The Idea of Fraternity in America at 50 and Its New Generations of Readers

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

“Americans, especially young Americans, cannot find their country in the land about them,” Wilson Carey McWilliams observed in the opening pages of The Idea of Fraternity in America, first published fifty years ago. McWilliams’s description of the American polity in 1973 resonates with our experience today. “Wealth accumulates, men decay; racism stubbornly, and violence insistently, remain with us; riches and poverty exist in insane juxtaposition.” A half century later we might add that boys and men are said to be in “crisis” and, despite the gains made by the modern women’s movement, women continue endure disrespect, if not injustice. The Surgeon General of the United States warned of a “loneliness epidemic,” that only seems to be exacerbated by the proliferation of online communities promising connection. It is no wonder that America’s prevailing political theory, liberalism, has become a matter of intense debate. While some some public intellectuals and scholars have condemned liberalism for its emphasis on individual rights, a mastery of nature, secularism, and free markets, others have defended it on the basis of these very same tenets.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of The Idea of Fraternity in America was published at just the right moment. It reminds us that the American political tradition is more nuanced and manifold than contemporary debates on liberalism would suggest. McWilliams argued that all the afflictions that Americans are experiencing arise from a particular strain of American liberalism that was fostered by our Constitution. However, McWilliams also argued that there was more to the American political tradition than liberalism and that American politics contains an “alternative tradition,” —fraternity—which recognizes which recognizes that human beings need the political education offered by small groups with shared. This alternative tradition took root when the Puritans arrived on the rocky shores of New England and may be found in philosophical, historical, and literary texts throughout the American experiment. With the publication of fiftieth anniversary edition The Idea of Fraternity in America McWilliams assures a new generation of Americans that “by knowing how we have come to our dismal passage, we may be able to find the way out. To restore the past, is perhaps, to recover the future.”

Sub Unit

• Division 56: American Political Thought

Chair

• Susan McWilliams Pomona College

Presenters

• Natalie Taylor Skidmore College

• Emma Rodman University of Massachusetts Lowell

• Geoffrey A. Kurtz CUNY-Manhattan Community College

• Nadia Hilliard City, University of London

• Derek Barker Kettering Foundation