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³ In Blau, J. L. (ed.), Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (New York, 1947), p. 58Google Scholar.

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⁵ Quoted in Walther, D., Gouverneur Morris (New York and London, 1934), p. 76Google Scholar.

⁶ The term “feudal,” of course, has a technical reference to the medieval period. What Tocqueville and Adams largely had in mind, and what I refer to here, is the decadent feudalism of the later period—the “corporate” society of Europe, as some historians of the eighteenth century have put it. It has often been noted that the nonexistence of a feudal tradition—save for scattered remnants of which most, to be sure, were abolished by the American revolution—has been the great distinguishing feature of American civilization. But no interpretation of American politics or American political thought has as yet been inspired by this observation. It is obvious that the development of liberalism without feudalism, the development of Locke, as it were, without the antagonism of Filmer and Maistre, is bound to raise a whole series of peculiar problems. One of the reasons for our failure to examine these problems is undoubtedly to be found in the academic separation of American from European history. Any attempt to follow up the nonfeudal nature of the American experience requires the interchangeable use of American and European data and the formulation of issues that tend to be unfamiliar to the American specialist.

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⁹ Thornton, J. (ed.), The Pulpit of the American Revolution (Boston, 1876), pp. 196–7Google Scholar. The point I am making here about America in contrast to Europe is much the same point that Halevy makes about England in contrast to the Continent. We must not, of course, confuse French and English thought on this score. But the role of nonconformity in discouraging the rise of political religions was actually more marked in America than it was in England.

¹⁰ Quoted in Niles, H. (ed.), Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (New York, 1876), p. 56Google Scholar.

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²¹ Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (New York, 1937), Vol. 2, p. 645Google Scholar. By the same logic, we have never had a “Liberal Party” in the United States.

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²⁶ Some of the finest work on this subject is being done by Professor Carter Goodrich of Columbia. See his recent articles in the Political Science Quarterly.

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²⁹ Quoted in Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America, cited above (n. 8), p. 46.

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³⁵ The distinctive nature of these reforms is that they were a fulfillment of the past rather than, as in Europe, a revolt against it. The elimination of feudal vestiges in a society already under the dominion of liberalism is an entirely different matter from the introduction of liberalism in a society still heavily ridden by feudal forms. America's “social revolution” thus is not to be compared with the great social revolutions of Europe. I am reserving this general problem for another discussion.

³⁶ Becker, C. L., Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life (New York, 1945), p. 16Google Scholar.

³⁷ I have sketched the main lines of this interpretation of Southern thought in “The Reactionary Enlightenment: Southern Political Thought before the Civil War,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 5, pp. 31–50 (March, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³⁹ In The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, p. 304. It will be seen that this analysis coincides to some extent with the much debated philosophy of Frederick Jackson Turner. The mistake of Turner was to miss the importance of the liberal ideas that the American settlers brought with them from the Old World and the East; nevertheless he seized upon an important truth when he emphasized the raw environment that they found. That feudalism could be established in Canada does not alter the fact that liberalism could be established much more easily in America because feudalism did not already exist. B. F. Wright, Jr., one of the earliest of the Turner critics, noted the significance of this factor of a new environment. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the abundance of land in America helped to support a system of liberal individualism by giving it a solid economic basis. Turner, in other words, seized upon a half-truth, and the argument over his theory has tended to obscure it. The American liberal community arose out of what must be accounted one of the happiest coincidences of modern history: the interplay between the philosophy of liberalism and an almost actualized state of nature. I am indebted to Mr. Rush Welter for originally suggesting to me that the interpretation of American thought advanced here, based on the nonexistence of a feudal tradition, might serve to confirm in part Turner's famous and controversial insight.