essay outlines

Prompt 1:
What is American exceptionalism and how might one go about defending its claims?

What does exceptionalism entail?
- That the American revolution was the first of its kind (Hannah Arrent's synthesis)
- That America is a great nation today because of its staunchly liberal roots (Hartz)
- Did not have a long history of violent uprisings and did not have to endure a class struggle. Relatively homogenous population and largely living in conformity to Protestant ideals

How would one attack exceptionalism?
- The American revolution was largely conservative and nothing new to the world (Jefferson's admission that those were common sense)
- Americans do not realize they are not truly free but are living an illusion of it (Gerstle? Or Kloppenberg)
- A lack of a violent past does not a nation make.
- A homogenous population is the source of factions and strife

How would one defend these claims?
- Even in its conservative roots, the revolutionaries were envisioning a new nation free of monarchy, and this exceptionalism manifests itself in the great revolt against the UK
- Regardless of whether they are truly free or not, liberty is a quality of nationhood that is created over time
- This claim needs more unpacking
- Pitting traditional liberalism (right to property, life etc) vs socialist liberalism is not the end of the story, here lies a government for the collective good of the people, with all the necessary institutions in place (party politics, Jacksonian checks and balances???, progressives' emphasis on states rights)

Prompt 2: 
Is it compatible that the American revolutionaries fought for Republican ideals and that the US today remains solidly entrenched in a liberal tradition?

Certain characteristics of the founders' republicanism are compatible with Louis Hartz's liberalism but looking beyond Hartz, liberalism also encompasses conflicting strains of thought, based on differing start-state assumptions like how one views the fundamental state of human nature, power, and the events surrounding the revolution itself. How one conceives of the American liberal tradition therefore determines its affinity to Republican ideals.

Characteristics of Republicanism:
Republicanism has many core tenets. One is the virtuous representative leader to whom we must submit. How do liberals reconcile with this if their goal is to be suspicious of all authority? If they argue that everyone is capable of self-rule, if they reject even representative authority, then they must accept the other premise of republicanism, the idea that self-virtue is necessary for a populist state to survive. Citizens must be virtuous and capable of limiting their own excessions to be truly free. Only when this state is achieved will citizens achieve the "true liberty" that Wood claimed.

Start-state conditions:
The tradition of revolutionary thought derived from Locke claims all men are endowed with a divine right to liberty. Thus endowed, in a diverse society they would have to fight for that right and, following the Marxist tradition, eventually progress beyond class warfare to a virtuous, socialist and very much Republican way of life. Hartz argues that Americans were born free and without class struggle, and in my view, the implications of his theory is that the new nation's ideal form of government would then have ensure this continued preservation of liberty in such a unique state of nature. To this end, staunch republicans may claim to provide the very infrastructure that gives them the ability to exercise these freedoms. Without virtue at the helm, men would exist in a state of "war, rapine and murder". Yet what follows from these ideas, has to be the purest form of republicanism, which is that all life in the state is public property and belongs to the country(Samuel Adams), i.e. the obliteration of the individual(Gordon Wood), as the ideal state of society.

Hartz's critics can potentially expose the fallacies behind this "dilemma". One of their contentions were that America was not classless because it had a different kind of class struggle. The kinds of social antagonisms that threatened liberal traditions in Europe were different from the institutions of slavery and minority oppression that Americans actually took for granted. Taking the critics' views into account, the only way to reconcile this paradoxical liberal tradition and the thriving of state power under republican principles, is that Americans were living in an illusion of freedom propagated by a staunchly republican government claiming to be acting in accordance with the original intentions of the Founders. The people subconsciously associated such rhetoric with having successfully achieved an ideal state of liberty and equality, and never woke up from that dream.

Positive and negative liberty:
If liberty means licentiousness and right to revolution, then liberty enables power, and power, according to Samuel Adams, is "intoxicating in its nature", and corrupts. Negative liberty rests on the idea that preservation of liberty requires that we maintain checks on those in power. In this view, Republican idealists may feel that the virtuous leader is "tainted" by the need for checks and balances. If liberty were conceived as a source of power itself, then Republican institutions will be seen as institutions that keep checks on liberty and not as agents to achieve individual liberty.

Conclusion:
I argued that republican ideology was, in the founders' view, the ideal apparatus for preserving the American liberal tradition from the beginning, but involving a specific, idealistic conception of liberalism where virtue and self-restraint was exercised by the state to ensure equality and liberty for all. While the revolutionaries conceived of this tradition because they were mainly reacting against a power they thought was corrupt and unrepresentative of the American people's vital interests, it took writers like Bernard Bailyn who was looking at the factious history of England, and James Madison who was looking beyond this narrowly conceived tradition of liberty, to see the limits of antiquated notions of virtue and argue that the homogenous and disinterested populace that Republican ideology mandates are not possible in reality, and that as long as self-interest exists, the problem of factions always arises. Freedom for all is not always attainable; freedom must be fought for and to preserve that freedom, power vested in the hands of government must be constantly kept in check. Therefore in the real world, especially at the point when Americans put the revolution behind them and turned their attention to matters of nation building and identity, the main source of conflict of these Republican ideals with the unique liberal tradition that Americans had inherited, was their antiquity and their inapplicability to a nation fully embracing of a meritocratic and capitalist tradition, ie a large body politic of ultimately self-interested citizens. Despite this, I argue that however much the post-revolutionary liberal tradition has changed since Louis Hartz's interpretation, the fact that they put in place a comprehensive system of "un-Republican" checks and balances, and continue to do so, is to me a sign that they continue to have a healthy fear of not achieving Republican ideals rather than a sign of rejecting these ideals altogether.