Twilight of the Republic: Empire and Exceptionalism in the American Political Tradition

1. The Problem of American Exceptionalism

1 the Problem of AmerICAn exCePtIonAlIsm Wide and seemingly interminable disagreements are prominently on display nearly any time the words American exceptionalism are uttered. They are today a shorthand for the popular view that America is not subject to criticism or constraint—at least not beyond any very minimal level. Those who “support” American exceptionalism often critique the idea’s opponents as unpatriotic and un-American. Yet those who oppose American exceptionalism in this way are difficult to identify.1 Chief among current opponents of American exceptionalism is, it is said, President Barack Obama, who in his first trip abroad as president espoused a number of equivocal senses of the term simultaneously.2 If he is genuinely confused about the precise meaning of the term, the president is far from alone. The question of American exceptionalism has perplexed historians and social scientists for over a century. Part of the confusion arises from the various meanings of the term, though even when there is agreement on the term’s meaning this has not assured similar conclusions about its underlying causes. For a hundred years the scholarship on the topic has mainly focused on finding what lies at the root of America’s uniqueness .3 Some have argued that it is America’s lack of a feudal past that sets it apart—along with the Lockean liberal consensus that follows from this.4 Others have said it is America’s unique foundation in, or aversion to, philosophical politics.5 Some have argued that it is America’s unique cultural heritage of liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire that explains the difference.6 American uniqueness has been attributed to its unique political system, particularly its federal structure.7 Still others have claimed American exceptionalism is due to the place of the frontier in American life, or America’s unique economic circumstances— whether it is the character and history of organized labor, the early advent 5 6 Twilight of the Republic of universal white manhood suffrage, the degree of upward mobility, or the abundance of job and business opportunities and American natural resources.8 But uniqueness can be taken in a number of different ways, a point I will amplify later. There is, to say the least, little consensus on either the nature or the causes of American exceptionalism. Many social scientists argue that America is indeed an exceptional country, though the notion is not held universally in academe; numerous historians have come to deny the claim.9 Many of these authors silently suggest that the idea of American exceptionalism is uncomplicated, since very few discuss their particular meaning in using the term. That the numerous articles and monographs on the subject do not seem to engage one another, however , suggests a reason that the use of the term, and the ensuing debate, is largely uncritical. Nearly all this scholarship to date contains an important common thread. On core methodological considerations, even critics of American exceptionalism seem to agree with exceptionalist proponents. All of these scholars understand the term American exceptionalism to be a claim in the idiom of comparative political science or comparative history. At the core of the term, it is thought, American exceptionalism means that there is either some standard from which America deviates—perhaps one provided by a historical ideology such as Marxism—or that America deviates from an empirical pattern set by similar countries—as with America’s high rates of imprisonment, and so on. These scholars’ primarily comparative tack means that the question of American exceptionalism is usually taken to be an empirical one, answerable by survey analysis and the cataloging of various other measurable phenomena. Though the scholarship is fairly unified on this point, scholars’ resulting accounts intersect little or not at all. Their methodological unity appears to be their only point of unity. Their conclusions are as diverse as the data they use. Some have tried to account for and move beyond these impasses, though with little success. Because of this, a new way of moving forward is needed. The new way forward should not partake of the same basic assumptions as these accounts, because a similar inconclusiveness is likely to be the result. Rather than social science or comparative history , there can be a new way forward through political theory. But, for reasons of both ideology and scholarly interest, other ways and methods have predominated. The Problem of American Exceptionalism 7 Werner...