The idea that the United States is destined to spread its unique gifts of democracy and capitalism to other countries is dangerous for Americans and for the rest of the world, warns Godfrey Hodgson in this provocative book. Hodgson, a shrewd and highly respected British commentator, argues that America is not as exceptional as it would like to think; its blindness to its own history has bred a complacent nationalism and a disastrous foreign policy that has isolated and alienated it from the global community. Tracing the development of America’s high self regard from the early days of the republic to the present era, Hodgson demonstrates how its exceptionalism has been systematically exaggerated and—in recent decades—corrupted. While there have been distinct and original elements in America’s history and political philosophy, notes Hodgson, these have always been more heavily influenced by European thought and experience than Americans have been willing to acknowledge. A stimulating and timely assessment of how America’s belief in its exceptionalism has led it astray, this book is mandatory reading for its citizens, admirers, and detractors.

A powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America’s exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America’s exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.

American Exceptionalism provides an accessible yet comprehensive historical account of one of the most important concepts underlying modern theories of American cultural identity. Deborah Madsen charts the contribution of exceptionalism to the evolution of the United States as an ideological and geographical entity from 1620 to the present day. She explains how this sense of spiritual and political destiny has shaped American culture and how it has promoted exciting counter arguments from Native American and Chicano perspectives and in the contemporary writings of authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The "Natural Elevation" of Equity: Quasi-Inquisitorial Procedure and the Early Nineteenth-Century Resurgence of Equity -- Chapter 2. A Troubled Inheritance: The English Procedural Tradition and Its Lawyer- Driven Reconfiguration in Early Nineteenth-Century New York -- Chapter 3. The Non-Revolutionary Field Code: Democratization, Docket Pressures, and Codification -- Chapter 4. Cultural Foundations of American Adversarialism: Civic Republicanism and the Decline of Equity's Quasi-Inquisitorial Tradition -- Chapter 5. Market Freedom and Adversarial Adjudication: The Nineteenth-Century American Debates over (European) Conciliation Courts and the Problem of Procedural Ordering -- Chapter 6. The Freedmen's Bureau Exception: The Triumph of Due (Adversarial) Process and the Dawn of Jim Crow -- Conclusion. The Question of American Exceptionalism and the Lessons of History -- Appendix. An Overview of the Archives -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Is America unique? One of our major political analysts explores the deeply held but often unarticulated beliefs that shape the American creed. "(A) magisterial attempt to distill a lifetime of learning about America into a persuasive brief . . . (by) the dean of American political sociologists".--Carlin Romano, "Boston Globe".

Why did Donald Trump follow Barack Obama into the White House? Why is America so polarized? And how does American exceptionalism explain these social changes? In this provocative book, Mugambi Jouet describes why Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sex, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war. Raised in Paris by a French mother and Kenyan father, Jouet then lived in the Bible Belt, Manhattan, and beyond. Drawing inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville, he wields his multicultural sensibility to parse how the intense polarization of U.S. conservatives and liberals has become a key dimension of American exceptionalism—an idea widely misunderstood as American superiority. While exceptionalism once was a source of strength, it may now spell decline, as unique features of U.S. history, politics, law, culture, religion, and race relations foster grave conflicts. They also shed light on the intriguing ideological evolution of American conservatism, which long predated Trumpism. Anti-intellectualism, conspiracy-mongering, a visceral suspicion of government, and Christian fundamentalism are far more common in America than the rest of the Western world—Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Exceptional America dissects the American soul, in all of its peculiar, clashing, and striking manifestations.

It’s become fashionable among the liberal elite to downplay, deride, even deny America’s greatness. The political correctness police insist that America is “hated” around the world for being too big, too powerful, too rich, too successful, too loud, too intrusive. And besides, it’s not nice to brag. They are completely missing the point. America’s greatness, America’s exceptional greatness, is not based on that fact that we are the most powerful, most prosperous—and most generous—nation on earth. Rather, those things are the result of American Exceptionalism. To understand American Exceptionalism, as Newt Gingrich passionately argues in A Nation Like No Other, one must understand our unique birth as a nation. American Exceptionalism is found in the simple yet utterly remarkable principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.” Our nation is exceptional, continues Newt, because we—unlike any nation before or since—are united by the belief and the promise that no king, no government, no ruling class has the power to infringe upon the rights of the individual. And when such a government attempts to do so, we will vigorously reject them. Sadly, many politicians and leaders today have forgotten our sacred commitment to these ideals. Our government has strayed alarmingly far from the scope of limited powers framed by our Founders. Meanwhile, the liberal media seek out, and sometimes create, stories intended to portray America as a bully and a thief. Even our own president seems clueless, assuring us that yes, yes, he believes in American exceptionalism, just like the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism and the British in British exceptionalism. But American Exceptionalism is not about cheerleading for the home team. It’s about recognizing and honoring the history-making, world-changing ideals our Founding Fathers enshrined to make this a nation of the people, by the people, for the people. And, as Lincoln warned, we must rededicate ourselves to those principles, lest our truly exceptional nation perish from this earth.