Historians love to ridicule Americans for their lack of historical consciousness, which supposedly makes them believers in the myth of American “exceptionalism,” you know, the idea—not the fact—that the USA was born free of the laws that govern the development of other nations, and that its people are therefore an exception to the rules that regulate these other, less gifted communities: in these terms, “America” was not so much imagined as ordained. Literary critics, philosophers, political scientists, and assorted other academics have recently joined this chorus. The invective invocation of exceptionalism has become something of a recreational retreat, a commonplace fit for the moments when a writer with nothing to say except what reviews of books have taught him to say must pause, clear his throat, and get on with his tedious rehearsal of borrowed thoughts and stolen phrases.
I introduce the book I’m writing with an angry riposte to this complacence; for it is plain to me that the academics themselves, historians included, are the ones who lack historical consciousness. I go on to argue that it is precisely this lack which accounts for their extraordinary blindness to a simple fact—that the emergence and articulation of pragmatism in the thinking of William James, ca. 1898-1910, revolutionized intellectual discourse in every field and in every corner of the globe, to the point where it can safely be said that something as cosmopolitan and arcane as “French Theory” is a return of the repressed, or, if you like, a new branch on a family tree with deep American roots.
Here’s how I put it in the opening pages of the book in progress:
“This periodization of the book brings us back to my first set of questions. How to explain the obvious yet unnoticed fact that ‘French Theory’ is a profuse branch on the family tree of pragmatism? And so what if it is? Why claim a national origin and natal significance for what quickly became a globalized intellectual idiom that, as early as the 1920s, was already inflected by its restatement—transformed by its repetition—in ‘foreign’ languages?
“To begin with, I would cite the diffidence of American intellectuals themselves. By this I mean their inability to grasp the cultural traditions or customs of the US as anything but a deviation from or an exception to those of other ‘advanced’ civilizations. In this sense, the frontier thesis as devised by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893—the idea that spatial extension into ‘virgin land’ enforced a continuous cultural regression, so that the latest chronological moment in American history was always the reiteration of its earliest, boyish beginnings at the margin of civilization—became a lived reality, practically the common sense, of American intellectuals themselves by the 1920s, and remains to this day as an obstacle to the retrieval of a usable past from the American intellectual archive.
“That common sense was of a piece with the verdict rendered by European philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Bertrand Russell, who had, by the 1920s, identified pragmatism as the epitome of the American exception to the rules of metaphysical—that is, genuinely philosophical—discourse. The capstone in this curriculum is captured in the title of Cornel West’s scholarly work, The American Evasion of Philosophy (1987), a strong and sympathetic reading of pragmatism from Emerson to Rorty.
“The irony here is that the professors of history, philosophy, and literature who have made ‘exceptionalism’ their master text in convicting Americans of imbecility are the true believers in the exemption of America from the laws of motion that shape normal historical development in other civilizations. In other words, it’s their blind, unjustified faith in the social amnesia of the American people—both the leaders and the led, the educated and the unwashed—that makes for the persistence of the idea, not the actual historical and literary record. Even a cursory examination of this record reveals that Americans, both the leaders and the led, have come to debates about their future equipped with an acute historical consciousness, largely because they have never shared a national origin, a religious tradition, or a linguistic affinity, and so must argue about and choose among competing narratives of the American past.
“It is true, of course, that John Winthrop invoked a ‘city upon a hill’—a righteous citadel fortified against the corruptions of old world creeds—when exhorting his fellow Puritans to leave their pasts behind, and that Ronald Reagan recited the line, with feeling, almost 400 years later. It is also and more importantly true that the men who wrote the US Constitution did so with the historical precedents of all previous republics in full view, knowing that an escape from the Polybian cycle that had destroyed every one of those fragile polities would require the enlistment, not the evasion, of historical time—that is why these founders, particularly James Madison, put commerce, the division of labor, and yes, even class division and conflict to work in prolonging the life of their new republic.
“And, to cite another example, it’s clear that the architects of American Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries departed, at least in theory, from all inherited models of imperialism —they believed that their new design would permit growth and development in the former colonies of European nations, not merely the continued exploitation of them—but it is equally clear that their departure was determined by their close study of all former empires, from which, like Madison, they drew the lesson that these historical precedents had exhausted their potential. They didn’t repudiate or evade the past; they ransacked it for practical purposes, and found it lacked a workable template for an anti-colonial, developmental imperialism.
“But the question remains: why are American intellectuals so suspicious of their own predecessors, to the point where they believe that a usable past is not to be found in American history—except, of course, at the margins of discourse, where the losers and the dissenters, the renegades and the castaways, the dreamers and the damned gather to say ‘No, in thunder’ to the rural idiocy of the American way, or, more likely, to say ‘I prefer not to’ in announcing their principled abstention from the broken promise of American life? Why do they, as a result, leave themselves vulnerable to the latest intellectual fashion from the other shore? Myra Jehlen, a formidable contestant in the culture wars that consumed higher education in the late-20th century, once explained this vulnerability to me by comparing American academics to the indigenous peoples who couldn’t survive the germs brought by European invaders three centuries before: in so-called French Theory, she quipped, they encountered a ‘disease against which they had no immunity.’ [personal communication, May 5, 2023]”
If you think I exaggerate this disciplined forgetting, the kind that lets academics treat the American past as something that is at best embarrassing, you can sample almost any journal or magazine that exists to translate more or less academic research into terms the fabled general public can digest—from The Atlantic, The Nation, and Harper’s, the founding fathers, to The Hedgehog Review, LARB, NYRB, LRB, and Bookforum, on toward The Economist, Project Syndicate, and The American Prospect. Flip through the pages of the last year or so in any of these publications, and I guarantee you will find a reference to “exceptionalism,” whether in passing or as the topic at hand.
The latest such reference is already waiting for you in LRB, with a publication date of January 4, 2024, in a review of a book on John Locke by Colin Kidd, a professor of modern history at St. Andrews. [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/colin-kidd/antidote-to-marx?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email]
Kidd opens with this whopper:
“Among the enduring riddles of American exceptionalism is the absence in the political mainstream of an overtly socialist party. Whereas in Europe socialist and social democratic parties emerged to tame the excesses of private enterprise, the much rawer, more carelessly exploitative forms of capitalism found in the United States failed to provoke a political response of a similar character or on anything like the same scale. The paltry 6 per cent of the popular vote won in the 1912 election by Eugene Debs remains the best performance by a Socialist Party presidential candidate. In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately rejected the idea that there was any socialist intent in the New Deal, presenting it instead as a pragmatic, non-doctrinaire response to a highly particular crisis.”
Key words: enduring, whereas, failed, paltry, pragmatic (as against socialist) . . . . If these egregious statements were questions, a competent lawyer would object on the grounds that they’re leading the witness because they assume the factual standing of what needs to be proven factual, as in “Where did you dispose of the murder weapon?” or “When did you stop beating your wife?” or “Why can’t Johnny read?” or “Why did the Harlem Renaissance fail?”—or, the default setting of the lazy historian who has never bothered to read Max Weber’s reply to Werner Sombart: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”
What makes Kidd think that the only reliable evidence of socialism is to be found where an avowedly socialist party competes for votes? We know that capitalism exists, but has there ever been a political formation that calls itself “the” Capitalist Party?** The bourgeois citizens who invented modernity by means of revolution didn’t know they were clearing the way for capitalism—they’d be appalled by what their successors have wrought (yes, Adam Smith would be, too, although Alexander Hamilton would probably exult in the results). But they did, in fact, make capitalism possible by celebrating and instantiating new social relations of production which allowed anyone with enough money to buy the kinds of property designated by new markets in land and as labor power.
So, shouldn’t we be looking for the evidence of socialism in the same places, in social relations of goods production, where change is slow and barely perceptible until it’s not, when quantitative change becomes qualitative? The transition from feudalism to capitalism had been underway for at least 250 years by the time anybody got around to naming the new mode of production, and explaining how it had arrived (the year was 1854, and it was William Makepeace Thackery the novelist, not Karl Marx the political economist, who coined the word).
Even in view of the accelerating pace of change we have experienced since then, shouldn’t we expect to find the evidence of socialism to appear similarly—incrementally and in less obvious places than in political manifestos or parties? Why do we take it for granted that Lenin was right in believe that socialism would be established only by way of a revolutionary vanguard party, and that revolution meant the “overthrow of the state” and the annihilation of capitalism? Didn’t Gramsci cure us of this mental disease? Hadn’t Eduard Bernstein diagnosed it already, in 1899, in Evolutionary Socialism?
Kidd concludes as he began, with the solemn aplomb that always accompanies the certainties of hard-earned ignorance:
“From the mid-1960s the works of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock demonstrated that the revolution and constitution owed more to a participatory language of virtue, duty and civic activism derived from the Ancients via Machiavelli and late 17th-century English Commonwealthmen than to the rights-based idioms of liberalism [of which Locke was a founder]. Daniel Walker Howe went on to trace the persistence of these classical republican tropes well into the mid-19th century in the ideology of the American Whig party. Insofar as a distinctive tradition has shaped American political culture and institutions, it derived from Aristotle, Livy and Polybius, not Locke.
“These insights have failed to dislodge Locke from his place in American popular memory, however misremembered or historically dubious. But a growing awareness on the progressive left of his shareholding in the Royal African Company and his broader complicity in slavery and colonialism has seriously dented his reputation. Arcenas anticipates Locke’s eviction from the liberal canon, and wonders whether he might be replaced by another icon—John Stuart Mill, say. Locke’s curious American afterlife remains an unfinished story, like the unresolved history of the word ‘liberal’ itself, which carries a raft of seemingly incompatible meanings—sometimes pejorative—in current Anglo-American usage; denoting, variously, the middle ground of politics, a vast range of positions on the left, and, less often but just as plausibly, the free-market right. These ambiguities are generally understood, but there is also a less well-known difficulty, an anachronism of the sort that makes historians twitchy. Since the term ‘liberal’ acquired a political hue only in the early 19th century, in what sense can any 17th-century philosopher really be said to belong to the liberal canon?”
There is so much horseshit in these two paragraphs that Hercules himself couldn’t clean it up. Does Kidd really believe that Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock displaced Louis Hartz—in effect, that the Machiavellian dialect of an Aristotelian language was more audible in the making of the American Revolution and the political tradition it enabled than the Lockean idiom of natural rights, which Tom Paine and Sam Adams invariably used to rouse their new constituencies? If so, Colin must have stopped reading or thinking in 1975, when the late Pocock’s magnificent opus, The Machiavellian Moment, was published. The American political tradition has never been EITHER Machiavellian OR Lockean—it has always been both, in keeping with its commitment to both liberty AND equality, or both negative AND positive notions of freedom.
Does Kidd not know that John Stuart Mill was something of a socialist, and made no secret of it? Does he really believe that a 17th-century philosopher has no relevance to an intellectual tradition crafted in the 19th or the 20th century? If so, what are we to do with current curricula that are strewn with readings from antiquity, and political ideas that are loaded with meanings invented long before he and his students were born? Toss them, for want of relevance?
You can see why this sort of bilge irritates me. Its purveyors silently congratulate themselves for displaying what they accuse the unwashed of lacking, a consciousness of how the past comes before us, but is not behind us. It is precisely this, a historical consciousness, that prestigious professional historians like Colin Kidd lack. It is precisely this, a historical consciousness, that the American people must have, because without it, they have nothing to say to their fellow citizens: they know better than their credentialed betters that, absent a common heritage in origins, language, and customs, the only grounds for staking a claim to be an American with a legitimate voice in determining the future of the USA is there, on the terrain of a usable past.
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**This is a point frequently made by Martin J. Sklar, whose ideas about the provenance of socialism have deeply informed mine.