wherein he developed and expanded upon his “fragment thesis.” Hartz developed this thesis from the idea that those nations which originated as settler colonies are “fragments” of the original European nation that founded them.

Hartz called them fragments because these colonies, in a sense, froze the class structure and underlying ideology prevalent in the mother country at the time of their foundation and did not experience the further evolution experienced in Europe.

The Canadian context of Hartz's fragment thesis was disseminated and elaborated upon by Gad Horowitz, in the latter’s essay "Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation" (1966).

Hartz led a normal life until a sudden unexplained emotional disturbance changed his entire personality in 1971.

He refused all medical help.

He divorced in 1972, rejected all his friends, and feuded intensely with students, faculty and administrators.

In 1973, the Australian Economic History Review dedicated an issue to analysis of Hartz's theory.

He retired in 1974 because of ill health.

In 1974 he resigned from Harvard, but his scholarly skills and interests continued to remain strong.

It was applied to early colonial history by feminist historian Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda (1976), in which she traced gender relations in colonial New South Wales to the culture of the proletarian fragment identified by Hartz.

Hartz spent his last years living in London, New Delhi, New York City, then Istanbul, where he died of an epileptic seizure in January 1986.

He considered Latin America and French Canada to be fragments of feudal Europe; the United States, English Canada, and Dutch South Africa to be liberal fragments; and Australia and English South Africa to be "radical" fragments (incorporating the nonsocialist working class radicalism of Britain in the early 19th century).