Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-c9gpj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T15:15:32.153Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.”

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ackerman Bruce. 1991. We the People: Foundations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ambrosius Lloyd. 1987. Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective. New York: Cambridge.
Ambrosius Lloyd. 1991. Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism During World War I. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources.
Ambrosius Lloyd. 2002. Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Balkin J. M. 1993. “Ideological Drift and the Struggle Over Meaning.” Connecticut Law Review 25 (Spring): 869– 92.Google Scholar
Baskin Darryl. 1969. “The Pluralist Vision of John C. Calhoun.” Polity 2 (Autumn): 49– 65.Google Scholar
Beard Charles. 1908. “Politics: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University in the Series on Science, Philosophy and Art,” February 12. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bimes Terri, and Stephen Skowronek. 1998. “Woodrow Wilson's Critique of Popular Leadership: Reassessing the Modern-Traditional Divide in Presidential History.” In Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard Ellis. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 134– 61.
Boot Max. 2004. “Neocons.” Foreign Policy 140 (January/February): 20– 28.Google Scholar
Bragdon Henry. 1967. Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ceaser James. 1979. Presidential Selection: Theory and Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ceaser James. 2000. “The Great Divide: American Interventionism and its Opponents.” In Present Dangers, ed. Robert Kagan and William Kristol. San Francisco: Encounter. 25– 46.
Ceaser James, Glen Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Joseph Bessette. 1982. “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency.” In Rethinking the Presidency, ed. Thomas Cronin. Boston: Little Brown, 233– 51.
Congressional Record. 1919. 66th Cong., 1st sess. Vol. 58.
Congressional Record. 1920. 66th Cong., 2nd sess. Vol. 58.
Cooper John Milton. 1983. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cooper John Milton. 2001. Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations. New York: Cambridge.
Current Richard. (1963) 1987. Arguing with Historians: Essays on the Historical and the Unhistorical. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Croly Herbert. 1914. Progressive Democracy. New York: MacMillan.
DuBois W. E. B. 1919. “The League of Nations.” The Crisis 18 (May): 10– 11.Google Scholar
Eisenach Eldon. 1994. The Lost Promise of Progressivism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Forcey Charles. 1960. Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippman and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925. New York: Oxford.
Fulbright J. William. 1966. The Arrogance of Power. New York: Random House.
Gigot Paul. 1993. “Potomac Watch.” Wall Street Journal, May 7, A14.Google Scholar
Guinier Lani. 1994. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press.
Gunnell John. 2001. “The Archeology of American Liberalism.” Journal of Political Ideologies 6 (June): 125– 45.Google Scholar
Haney-Lopez Ian. 1996. White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.
Hartz Louis. 1955. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Hill Benjamin. (1876) 1893. “The Stars and Stripes.” In Senator Benjamin H. Hill of Georgia: His Life, Speeches, and Writing. ed. Benjamin H. Hill Jr. Atlanta: Bloodworth, 354– 73.
Hofstadter Richard. 1948. The American Political Tradition. New York: Random House.
James Scott. 2000. Presidents, Parties and the State. New York: Cambridge.
Katznelson Ira. 1999. “Review of Civic Ideas: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History.” Political Theory 27 (August): 565– 70.Google Scholar
Kersh Rogan. 2001. Dreams of A More Perfect Union. Ithaca: Cornell.
King Desmond. 1995. Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal Government. Oxford: Clarendon.
King Desmond. 2000. Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard.
King Desmond, and Rogers Smith. 2005. “Racial Orders in American Political Development.” American Political Science Review 99 (February): 75– 92.Google Scholar
Knock Thomas. 1992. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lauren Paul. 1978. “Human Rights in History: Diplomacy and Racial Equality at the Paris Peace Conference.” Diplomatic History 3 (Summer): 257– 79.Google Scholar
Leuchtenburg William, ed. 1961. Woodrow Wilson: The New Freedom. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Link Arthur. 1954. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917. New York: Harper and Row.
Lowi Theodore. 1969. The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy and the Crisis of Public Authority. New York: Norton.
Mehta Uday. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago. Chicago University Press.
Morgan Edmund. 1975. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton.
Muravchik Joshua. 2002. “The Bush Manifesto.” Commentary 114 (December): 23– 30.Google Scholar
Ngai Mae. 1999. “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924.” Journal of American History 86 (June): 62– 92.Google Scholar
Ninkovich Frank. 1999. The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy Since 1900. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Notter Harley. 1937. The Origins of the Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
O'Sullivan John. 1996. “Mistaken Identities.” National Review 48 (November 25): 50– 56.Google Scholar
Pearce Haywood. 1926. Benjamin H. Hill: Secession and Reconstruction. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Podhoretz Norman. 1999. “Strange Bedfellows: A Guide to the New Foreign Policy Debates.” Commentary 108 (December): 19– 31.Google Scholar
Reid Edith. 1934. Woodrow Wilson: The Caricature, the Myth and the Man. New York: Oxford.
Rogin Michael. 1987. “The King's Two Bodies: Lincoln, Wilson, Nixon and Presidential Self-Sacrifice.” 81–114; and “‘The Sword Became A Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation,” 190–235. In Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Root Elihu. 1919. “The League of Nations.” In Men and Policies: Addresses by Elihu Root. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 248– 65.
Safford John. 1995. “John C Calhoun, Lani Guinier and Minority Rights.” PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (Summer): 211– 16.Google Scholar
Sanders Elizabeth. 1999. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers and the American State, 1877–1920. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Schlesinger Jr.Arthur. 1945. The Age of Jackson. Boston: Little Brown.
Sklar Martin. 1988. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916. New York: Cambridge.
Skowronek Stephen. 1997. The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership From John Adams to Bill Clinton. Cambridge: Harvard.
Smith Rogers. 1993. “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz—The Multiple Traditions in America.” American Political Science Review 87 (September): 549– 66.Google Scholar
Smith Rogers. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in the U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sosna Morton. 1970. “The South in the Saddle: Racial Politics During the Wilson Years.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 54 (Autumn): 33– 49.Google Scholar
Steigerwald David. 1994. Wilsonian Idealism in America. Ithaca: Cornell.
Stuckey Mary. 2004. Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity. Lawrence: Kansas.
Tulis Jeffrey. 1987. The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Will George. 2005. “Realism Rewarded.” The Washington Post, May 12: A12.Google Scholar
Williamson Joel. 1984. The Crucible of Race: Black White Relations in the South Since Emancipation. New York: Oxford.
Wills Gary. 1992. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Wilson Woodrow. (1881) 1973. “Woodrow Wilson Scrapbooks.” Woodrow Wilson Papers, 1855–1961, Series 9, Vol. 16, Washington DC: Library of Congress.
Wilson Woodrow. 1880. “John Bright,” The Papers of Woodrow Wilson I (PWW), ed. Arthur Link. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 608– 21.
Wilson Woodrow. (1885) 1956. Congressional Government: New York: World.
Wilson Woodrow. 1886. “The Study of Administration” PWW 5: 357– 80.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1889a. The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. Boston: Heath.
Wilson Woodrow. 1889b. “The Character of Democracy in the United States.” PWW 6: 221– 39.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1890 “Leaders of Men.” PWW 6: 644– 71.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1891. “Democracy.” PWW 7: 344– 69.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1893a. “Edmund Burke: The Man and His Times.” PWW 8: 313– 43.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1893b. “A Calendar of Great Americans.” PWW 8: 368– 81.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1893c. Division and Reunion, 1829–1889. New York: Longmans.
Wilson Woodrow. 1895a. “Address at the University of Virginia.” PWW 9: 287– 91.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1895b. “The Proper Perspective of American History.” Forum XIX (July): 544– 60.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1897a. “The Making of the Nation.” PWW 10: 217– 36.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1897b. “Leaderless Government.” PWW 10: 288– 305.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1899. “When a Man Comes to Himself.” PWW 11: 263– 73.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1900. “Democracy and Efficiency.” PWW 11: 6– 21.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow 1901a. “The Reconstruction of the Southern States.” Atlantic Monthly 87 (January): 1– 15.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1901b. “The Ideals of America.” PWW 12: 208– 27.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1902. A History of the American People (in five volumes). New York: Harper.
Wilson Woodrow. 1908. Constitutional Government in the United States. New York: Columbia.
Wilson Woodrow. 1909a. “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People.” PWW 19: 33– 47.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1909b. “An Address on Robert E. Lee at the University of North Carolina.” PWW 18: 631– 45.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. 1911. “The Law and the Facts.” American Political Science Review 5 (February): 1– 11.Google Scholar
Wilson Woodrow. (1912). 1956. A Crossroads of Freedom: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Woodrow Wilson, ed. John Davidson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Wilson Woodrow. 1917. “Peace Without Victory.” PWW 40: 533– 39.Google Scholar
Wolgemuth Kathleen. 1958. “Woodrow Wilson's Appointment Policy and the Negro.” The Journal of Southern History 24 (November): 457– 71.Google Scholar
Wolgemuth Kathleen. 1959. “Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation.” Journal of Negro History 44 (April): 158– 73.Google Scholar
Wood Gordon. 1969. The Creation of the American Republic. New York: Norton.
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.