updated 4/23/03AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Adapted from Sean Wilentz, "AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM" Encyclopedia of the American Left (Garland, 1990), pp. 20-22; Rachel Clutterbuck , Seymour Lipset...
[Note -- this is a work in progress, definitiley in need of more work. However, there are now in place numerous links, enough to keep anyone busy for quite a long time. in creating hyperlinks for the people, terms, books, and so forth, below, to save time, I did not always search out the best scholarly sources.]
the concept "American Exceptionalism" was coined by the Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America
"Exceptional" in this context is to be interpreted as "...qualitatively different from all other countries." Seymour Martin Lipset. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, (W.W.Norton & Company, New York, 1996), pp.18.
in Democracy in America, Tocqueville identified five values crucial to America's success as a democratic republic: (1) liberty (2) egalitarianism, (3) individualism, (4)populism and (5) laissez-faire
These concepts constitue what is known as the American Creed. Tocqueville perceived these values as being reflective of the absence of feudal and hierarchical structures such as monarchies and aristocracies.
but AE definitely is a double-edged sword
Lipset writes that the idea of American Exceptionalism reveals America to be both the worst and the best nation. As he says, is is "...a double-edged sword."
on the one hand, the "good" side of the double edged sword promotes, "Egalitarianism," ie, equality of opportunity, the idea that in America, anyone can become president
The U.S is reputed as valueing meritocracy, of being a free society open to the most efficient and most competent. Though Franklin directly addresses this notion in his "Work Ethic", the precedent was set by early Puritan settlers. The religious tradition set by them, which emphasises individualism and personal rights, proved to be foundational to the rise of capitalism in America. Lipset writes:
"Americans do not feel obligations, other than familial, if these conflict with the requirements of efficiency or income. They are more disposed than other people to expect individuals to do their best for themselves, not for others." (238)
The puritan emphasis on the individual's rights can be seen as the origins for the value of laissez-faire. Although such things as this and the Bill of Rights are progressive, they are also the cause of the excessive litigousness which now prevails in America.
As well as the work ethic, the education ethic (which promotes widespread public education) has its origins in puritan ideology. The puritans perceived knowledge to be a form of protection against the temptation of sin. Lipset quotes a passage from the "Code of 1650, Being a Complilation of the Earliest Law and Orders of the General Court of Conecticut" (Hartford, CT:S Andrus & Son, c.1822, pp.90 - 91, Lipset. p 61)):
"It being one chiefe project of that old deluder, Sathan, to keepe men from the knowledge of the scriptures, as in former times, keeping them in an unknowne tongue, so in these latter times, by perswading them from the use of tongues, so that at least, the true sence and meaning of the originall might bee clouded with false glosses of saint seeming deceivers; and that learning may not bee buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our indeavors..."
The puritans set an example which was influential upon the social, political and economical spheres of contemporary American society. Values the Puritans initiated are still prevalent today, Lipset writes:
"America began and continues as the most anti-statist, legalist, and rights-oriented nation." (20)
on the other hand, the "dark" side of the double edged sword promotes, violence, brutality, hatred, cruelty
From alternet, this recent posting by Ira Leonard, Violence is the American Way, April 16, 2003, goes a long way in demonstrating with evidence the fact that, in the US, American Exceptionalism definitely has a dark side. (Ira M. Leonard, a professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University, gave this address to the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, January 2003.)
"Increasingly, Americans are a people without history, with only memory, which means a people poorly prepared for what is inevitable about life -- tragedy, sadness, moral ambiguity -- and therefore a people reluctant to engage difficult ethical issues."
Elliot Gorn, "Professing History: Distinguishing Between Memory and Past," Chronicle of Higher Education (April 28, 2000).
In August 2002, President George Bush began to drum up a war fever in America with a view to toppling Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein, alleged to be the possessor of weapons of mass destruction. Bush did so without providing the evidence, the costs, the "why now" explanation, or long-term implications of such a war.
And by October 2002, The United States Congress not only granted the president a virtual declaration of war for an historically unprecedented "pre-emptive war," but did so without raising any questions about the whys, the evidence, the costs, or long term implications for the nation -- and for the world -- of such an unprovoked invasion.
Only a democratic society accustomed to war -- and predisposed to the use of war and violence -- would accept war so quickly, without asking any questions or demanding any answers from its leaders about the war.
And only the opposition of the French, Germans, Russians, and Chinese finally forced some Americans to raise questions about what was actually being planned. This, coupled with the anti-war demonstrations on February 15th, 2003 by millions of people in 350 cities around the globe, delayed President Bush from actually launching this war against Iraq by mid-February 2003.
I encourage you to read the entire piece, as posted by Alternet, because the information Leonard has assembled about violence and its related cognates in America is both shocking and depressing, in the true sense of each of these over-used terms.
At bottom, AE refers to the apparent departure of the United States from certain assumed historical norms or laws of development
The notion of American exceptionalism is an old one with many meanings. ... For one reason or another, so the notion goes, the United States has failed to produce eversharper antagonisms between capital and labor (as measured, most commonly, by the rise of a viable socialist movement). Hence, it appears that America is an exceptional historical case, quite different from other capitalist nations.
observers have often diluted the concept of American exceptionalism to mean something closer to American distinctiveness
The search for reasons why this is so has taken scholars and pundits in numerous directions, searching for the flaws (or, depending on the writer, the strengths) that are unique to American politics, culture, and social relations. As a result of these searches, scholars and other investigators, or just the curious, focus on the ways the United States is different from other countries.
claims about American exceptionalism date back to the earliest days of European settlement
In some respects, claims about American exceptionalism date back to the earliest days of European settlement on these shores -- at least as far back as John Winthrop's famous remark to his fellow Puritans in 1630, that they would establish a "city upon a hill," a clear break from the corrupt world they had left behind. Through the age of revolution, travelers, colonists, and home-grown philosophes explored what was special about the North American continent and its inhabitants-inquiries that culminated in Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. By the nineteenth century, America had come to loom large in the imaginations of European thinkers as different as Hegel and Tocqueville, as some sort of exceptional image of the future. Americans, for their part, proudly proclaimed theirs a unique political society, freed from the shackles of Old World superstition and tyranny.
the coming of industrialism to the United States, the emergence of labor movements from the 1820s to the 1890s, and the demise of slavery forced observers to rethink some of these assumptions, in light of the passing of long-established regimes
Professor Sean Wilentz , who introduces us some of the striking ambivalence that comes as part of the baggage of American Exceptionalism, gives these references for further investigation: Wilentz, Sean. "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920," with critiques by Nick Salvatore and Michael Hanagan and reply by Wilentz. International Labor and Working Class 26-27 (1984-85); Foner, Eric. "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" History Workshop Journal, no. 17 (Spring, 1984).
"Mainstream writers," Wilentz asserts, "while foreseeing the closing of the American frontier and the rapid growth of manufacturing, celebrated America's supposedly exceptional lack of fixed social classes and its opportunities for social mobility." For example, T. Roosevelt, "The Trusts, the People, and the Square Deal," Outlook 99 (18 Nov. l9ll), pp. 649-656; T. Roosevelt, ". . . Where We Cannot Work with Socialists," and "Where We Can Work with Socialists," Outlook 91 (20, 27 March 1909), pp. 619-623, 662-664. Whether these roosevelt texts are digitized and available on the Web is not clear. Check the extensive bibliography in Sklar, below, especially the "Coda" section, larded with quotes to writers contemporary the latter part of the era noted above, ie, 1820-1890.)
Homegrown "American radicals," as one example, measured some of the new industrial realities against the legacy of the American Revolution, and found that the nation had departed in decisive ways from its highest ideals of personal independence. "European radicals", as a second example, "tended to respond ambiguously to American events: while none could deny the liveliness of American labor movements, they also tended to believe that American workers were far more attached to bourgeois political and social ideals than their European counterparts were-and therefore proved an "exceptional" kind of working class." Martin J. Sklar, "Capitalism and Socialism in the Emergence of Modern America: The Formative Era, 1890's-1916 Also check out William A. Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland: World, 1961); W. A. Williams, The Great Evasion (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968) and Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1955). [As I get time, I'll flesh these examples out with quotes from actual texts.]
in the 20th century, the notion of American exceptionalism has gathered enormous strength from writings all across the political spectrum
Conservative writers, sometimes mingling nostalgia with analysis, have kindled the ideal of America as a providential nation, set apart from the rest of the world as a bastion of freedom.
[statement by Quaker writer against AE as a tool of american foreign policy, recommended by hawks]
Liberal writers have preferred to focus on economic growth and cultural pluralism as the keys to understanding American distinctiveness.
mostly, however, the modern discussion of exceptionalism has revolved around issues first raised on the Left
The German socialist Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) became a classic statement of the problem. Sombart's answer to the question he posed -- that American class-consciousness had been wrecked on "shoals of roast beef and apple pie" -- reflected both the economism of the Second International and the German ascendancy within the international socialist movement. (sombart's text doesn't seem to be available on the Web in digitized format.) Lipset, in another work, posits his reasons. Nonetheless, others have interpreted the matter of "socialism" in America in an entirely differing perspective, as you'll see in these two examples: (1) (2) The emigre , a product of the Russian social revolutionary movement, restated matters somewhat in A Theory of the Labor Movement (1928). Perlman stressed both the importance of political citizenship and the power of "pure-and-simple," "bread-and-butter" unionism as major factors undermining American working-class radicalism and assuring American exceptionalism. Somewhat later, the question reappeared in various dissident corners. Of special note were the writings of Leon Sampson, which argued that "Americanism" had become a kind of substitutive socialism for American workers. In a rather different vein, writers grouped around the anti-Stalin Bukharinite opposition of the 1930s -- including Bertram Wolfe and Lewis Corey -- wrote explicitly of "American exceptionalism" while drawing on Bukharin's general theory of exceptionalism.
since the 1930s, what had once been a debating point for left-wing intellectuals has entered the mainstream of academic controversy
Young liberal historians and sociologists who had been influenced by the 1930s Left (notably Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Seymour Martin Lipset) -- [Lipset later became a neoconservative] refashioned the exceptionalism idea in the 1950s, in their explanations for the apparent overriding consensus in American political life. The more celebratory strain in this scholarship lives on today in the writings of historians like Boorstin, as one of the animating concepts behind academic neoconservativism.
The New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, while arguing against the so-called consensus school, carried on with its own versions of the exceptionalism argument. While insisting that class divisions are central to American life, New Leftists also contended that one or another social or cultural factor (ethnicity, racism, party politics, mass culture) has effectively muffled working-class consciousness. Explanations for what various scholars called "the historical incorporation of the American working class" remained very much a part of New Left historical and sociological writing, whether couched in the Gramscian vocabulary of "hegemony," in borrowings from the Frankfurt School, or in some other idiom.
more recently, the entire concept has come under further scrutiny -- and considerable attack.
At the core of the exceptionalism problem, some scholars have argued, is a fallacious, teleological assumption that the past and present ought to judged against some preconceived notion of what ought to have happened. Continuing events in Europe and elsewhere have made the United States seem far less "exceptional" than ever before. The criteria for assessing normality-what C. Wright Mills once called a "labor metaphysic," which quickly turned into a socialist metaphysic-no longer appear as self-evident as they once did. Discarding their blinders, several historians have located a powerful, recurrent strain of American working-class consciousness, rooted in the very concepts of democratic equality that older historians misconstrued as "bourgeois." Without denying the obvious differences between the United States and other industrial capitalist countries-the heritage of slavery, the impact of mass immigration, the changing structure of American politics-historians, literary critics, and social scientists have begun looking at class relations and social development without judging them against some predetermined model of supposedly normative results.
still some scholars and activists who think the exceptionalism question a useful entryway into larger problems of United States and world history
Not that the idea of American exceptionalism has entirely disappeared. The picture of America as a shining city on a hill, standing virtually outside of history, retains a powerful cultural appeal. Plainly, the differences between characteristically American ideas and situations and those in other countries are open to comparative study. There are still some scholars and activists who think the exceptionalism question a useful entryway into larger problems of United States and world history. At the moment, however, the whole matter would seem to be more important as a myth that needs analysis than as a fixed historical reality requiring some global explanatory theory. See also: History, U.S.
REFERENCES
Laslett, John H., and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds. Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism. Garden City: Doubleday, 1974.
Perlman, Selig. A Theory of the Labor Movement. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1928.
Sombart, Werner. Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? 1906. Reprint. White Plains: International Aptitudes & Science Press, 1976.