Louis Hartz was the greatest teacher I ever had, and his death at the age of 66 in early 1986 has reminded me of the need to try to recapture his contribution and transmit it to others. He once was asked to write a short piece on teaching, and the essence of his brief argument was that a scholar performs his educational functions best as he offers himself to students as an example of how to proceed. On the lecture platform, and in small classes, he was a model of a dazzlingly brilliant political theorist at work. By his own standard he succeeded as a teacher, certainly with me, and yet in the end he seemed to fail spectacularly. Since he retired from Harvard in 1974, under unusual and tragic circumstances, by now he has disappeared from the imaginations of a whole new generation of intellectuals.

I remember with absolute clarity the first time I laid eyes on his great book, The Liberal Tradition in America; it not only went on to win the highest professional awards a political scientist could hope for, but its continued survival in the general culture ensures the standing and reputation he now has. During the spring of 1955, in my freshman year at Harvard, I spotted a stack of the new book on display in a corner of the front window of the Harvard Coop. That was a time when it had become fashionable to talk about the "new Conservatism," a movement of thought advocated by a distinctly different set of writers from our own so-called neo-conservatives. Walter Lippmann's The Public Philosophy had come out that term and was the source of much talk about the limits on the public's rationality; in rebuttal some writers challenged Lippmann's pessimistic assessment of democracy with their own passionate defenses of the traditional values of American progressivism. Other controversial books were then appearing from the Right by such different writers as Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck, and Clinton Rossiter; so it was not surprising that my section-man in the introductory course in Government offered one essay, among other alternatives, on conservatism.