Louis Hartz

Louis Hartz (April 8, 1919 – January 20, 1986) was an American political scientist, historian, and a professor at Harvard University, where he taught from 1942 until 1974. Hartz's teaching and various writings—books and articles—have had an important influence on American political theory and comparative history. which has shaped and narrowed the landscape of possibilities for U.S. political thought and behavior. Hartz attributed this triumph of the liberal worldview in the United States to the lack of a feudal past,

The Founding of New Societies Hartz edited and wrote substantial sections of The Founding of New Societies, published in 1964, in which he developed and expanded upon his “fragment thesis.” It was applied to early colonial history by feminist historian Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda (1976), in which she traced gender relations in colonial New South Wales to the culture of the proletarian fragment identified by Hartz. In 1973, the Australian Economic History Review dedicated an issue to analysis of Hartz's theory.