Papers of Louis Hartz

Louis Hartz was a political theorist and historian and professor of government at Harvard. Hartz was born on April 8, 1919 in Youngstown, Ohio and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. He received a SB from Harvard in 1940. Hartz returned to Harvard in 1942 as a teaching fellow. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1946, became assistant professor in 1947, associate professor in 1950, and full professor in 1956. Hartz was known as one of the best lecturers at Harvard, and many students took his Government 3 course, Principles of Popular Government. Following a suspension, Hartz resigned from his position at Harvard in 1974 and spent the last years of his life traveling, living in London, New Delhi, New York City, Athens, and Istanbul, where he died on January 20, 1986.

Hartz’s scholarship focused on comparative politics and economic policy. His first book, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776-1860 (1948), was about early American government intervention in economics. The work for which Hartz was most well-known, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (1955), compared American politics and culture to European. In The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (1964), Hartz’s developed his "fragment theory," which gained influence in the field of comparative politics, particularly in Canada. Hartz won the Woodrow Wilson Prize from the American Political Science Association in 1956 and the Lippincott Prize from the same organization in 1977 for The Liberal Tradition in America.