The Revolt against Americanism: Cultural Pluralism and Cultural Relativism as an Ideology of Liberation

The Revolt against Americanism: Cultural Pluralism and Cultural Relativism as an Ideology of Liberation F. H, MATTHEWS One of the more important tasks facing the intellectual historian is to chart the changing meaning of "liberalism" from 1900 to the present and to understand the transition in American thought from the tradition of 18th and 19th century individualism to the modified organicism of the mid-20th century. Until the 20th century most Americans took for granted the "Lockean" postulate of government as a rational compact between free and equal individuals. The liberal model of an active human nature, oriented toward goals formulated in the present and realizable in a better future, seemed natural and inevitable. 1 Several historians have delineated the "cultural revolution" through which at least the educated classes in America have passed since the late 19th century. The dates and major influences differ somewhat - the watershed of the Nineties, the liberation from individualist morality, the replacement of evangelical Protestantism by secular pragmatism. 2 But there is considerable agreement that during the first decade of the new century, developments in social science and literature, influenced by the literature of revolt and the organic philosophy received from Europe, began to threaten the 11 Lockean" modes of perception. As Morton White's Social Thought in America has demonstrated, the social theories of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robins on had in common a "historicist" sense of the historical factors conditioning behavior, and an "organicist" awareness of the inter-dependence of action with the surrounding cultural context. However, White also notes the npresentoriented " perspective of these thinkers, their concern with using historical study to explain the present, to make the citizen understand the significance of what he read in the morning paper. They used history without worshipping the past, the study of culture without worshipping culture as inviolate. The goal, then, was to combat the "formalism" or deductive rationality of 19th century American thought without destroying its optimistic environmentalist approach to social reform. 3 As David Noble has shown, much "progressive" theory in social science was a THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES, VOL. 1 1 NO. 1, SPRING 1970 brilliant effort to overcome the contradictions between organicist, deterministic science and the liberal optimism of the American tradition . 4 But during and after the First World War, some American intellectuals were driven by their situation to adopt "organicist" theories which were closer to those of the European conservative tradition of the 19th century. In the name of "liberalism" and "liberation,"' they adopted, or developed independently, systems of thought which had traditionally been associated with conservative theory. A key factor in this reorientation of many intellectuals was their "discovery" of the immigrant. The great influx of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century brought modes of thought which were often feudal, stressing loyalty to particular individuals and groups rather than to universal norms. 5 While many Americans reacted with demands for exclusion or a crash program of acculturation, many young intellectuals began to perceive in the immigrant subculture a richer, more human alternative to that Anglo-Saxon Americanism from which they felt themselves increasingly alienated. For these dissidents, Americanization was another proof of the desperate condition of their society, another attempt to make more monolithic and impregnable the worst qualities of a native culture already too powerful in its constricting thinness and monotony. Because the intellectuals were attacking the simplistic environmentalism of the "Americanizers" and defending the apparently organic communities of the immigrants, they naturally took up an organicist position which put them in basic theoretic opposition to the traditional postulates of their society. But scientific development in the twentieth century validated the polemical position forced upon them by their alienation - holistic theories of human behavior, which emphasized the effects of organic wholes upon the behavior of the parts, replaced atomistic theories along the whole spectrum of intellectual analysis. Thus, developments in theory interacted with changes in the polemical needs of the intellectuals. The celebrated "alienation" of the American intelligentsia after 1918 resulted in changes of personal perspective within the ranks of social scientists, giving some younger practitioners the degree of emancipation necessary to...