Port Au Prince protests; Overcoming a feudal society of European dominance

Discussion of Western Hemisphere geo politics

We combine the history of Haiti with Louis Hartz idea of a classless society where everyone wanted to participate for economic gain/prosperity in the mid 1850s and build a new country free from European feudal oppression.  We talk about the Haitian civil rights movement of 1797 to 1804

Hartz’s 1950s characterization of America as unconsciously and compulsively wedded to liberal values retains today the quality of an orthodoxy which many argue with but few ignore. I will shortly consider why Hartz’s thesis has been so durable, but first I want to examine its principal features.

According to Hartz, America was born in the flight from European oppressions by settlers who took the classical liberalism of Locke as a self-evident belief system. Having rejected the feudal ethos intellectually, and never having had to battle against the power of the aristocracy and the clergy, Americans were ‘born equal.’ Because of this absence from America of feudal structures, and because of the overwhelming predominance of liberal values, the American political universe, though rich in conflict, lies almost wholly within the horizons of liberalism, a consensus which remains largely invisible precisely because it is virtually universal, uncontested, and taken-for-granted. Thus as Eric Foner puts it in his own summary of Hartz, “Without a feudal tradition, and a sense of class oppression in the present, Americans are simply unable to think in class terms.” For Hartz, though, the inability of Americans to think in class terms is not a matter of ‘false consciousness’ because American society is not, in fact, structured by class. The American ideals of “social mobility, individual fulfillment, and material acquisitiveness” (Foner, 62) have been sufficiently fulfilled to render a class-based view of American society unfounded.