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The Reassociation of Ideas and Purposes: Racism, Liberalism, and the American Political Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2006

STEPHEN SKOWRONEK
STEPHEN SKOWRONEK
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Abstract

Racist and liberal ideals are said to anchor competing political traditions in America, but a juxtaposition of ideals obscures key processes of change in the cultural lexicon and misses much about how a political tradition comes to bear on the development of a polity. Attention to the reassociation of ideas and purposes over time points to a more intimate relationship between racism and liberalism in American political culture, to the conceptual interpenetration of these antithetical ends. Cuing off issues that have long surrounded the reassociation of John C. Calhoun's rule of the concurrent majority with pluralist democracy, this article examines another southerner, Woodrow Wilson, who, in the course of defending racial hierarchy, developed ideas that became formative of modern American liberalism. Analysis of the movement of ideas across purposes shifts the discussion of political traditions from set categories of thought to revealed qualities of thought, bringing to the fore aspects of this polity that are essentially and irreducibly “American.”

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ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 100 , Issue 3 , August 2006 , pp. 385 - 401
Copyright
© 2006 by the American Political Science Association

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