American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

position” under a “veil of ignorance” about how well they would fare in the new society, economically and in social status. The liberal Rawls posited that these hypothetically contracting individuals would place surpassing value on liberty and equality, via limited constitutional government by consent committed to the appropriate guarantees for individual rights. Rawls argued, broadly speaking, moreover, that in addition to securing these foundational guarantees, individuals operating behind a veil of ignorance would insist that the new political order be just, with what is just defined as what is fair (“justice as fairness”). This, Rawls argued, entailed not simply a commitment to maximizing individual liberty (so long as that liberty did not infringe upon the equal liberty of others – Mill’s “harm principle”). It further entailed a certain level of distributive justice – a floor, guaranteed by the liberal state, that set limits to the level of economic and social status inequality. Rawls enlisted the “minimax” principle (minimizing the maximum possible loss) in specifying how his theory of justice would ensure the realization of basic individual freedoms and equal opportunity of access to offices and positions. In this way, his liberalism sought to model a just political order that offered the fullest possible commitment to liberty and equality (equal rights to basic liberties), under conditions of universal access to power consistent with the full civic membership of free and equal citizens. This liberalism, unlike Locke’s, provided a clear justification for the modern redistributive (liberal) social welfare state.

      For her part, Judith Shklar (1928–1992), a Harvard political scientist, argued, at least implicitly, that Rawls’s grand theoretical bid for an intricately constructed systematic liberalism in A Theory of Justice (and his other books offering refinements of his initial model) was perhaps a bit illiberal in its totalizing ambitions. Informed by her direct encounters with the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, including Nazism and Stalinism, Shklar, a Latvian-Jewish refugee, eschewed efforts to forge grand systems. Ever alert to the menace of overwrought utopian ambitions – even in pursuit of ostensibly noble ends – Shklar’s liberalism spent less time positing first principles, and then constructing an elaborate theory of government on those foundations, than focusing our attention on attending to the greatest danger and problem in collective life: human cruelty. Putting “cruelty first” entailed what Shklar called a “liberalism of fear.” Such a liberalism was decidedly non-perfectionist – it held to a (seemingly) modest, but firm, commitment to the project of staving off, to the maximum extent possible in an imperfect world, the greatest ravages and evils of human societies.

While retaining the schematic ambitions of Hartz, and retaining his emphasis on the importance of liberalism, two frameworks of American political thought with ties to the University of Chicago posited the thought tradition of the United States as essentially plural, and contested. The University of Chicago political scientist J. David Greenstone (1937–1990) accepted Hartz’s thesis about the predominance of liberalism in the United States. Greenstone, however, rejected Hartz’s view that this had entailed an American “consensus” – to a one-dimensional hegemonically liberal political culture. Where Hartz had posited widespread and reflexive agreement among Americans, Greenstone found a history of political conflict. Taking Abraham Lincoln’s thought as his point of entry, Greenstone proposed that, if one looked at the nation’s actual politics over the long term, one could discern two different and distinguishable (“bipolar”) liberalisms that were offered in opposition to each other in contests for political power. One emphasized “negative liberty,” or freedom from coercion by government. The other promised “positive liberty,” or the purposive and affirmative direction of public power to expand the scope of individual freedom, in a practical, real-world sense, in everyday life. This concrete contestation over the meaning of liberty, with divergent views over the legitimacy of the enlistment of government power to achieve it, Greenstone argued, was a defining feature of American politics.

      Although he wrote almost nothing about American political thought, the German-Jewish émigré University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) sired a line of scholars who came to write extensively about American political thought from a “Straussian” perspective. Contemporary Straussians – a mostly conservative cohort – have their own distinctive take on, idioms concerning, and disputes over the nature of the American political “regime.” In Natural Right and History (1953), Strauss drew a fundamental distinction between the “ancients” and the “moderns” in political thought. The former, he argued, were devoted to understandings of political communities as committed to knowing and, in turn, pursuing the highest substantive philosophical ideals of truth, virtue, and justice. The latter, Strauss argued, as exemplified by Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, in formulating their theories of political life, set these normatively desirable philosophical ideals to the side, and focused their attention instead on the “low but solid” goal of establishing social peace among members of a polity, who, in the nature of things, disagreed about the content of those ideas, and, indeed, had a tendency to go to war over them. While the ancients, one might say, believed that politics was about truth, virtue, and justice, the moderns believed it was about self-preservation and self-interest.

      Liberalism is an instantiation, par excellence, of the modern view. Its theory of the social contract posits a Hobbesian (or, somewhat more benignly, a Lockean) unsafe – if not dog-eat-dog – state of nature. It then theorizes a contractual agreement that brackets any questions concerning hotly disputed substantive ideals. On these the parties to the contract agree to disagree, and move forward. They create a government that preserves the individual’s right to follow his or her own understandings of what he or she believes those ideas entail and require (“liberal neutrality”).

Strauss mourned the transition of western societies from the ancient understandings to the modern ones as a falling off. It involved, in important ways, a civilizational decline, entailing the abandonment of the pursuit of the highest human ideals in favor of the more grubby and delimited. At the same time, however, Strauss seemed to suggest at various points that this movement toward modernity may have been inevitable. It may even have had some distinct advantages, though this was far from clear. One virtue liberal modernity did have, however, was that it was far from pristine. There were cracks in the pavement through which flowers could bloom. A commitment to the pursuit of the highest ideals in the modern world was retained, for instance, in classic education in the liberal arts (chiefly the “Great Books” of western thought). It was also retained in the teachings of what Straussians have called “revealed religion.” To the extent that we in the modern world were willing to study and construct our institutions to invite, to the extent possible, the salubrious influence of Athens (standing for reason) and Jerusalem (standing for revelation), we might be able to construct a morally and philosophically admirable and decent polity.

      Most Straussians writing about American political thought adopted a self-consciously (and, some would say, unduly self-aggrandizing) patriotic stance toward the American polity, although they do not all think about it in the same way. Some, in implicit agreement with Louis Hartz, consider the United States an essentially modern, liberal (and, perhaps, bourgeois and commercial) polity. And they do not hesitate to pass judgment on the political regime. Straussians do not believe that one can separate positive from normative political analysis, in the way that most contemporary social scientists do. They either believe that it is good that the United States is liberal and modern, or they believe that, felicitously, in conjunction with its continuing commitment to normatively desirable non-liberal institutions inside the overarching liberal order (e.g. belief in God; loyalty to family and country; and commitment to traditional [natural] hierarchies), the US regime is worthy of full assent, and possibly even celebration, as the best possible political regime under modern conditions. These Straussians, however, are ever alert to the threats posed to these institutions by the country’s secular liberals, who, as they see it, have waged war against them. For their part, other Straussians either challenge the foundational liberalism of the American political regime, such as by emphasizing republican themes (though they rarely declare themselves as simply proponents of republicanism as against liberalism), or by promoting the religious commitments of the American people and the religious (often Christian) grounding of the American political experiment. Alternatively, some Straussians reimagine liberalism, in the United States, at least, along lines that reject the