that liberalism had never had to contend with serious opposition either in the colonial period or in any subsequent period of American history. The story of American politics, as seen by Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and others—not necessarily a success story, in their eyes—was the unchallenged ascendancy of liberalism, the triumph of capitalism, and the failure of conservatism and socialism alike. Thus Andrew Jackson, once deified as the tribune of the people, emerged in Hofstadter's American Political Tradition as an exponent of "liberal capitalism" and Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, as the foremost ideologist of the "self-made myth." Whether the intention behind such interpretations was to deplore the absence of a social democratic tradition (as it seemed to be, initially at least, in the case of Hofstadter and Hartz) or to celebrate the absence of ideological division (as in the case of Daniel Boorstin), the assumption of a broad liberal "consensus"—stifling or comforting, as the case might be— dominated historical scholarship in the forties and fifties.

Bailyn and Wood challenged this view by showing that Lockean liberalism was not the only source of revolutionary ideology. But this accomplishment was not enough for a legion of revisionists who followed in their footsteps. The revisionists wanted to make republicanism the dominant theme of American history. If the older historians saw nothing but liberalism, the revisionists saw nothing but civic humanism. When they found liberals who expressed misgivings about acquisitive individualism, they proceeded to call them republicans instead. The American Whigs, enthusiastic promoters of economic development, became republicans because they advocated a regulated pattern of development and a balance between industry and agriculture. The Jacksonians' opposition to monopolies and corruption made them republicans too. But if both parties came out of the same political tradition and held the same views of government, how did they find so much to fight about? Louis Hartz found it necessary to dismiss the rivalry between Whigs and Jacksonian Democrats as a sham battle—an important indication that something was wrong with his hypothesis of liberal consensus. The "republican synthesis" appeared to generate the same difficulty. When all shades of political opinion were forced into the same category, it became more and more difficult to understand what people in the past thought they were arguing about. A republican synthesis was no better than a liberal synthesis when such terms expanded to cover every political persuasion.

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