Title: The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840
Author: Richard Hofstadter
Year of Publication: 1969
Thesis:
A healthy and functional pluralistic party system was not something the Founders anticipated; in fact, the Founders staunchly opposed the idea of a party system. Based on their own notions of party systems, they foresaw problems with the peaceful transfer of power. What makes the U.S. unique, according to Hofstadter, is that the U.S. did develop a culture that accepted legitimate party opposition. The book resolves a paradox of anti-party thought and pro-party action. In fact, either the Federalists or the Republicans imagined absorbing the other into its folds. Ultimately, he sees a shift in the 18th century that decidedly looks at parties as evil and corrupt (destroying unity), to the 19th, in which it is critiqued for being overly exclusive, to the 20th, where the party system offers "superficial" conflict, never resolving anything to anyone's satisfaction. (see quote on p.293)
Time: 1780-1840
Geography: U.S.
Organization:
Preface
- Founding Fathers didn't believe in parties (viii)
- This comes from responding to parties they had already been exposed to, so conflict between these groups didn't seem effective to them (ix)
One - Party and Opposition in the Eighteenth Century
- What is responsible opposition (see quotes)
- "Non-responsible" critiques of government - concedes they may have value (5) - agitation as a different means
- Effectiveness as a principle (see quotes) (5)
- See Duverger's def. of democracy (democratic republic + organized opposition)
- More definitions from different theoriests including parties are included on p.6
- Why so anti-party?
-> Lack of consensus bread conflict and disorder (12)
-> Special interests could take over party & impose its will (tyranny) (12)
-> Anti-"civic virtue" - takes away judgment (13)
- Finds even within a group of anti-party thinkers (Hamilton, Adams, and other less-high-profile folks) gentle concessions that keeping a balance between parties might be necessary, & even effective. (36)
Two - A Constitution against Parties
- Looking at England as devolving into degeneracy:
"On the eve of the Revolution, most colonials thought of re- cent English history simply as a story of moral degeneracy, political corruption, and increasing despotism, marking a sharp and perhaps irreversible decline from the glories of that earlier England whose principles had been the inspiration of American liberties. Indeed one reason for the Revolution was the felt necessity of severing connections with a state that was losing the pristine purity of its constitution and was cutting itself adrift upon the seas of corrupt and tyrannical government." (43)
- Madison unafraid of minority tyranny (but a majority tyranny (68, 121)
- "Madison’s pluralism, then, had substantial merits as a generalized model, but as to the parties it was mislocated. Envisaging political parties as limited, homogeneous, fiercely aggressive, special interests, he failed to see that the parties themselves might become great, bland, enveloping coalitions, eschewing the assertion of firm principles and ideologies, em- bracing and muffling the struggles of special interests; or that they might forge the coalitions of majorities that are in fact necessary to effective government into forces sufficiently be- nign to avoid tyranny and sufficiently vulnerable to be dis-
placed in time by the opposing coalition. Liberty, he had always understood, would sustain a political atmosphere in which a conflict of parties would take place. The reverse of that prop- osition, the insight that underlies our acceptance of the two- party system, that the conflict of parties can be made to reinforce rather than undermine liberty, was to be well understood only in the future." (72-73)
Three - The Jeffersonians in Opposition
- No dictatorship as a result of American Revolution stands out, argues Hofstadter (76)
- Washington pushes Hamilton and Jefferson to heal their divides (91)
- Attacks on Alien & Sedition Acts come from VA & Kentucky (example of effective power outside gov't/party & strengthened by geographic locale) (112)
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Four - The Transit of Power
- Jefferson as reticent as Washington to proclaim himself on the side of the Federalists or anti-Federalists. However, feared Federalists were attempting to restore monarchy & therefore not legitimate (123)
- John Adams' election unique b/c peaceful, no majority of electorate, decision made in House. (128)
Five - The Quest for Unanimity
"They might have expected, as few Republi- cans could, that Jefferson, the high priest of political anti- centralism and the supposed foe of presidential power, would use the presidency to make the central government an engine of oppression through the instrumentality of his embargo—and of an oppression more keenly felt than any act of government since Parliament’s Coercive Acts of 1774. " (172)
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Six - Toward a Party System
- New group of leaders exemplified by Van Buren - "They were considerably more interested than their predecessors in organization, considerably less fixed in their view of issues, considerably less ideological. They were less thoroughly imbued with eighteenth-century anti-party doctrines, and hence more capable of finding clues to a novel political outlook in the cumulative experience of a quarter century of political life under the Constitution." (213)
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Federalist papers, private correspondence
Historiography:
See Gordon Wood later on. See Bailyn for a comparison - he sees founders as drawing on English concepts of parliamentary government as purity corrupted.
Keywords:
Federalists
Republicans
Party/Faction (argues these were used synonymously, with faction being the more "evil" of the two) (10)
Constitutional Opposition - "both government and opposition are bound by the rules of some kind of constitutional consensus. It is understood, on one side, that opposition is directed against a certain policy or complex of policies, not against the legitimacy of the constitutional regime itself. Opposition rises above naked contestation; it forswears sedition, treason, conspiracy, coup d'etat, riot, and assassination, and makes an open public appeal for the support of a more or less free electorate. Government, in return, is constrained by certain limitations as to the methods it can use to counter the opposition; the free expression of oppositional views is permitted both inside and outside the halls of the parliamentary body." (4)
Responsible Opposition -
"When we speak of an opposition as being responsible, we
mean that it contains within itself the potential of an actual alternative government—that is, its critique of existing policies is not simply a wild attempt to outbid the existing regime in promises, but a sober attempt to formulate alternative policies which it believes to be capable of execution within the existing historical and economic framework, and to offer as its executors a competent alternative personnel that can actually govern." (4)
Effectiveness:
"effective, we mean not merely that its programs are expected to be capable of execution, that its alternative policy is real, but that its capa- bility of winning office is also real, that it has the institutional structure and the public force which makes it possible for us to expect that sooner or later it will in fact take office and bring to power an alternative personnel. If opposition, no matter how constitutional its methods and realistic its program, is too minuscule or too fragmented to offer this alternative, it hardly qualifies on the grounds of effectiveness.2 It might then be an educational force, but it is not a political one. Now it is an essential question, to which Western theorists usually give a
negative answer, whether the requirement of effectiveness can be adequately met without opposition party structures. Ef- fectiveness and organization, they conclude, complement each other." (5)
Alien and Sedition Act - 1798 - Federalist efforts to absorb Republicans
Treaty of Ghent - 1814 - (Crown cedes territory/control)
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
Hofstadter's research question:
"How did this nation come to develop a responsible, effective, constitutional opposition?" (4)
On the shift in idea as to what a party is from 18th-19th-20th centuries
"It is, in fact, the very drastic nature of this change that makes it necessary for us to recreate with care the early development of the argument for parties. In the eighteenth century, parties had been charged with creating gratuitous strife and with destroying the unity and harmony of civil society. By the middle of the nineteenth century and afterward, the party system was charged with creating a corrupt (and perhaps overcentralized) government and with barring the ablest men from politics. In the twentieth century the characteristic criticism of the eighteenth has been all but reversed, since the party system is now most typically criticized not tor divisiveness bur fui offering a superficial and false con- flict to the voters, for failing to pose the “real” issues with clarity and responsibility, and for blocking out dissent—in effect, for protecting the unity and harmony of civil society all too completely, for blunting and minimizing conflict at too high a cost." (293)
Notes:
Does the two-party system support or undermine liberty? (73)
What is the significance of a search for unanimity/consensus? (171)