¹ The concept of a liberal community arises out of the American experience of establishing liberalism without being compelled to fight the heritage of a decadent feudalism. I have discussed a few of the problems raised by this concept during the eighteenth century in “American Political Thought and the American Revolution,” this Review, Vol. 46, pp. 321–342 (June, 1952)Google Scholar; and during the period of the Civil War in “The Reactionary Enlightenment,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 5, pp. 31–50 (03, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Education of Henry Adams, Mod. Lib. ed. (New York, 1931), p. 33Google Scholar.

³ It is in the American democrat that we find the distinctive impact of the liberal idea in American life: the individualism and the absence of real class consciousness in the worker, the capitalist spirit of the farmer, and the subordination even of the large land-owner during the Jeffersonian era to the political aims of the small farmer because of a system of widely diffused and independent land ownership. I intend to deal more closely with these problems in another discussion.

⁴ The English aristocracy was of course by no means monolithic in its opposition to the middle class. The Reform Act of 1832 was actually pushed through by aristocrats like Grey who recognized the need for reform. Here, as in other cases in political history, a nascent group found support among sectors of the dominant class.

⁵ This does not mean, of course, that the frontier did not enter into the creation of American liberalism by providing an abundance of land for individual proprietorship and by providing a virgin ground, unridden by a feudal heritage, for the implementation of liberal ideas. The American liberal community originated out of a happy interplay between the transplanted European concepts Turner neglected and the raw environment that he emphasized. This relationship was brilliantly perceived by Wright, B. F. in “Political Institutions and the Frontier,” in Sources of American Culture, ed. Fox, D. R. (New York, 1934), pp. 15–39Google Scholar. Nor need one deny that the emergence of an eastern working class provided an important democratic pressure, though it is essential to insist, curious as it may seem, that it was the nonproletarian outlook of this class, the fact that it did not frighten the mass of small property owners above it, which was crucial in the achievement of democratic objectives. The overriding fact is the unique fact of American liberalism; the others fit into it, but neither separately nor together can they take its place. Certainly the argument over which of the others we should choose, the West or the East, as it were, misses the point badly.

⁶ Works of Rufus Choate, ed. Brown, S. G. (Boston, 1862), p. 419Google Scholar.

⁷ Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, ed. Rogers, J. E. T. (London, 1869), Vol. 1, p. 227Google Scholar.

⁸ Farrand, Max, Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven, 1911–1937), Vol. 1, p. 87Google Scholar.

⁹ A Letter to the Hon. Daniel Webster (Philadelphia, 1837)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ It will be seen that I am interpreting the ultimate basis for judicial review, apart of course from the requirements of federalism, in terms of America's social agreement rather than in terms of its social conflict. The real question is not why Hamilton wanted to control the American majority, but why the American majority accepted his controls. And the answer here lies in the liberal individualism of the mass of the American people—in other words, in a fear of itself on the part of the majority. But this very fear, this very devotion to the individualist idea of Locke, meant that the American majority was the last majority in the world to need the elaborate checks to which it in the end submitted. We have here, in other words, a curiously circular logic inherent in the nature of a liberal community: a liberal majority binds itself down with restraints that would be much better suited for one that was a real threat to the individualist principle.

Looked at from a slightly different angle, however, it is this unanimity around the Lockean idea which makes the institution of judicial review, apart again from the matter of federalism, a meaningful thing. When half of a nation believes in Locke and half in Filmer or Marx, the result is not law but philosophy. Inter arma leges silent. But when the whole of a nation agrees on Locke, the idea of settling ultimate issues of public policy through adjudication logically arises, since the problem is then not one of principle, but of application. America's famous legalism is thus the reverse side of its philosophic poverty in politics, both of which, like its pragmatism, trace back in large part to a deep and implicit liberal general will. One of the ironies of this situation is called upon to deal with the tyrannical consequences of the very Rousseauian ethos which lies behind its power. Since its courage in the face of Jefferson is made possible by his agreement with Hamilton, it may not be hard to understand why, apart from obvious pressures, it has shown rather less courage when it has had to face Jefferson and Hamilton both.

¹¹ Story, J., Miscellaneous Writings (Boston, 1852), p. 156Google Scholar.

¹² Works of Rufus Choate, p. 422.

¹³ Quoted in Schlesinger, A. M. Jr., Age of Jackson (Boston, 1946), p. 327Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy, ed. Blau, J. L. (New York, 1947), p. 302Google Scholar. The absence of a Wellingtonian feudal conservatism in America after the Civil War is noted in McCloskey's, R. G. excellent American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise (Cambridge, 1951), p. 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A typical Progressive lament on this score, reminiscent of Brownson, is to be found in Schlesinger, A. M. Jr., The Vital Center (Boston, 1949), pp. 14–17Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Quoted in Rothstein, Th., From Chartism to Laborism (London, 1929), p. 96Google Scholar. Macaulay's prediction as to the ultimate fate of American democracy was of course a gloomy one.

¹⁶ Horton, J. T., James Kent, A Study in Conservatism (New York-London, 1939), p. 255Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Wright, B. F., Source Book of American Political Theory (New York, 1929), pp. 369, 373, 382Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See Hartz, L., Economic Policy and Democratic Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), pp. 56 ff., 292–293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Quoted in Schlesinger, , Age of Jackson, p. 270Google Scholar.

²⁰ Everett, Alexander, Orations and Speeches (Boston, 1836), p. 297Google Scholar.