Light on Democracy

...Professor Lipset, however, is an authentic sociologist who uses facts less to illustrate preconceptions than to suggest conclusions...

...Nor is he committed to any one country as a field of study: he roams widely and produces some of his most interesting effects through comparative analysis...

...Still, this remains a stimulating, if disorderly, work which will cause many readers to reconsider their own unexamined assumptions about the workings of democracy...

...Not to do so is the hallmark of dilettantism...

...I have advanced elsewhere (in a recent number of Daedalus) some of the reasons why I find Lipset's account of the status of intellectuals in American life superficial...

...Thus a pervading thesis of Political Man is that the upper classes are more tolerant and enlightened than anyone else...

...It should be said that here he is following the lead of other sociologists, who, in turn, have misunderstood what historians like Richard Hofstadter and Oscar Hand-lin have said about Populism...

...As a sociologist, Lipset is committed to no school...

...at another, he identifies "poorly educated small businessmen" as "the traditional supporters of American Populism...

...As an historian, however, I am obliged to report that he does not always handle history with what my own guild would consider proper caution...

...Indeed, with a certain facility for self-contradiction, Lipset writes in another place, "In general, the various nativist and anti-Catholic movements which have arisen at various periods in American history have been identified with the conservative parties...

...A good deal of the time the author uses historical evidence to excellent effect...

...One could quarrel with others of his contentions and conclusions...

...The thin strain of verbal anti-Semitism in Populism, of course, confirms the Lipset thesis about the wickedness of the lower classes...

...and, as it has receded from the modern mind, the sociology of politics has seeped in to fill the gap...

...he seems to have read everything...

...Once, when we had fundamental questions to ask about the nature of political society, we turned to the political philosophers...

...Finally he turns to the concrete behavior of democratic societies—their voting patterns and, especially in the United States, the character of their political parties...

...For example, at one point, he describes Populism as a movement designed to "restore the old middle classes' economic security and high standing in society...

...Professor C. Vann Woodward of Johns Hopkins deals with the fallacies of this theory brilliantly in an article in the current American Scholar...

...In successive chapters Lipset traces bigotry to the working class ("extremist and intolerant movements in modern society are more likely to be based on the lower classes than on the middle and upper classes") and to the self-employed urban and rural middle classes ("their discontent leads them to accept diverse irrational protest ideologies—regionalism, racism, super-nationalism, anti-cosmopolitanism, McCarthyism, Fascism...

...In order to understand the events . . . you must survey a period of much wider span...

...yet any notion that Populism is the source of American anti-Semitism would require Lipset to regard Henry and Brooks Adams, not to speak of New York's Four Hundred, as leading Populists...

...The anti-slavery Whigs, evidently not caring so deeply about the slavery issue, were quite content in 1848 to back a slaveholder for President in the same party with the largest slaveholders in the South...

...so I will only add a word or two here...

...It is true enough that the Democratic Party of the 1850s was pro-slavery...

...Lipset first turns his attention to the social prerequisites of democracy...

...But it would be hard to prove from American history that the upper classes have saved civil freedom from the wanton assaults of the working class and of the self-employed members of the middle class...

...and in a comparative analysis of several countries he uncovers illuminating, if not always surprising, correlations between the level of economic development and the quality of democratic politics...

...Lipset repeats the now standard sociological view that Populism is the source of all evil in American society—a theory which reaches its climax in the currently fashionable designation of Joseph R. McCarthy as the heir of the Populists...

...Actually most of the sociologists of politics in the grand style—Machia-velli, Marx, Tocqueville, Pareto, Sorel—have been political philosophers in disguise, and not necessarily the worse for that...

...he is prepared to invoke everything from historical sociology in the spacious Nineteenth Century manner to the minute statistical investigations of present-day quantitative sociologists...

...Nonetheless, he is concerned more of the time with establishing intolerance as a particularly lower class contribution...

...Similarly he argues—once again on behalf of his generalization about the superior enlightenment of the upper classes—that before the Civil War the upper-class Whig Party was more anti-slavery than the lower-class Democratic Party...

...and the result in Political Man is a series of essays which valuably illuminate significant aspects of the democratic process...

...Moreover, he writes of Populism and Progressivism as if they formed a continuous movement, overlooking the fact that one arose from the countryside, the other from the cities, that they were widely different in style and purpose, and that the great leaders of Progressivism—Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, LaFollette, and Brandeis—were all bitter foes of Populism...

...He quotes Schum-peter with approval: "No decade in the history of religion, technology, painting, poetry, and whatnot, ever contains its own explanation...

...To do this, he has to perform some astonishing operations on the word "Populism...

...And he is far more ready than most sociologists to take the evidence of history into account before he launches his grand generalizations...

...but the reason for this was precisely the fact that the anti-slavery Democrats were so numerous and passionate that in 1848 they withdrew from the Democratic Party, under the leadership of a former Democratic President, Martin Van Buren, and formed the Free Soil Party...

...And he is so eager to fit Progressivism into his Procrustean bed that he describes the Progressive attempts to revitalize and clean up the p<\rty system as attempts "to break down the sources of partisan strength and create as much direct democracy as possible...

...He never takes up the upper classes directly...

...but they hover in the wings of his analysis as a collection of high-minded libertarians, conservative on economic issues, no doubt, but otherwise dedicated to the defense of culture and individuality...

...If I had more space, I would comment on other features of Political Man...

...It is important, I think, to note that Professor Lipset seems to have only the vaguest idea what Populism was all about...

...This is a rich book, and, with all its looseness and sometimes confusion of argument, it contains much of value...

...Obviously there are libertarians and bigots in all classes...

...However, at another point Lipset turns around and praises the primary election system as facilitating the "maintenance of continuities" in party politics...

...Either view will astonish historians who had naively supposed Populism to have been an agrarian movement...

...He is particularly concerned with the impact of industrialization on societies...

...But in recent times political philosophy seems to have entered a stage of irreversible decay...

...he writes clearly, though with lapses into the patois of his trade...

...His intelligence is generous and eclectic, sometimes undiscriminatingly so...

...Next, he considers certain challenges to the democratic order—especially working-class "authoritarianism" and middle-class fascism...

...One senses an occasional tendency to subordinate the drabness of historical fact to the glories of sociological theory...