Summer Book Section
J. David Greenstone. The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. 312 with tables, bibliography and index. $24.95 (cloth). J. David Greenstone, Distinguished Service Professor of political science at the University of Chicago, had been working on The Lincoln Persuasion for nearly a dozen years when he died in 1990. Friends and family took on the task of readying the nearly completed manuscript for publication.Though the book is resolutely academic in its purposes and prose, anybody interested in American political history, especially the issue of how to define Abraham Lincoln's greatness, will find it richly rewarding. Greenstone's legacy to us is a complex analysis of Jacksonian political culture and Lincoln's career. The book originated in the author's respectful dissent from Louis Hartz's influential thesis. In The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Hartz, a long-time professor of government at Harvard, held that American political history had been exceptionally peaceful because a fundamental and continuing consensus on liberal political principles kept social forces from battling for their own forms of government, as conservative and working class movements did in other countries. Greenstone felt that Hartz, by overstating the liberal consensus, downplayed fundamental disagreements in our national experience, especially those on slavery which led to the Civil War. Putting Hartz's thesis to the test led Greenstone to three important insights. First, he contends that Hartz's concentration on uniformity in liberal ideas led him to miss their fateful variety. Second, he appreciates Lincoln's political genius as the leader who reconciled two sorts of liberalism into a new public philosophy, or "persuasion," which would carry our renewed nation through its next hundred years. Third, Greenstone concludes that Hartz oversimplified the political effect of general liberal principles because he misconceived the relation between motive and meaning. The Lincoln Persuasion effectively weaves these three insights together in an interesting and compelling narrative. Paradoxically, the most academic and the briefest part of Greenstone's argument brings him closest to the standpoint of practical politics. Politicians know that labels (like "liberal" or "conservative") seldom describe political work because general attitudes are notoriously imperfect guides to political behavior. Politics has much more to do with the contexts and situations of concrete practice than with the premises and conclusions of abstract logic. Tip O'Neill's dictum, "All politics is local," is more to the point than Louis Hartz's assumption that politics is principle. Greenstone holds that words and ideas do not determine deeds but combine with them in performances which can only be ambiguous. In normal times, ambiguities are overlooked because people have a common sense about what actions mean. But when meanings are unsettled, the ambiguities of action can promote divergent understandings and irreconcilable differences. Greenstone argues that this is what happened to the meaning of "liberty" and "union" in the second generation of American political leadership. He shows how the first generation, exemplified by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, arrived at a "founding synthesis," a consensus on how the new republic would practice liberty and union. Most of The Lincoln Persuasion is given over to charting the breakdown of that agreement in the Jacksonian period. Though the founders agreed on what a republican government supporting individual liberty and property ought to do, the successor generation fell into division over the resurgent issue of slavery and free soil. Basically, it came down to the question of morals in politics. One side of what Greenstone calls the "liberal bipolarity" saw slavery and free soil issues as political questions properly resolved by majority rule. These "humanist" liberals conceived of liberty as "negative," in Oxford historian Isaiah Berlin's famous formulation, and the union, in their view, was not to enforce any position on how things should be, but was simply to broker agreements in the political process. This sort of liberalism is represented in Greenstone's book by Stephen J. Douglas and Martin Van Buren. "Reform liberals," at Greenstone's other pole, saw slavery as a moral question. Their concept of liberty, in Berlin's term, is
"positive"; an individual must become free by developing the inborn potential for making good choices. The union, in this "reform" view, is the vehicle for collectively ascending to higher levels of practice. Lincoln's greatness, as Greenstone sees it, lay in his ability to combine conscientious moralism with political practicality, to resynthesize the two poles of liberalism by bringing Americans to believe that the purpose of the union was to foster the impulse to do good and be better. The book's final chapter is a persuasive argument that the resources for Lincoln's achievement came from the covenant tradition, the still vital Puritan way of making morals and politics one. "The Lincoln myth continues to resonate not because of any specific policy... [but] because his name is inextricably linked with 'one nation conceived in liberty' in a way that those who conceived this nation are not." In this sense. Greenstone joins with Garry Wills' more dramatic assertion in Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992) that"... the Civil War is, to most Americans, what Lincoln wanted it to mean." But, where Wills was properly lauded for his brilliant analysis of the literary provenance of Lincoln's words, Greenstone deserves praise for showing us more clearly the practical and political value of Lincoln's actions. Craig A. Brown is professor of political studies at Sangamon State University, where he teaches courses on political theory and liberalism. 30/July 1994/Illinois Issues
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