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"Louis Hartz [1919–1986]...was born in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of Russian immigrants, but grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. After graduating from Omaha Technical High School, he attended Harvard University, financed partly by a scholarship from the Omaha World Herald.

Hartz graduated in 1940, spent a year traveling abroad on a fellowship, then returned to Harvard as a teaching fellow in 1942. He earned his PhD in 1946 and became a full professor of government in 1956. Hartz was known at Harvard for his talented and charismatic teaching. He retired in 1974 due to ill health and spent his last years living in London, New Delhi, New York, then Istanbul, where he died.

Hartz's is best known for his classic book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) which presented an original view of America's past that sought to explain its conspicuous absence of ideologies. Hartz argued that American political development occurs within the context of an enduring, underlying Lockean liberal consensus, which has shaped and narrowed the landscape of possibilities for U.S. political thought and behavior. He attributed the triumph of the liberal worldview in America to its lack of a feudal past, and thus the absent struggle to overcome a conservative internal order; its vast resources and open space; and to the liberal values of the original settlers, who represented only a narrow middle-class slice of European society. Hartz was chiefly concerned with explaining the failure of socialism to become established in America, and believed that Americans' pervasive, unthinking consensual acceptance of classic liberalism was the major barrier. Hartz thus firmly rejected Marxist ideas about the inevitability of class struggle.

In 1956 the American Political Science Association awarded Hartz its Woodrow Wilson Prize for The Liberal Tradition in America, and in 1977 gave him its Lippincott Prize, designed to honor scholarly works of enduring importance. The book remains a key text in the political science graduate curriculum in American politics in universities today, in part because of the extensive, long-running criticism and commentary Hartz's ideas have generated." (from Wikipedia.com)

His other publications include The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada and Australia (1964), Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania 1776–1860 (1982), and The Necessity of Choice: Nineteenth Century Political Thought (1990), published posthumously.