Angel himself. At the outset of the Revolution, there were many Americans
prepared to align themselves with a holy cause; but as this passage suggests,
revolutionaries were also concerned with being part of a profoundly unique
and special historical moment, and were willing, so to speak, to rule in Hell
before they would serve in Heaven. The American republic was to be an
exceptional nation, a community of saints or, if necessary, a republic of the
damned. According to the logic of American exceptionalism, the exemplary
and clearly deWned nature of the Republic, the illumination of its ‘‘essential
soul,’’ is all. Perhaps what is most remarkable is that this narrative is still so
pervasive in American politics. My goal here is to chart the course of this
concept,Wrst by examining the history of the phrase itself, and then by charting
the development of several threads of exceptionalist literature, beginning
before the revolution and extending into the twenty-Wrst century. It is diYcult,
as we shall see, to write about American exceptionalism without engaging in
American exceptionalism; I hope rather to examine this genre of political
thinking as what has amounted to a kind of confusedbildungsroman, and to
force us to confront this narrative and the need that it apparently (as a cursory
glance at coverage of the American war in Iraq suggests) continues to meet.
The phrase ‘‘American exceptionalism’’ was Wrst coined in the mid-
twentieth century. It was part of an attempt by social scientists to explain
the lack of a revolutionary socialist response to the failures of industrial
capitalism in the Great Depression. American political thought, it seems,
was intrinsically diVerent from that of Europe, despite certain superWcial
parallels. Louis Hartz argued that the United States was a uniquely liberal
nation, lacking the feudal past or the Marxian imagination that could have
constructed a revolutionary alternative to the narrow political discourse of
New Deal America (Hartz 1991 , 5 – 11 , 263 – 83 ). In the decades since theWrst
formulation of this argument, however, ‘‘American exceptionalism’’ has be-
come more broadly used in social science, employed whenever one discusses
(or witnesses) faith that the political history of the United States was radically
diVerent from the experience of any other nation and that, indeed, its
experience was exemplary to other nations. We will get to the Hartzian
‘‘liberal America’’ argument, with its picture of a republic living under the
shadow of John Locke; but before that, we must go back further, to prior
examples of national self-deWnition in the United States, to the faith that the
USA was particularly singled out among the various nations of the earth.
We begin with the wilderness. John Locke uses the American wilderness to
signify an enormous distance in space and time; America is both the colonial
american exceptionalism in new contexts 283