Beyond Tocqueville, Please!

Rogers Smith in “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” in the September 1993 issue of this Review argues that ascriptive inequalities (eg. racism, sexism, nativism) are neither mere deviations from liberalism nor only symptoms of liberalism. Rather, multiple ideologies coexist in uneasy tension. Jacqueline Stevens criticizes Smith for failing to attend to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and others—whose descriptions of American ideological history, she says, provide the same insight that Smith claims as his own. She goes on to discuss how defining a “mainstream” of scholarship shapes inferences as to what counts as knowledge and further suggests that liberalism and exclusion betray an underlying consistency. In his reply, Smith recognizes the contributions of Du Bois and others, but argues that although they do foreshadow his work, they do not offer the same critique or do the same job. And he asserts that the linkages between liberalism and ascriptive inequality are political, economic, social and psychological—not logical—ones.