Friends and Citizens: Essays in Honor of Wilson Carey McWilliams. Edited by Peter Dennis Bathory and Nancy L. Schwartz. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 311p. $50.00.

Extract

Wilson Carey McWilliams is certainly one of the great teachers of American political thought in his generation. The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973), as well as his series on presidential elections and many essays, has captivated both his students and his colleagues. There are, of course, many prominent figures who have addressed the complexity of political thought in America in recent years but few whose influence is acknowledged so centrally on these terms. Of course, it is sometimes difficult for those influenced by a master teacher to convey thoughts once they are removed from the electricity of the seminar or conference. McWilliams is a good example of this phenomenon. At one level his understanding of American political culture is Whitmanesque. McWilliams is not primarily a jeremiadic thinker and much of his writing has the same breezy celebration of America as Whitman's. Added to this perspective is an intense appreciation of Mark Twain's comedic iconoclasm. Both foci are juxtaposed with what is his central preoccupation, a deep attachment to the Puritan vision of the human experience. McWilliams generalized the latter in The Idea of Fraternity in America as a tradition of fraternal politics that was enriched by other European immigrants. Although “Puritanism…was here first,” (113) it was superceded, though not replaced, by the powerful symbols of “Enlightenment liberalism.” McWilliams' model of cultural dualism offered the first systematic critique of Hartz's liberal society thesis and has since been replicated and expanded by many others including Robert Bellah and Rogers M. Smith. In fact, there is some irony in his alternative to Hartz's single-factor explanation of American culture, since it returned the study of American political thought to the traditional dualist perspectives developed by Progressive scholars, who are villains in McWilliams' own reading of American political thought. Moreover, McWilliams' focus on Puritan conceptions of community has led him to an attachment to premodern conceptions of politics as well as to a decided antipathy toward the political world of the American founders.