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Response to Karen Orren
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
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Karen Orren's critique wages more war with itself than it does with my main arguments and evidence, most of which she does not engage directly. The bulk of my essay was devoted to textual critiques of Tocqueville, Myrdal, Hartz, and a number of more recent authors. I argued that their assumptions that liberal democratic traditions formed the core of American political culture led to inadequate accounts of major systems of ascriptive hierarchy, especially racist, nativist, and patriarchal ones. Orren mentions none of the authors I critiqued except Carol Pateman, whom she invokes in a paragraph ending, like a third of her paragraphs in her first two sections, with a rhetorical question about my view, not a forthright contrary proposition. Her failure to address my specific critiques, and her recurring reliance on questions to do the work of affirmative arguments, make it unclear precisely how far she is defending the authors, challenging the criticisms, and disputing the evidence to which my essay was largely devoted.
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- Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1996
References
Notes
1. All she says of those authors is that they “take the dominant influence of liberal ideas as their point of departure,” and that since I do not, I “must depend on a clear specification” of the traditions in question. This sentence seems to imply that these authors are exempt from giving a clear specification of the liberal ideas that form their “point of departure,” but why Orren grants them this exemption escapes me.
Orren also asserts that “no one ever doubted” the “impurity of American culture,” but she does not explain how the authors I criticize were nonetheless guilty of the sweeping overstatements of ideological purity I cited, or why those overstatements don't matter.
2. Orren's own most extended discussions of feudalism do not identify it with any of these elements, and she recognizes that exponents and analysts of feudalism have regularly contrasted the master-servant relations she stresses with master-slave relations. Orren, , Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (New York, 1991), 10–14Google Scholar, 25, 26n47, 74, 78, 165.
3. Orren, Belated Feudalism, 14.
4. Smith, Rogers M., “‘One United People’: Second-Class Female Citizenship and the American Quest for Community,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 1 (1989): 229–293.Google Scholar
5. In answer to Orren's rhetorical questions in this section, just as I think “republican motherhood” did more to justify gender inequalities in America than doctrines of “limited government,” (which did play a part but are not in any case unique to liberalism), I also think nativism and racial Darwinism did have much more to do with justifying racist immigration restrictions and internal racial subordnations at various junctures in U.S. history, especially the late nineteenth century and the 1920s, than did doctrines of “limited government.” And as libertarians stress, racial Darwinism was used to justify restraints on free markets like the Jim Crow laws, not their maintenance. See Smith, ““One United People’,” 243–48.
6. Herrnstein, R. and Murray, C., The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Brimelow, P., Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; D'Souza, D., The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York, 1995).Google Scholar
7. Here Orren asks if practices are infused with ideas “by definition.” I do indeed think all political practices are infused with ideas, not by definition, but because of the empirical reality that human behavior is in significant measure cognitively directed. Orren''s apparent denial that this is the case seems incomprehensible. I also think that, in the absence of anti-Chinese racist traditions, it would have been much harder to get most middle and upper class Americans to forego the economic advantages they received from Chinese immigration. And in nineteenth-century America, those classes usually won.
8. Congressional Globe, 30 January 1866, 498–99; 4 July 1869, rep. 4 July 1870, 5150; Tichenor, Daniel J., “The Liberal and Illiberal Traditions in America: The Case of Immigration Policymaking.”Paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,Chicago(31 August 1995),34.Google Scholar
9. Congressional Globe, 4 July 1870, 1549–1555, 1571; Cong. Record, vol. 13 pt. 2, 47th Cong., 1st Sess., 1515–16, 1521–22 (1882); Hutchinson, E. P., Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia, 1981), 75–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daniels, R., Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, 1991) 56–57Google Scholar; Tafcaki, R., A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston, 1993)Google Scholar; Tichenor, “The Liberal and Illiberal Traditions in America,” 5–6.
10. Lowell, A. Lawrence, “The Colonial Expansion of the United States,” Atlantic Monthly 83 (1899): 151–53.Google Scholar
11. 118 U.S. 356(1886). (Princeton, NJ, 1995).
12. This is well depicted by Richard Valelly, in “National Parties and Racial Disenfranchisement,” in Classifying by Race, P. E. Peterson, ed.
13. Lofgren, Charles A., The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York, 1987), 94, 99, 115, 175.Google Scholar