the Declaration’s signing, in the Miltonian moment of rebellion in New York,
Americans begin with a question (‘‘If you b’st he.. .’’) that points to the
radical undecidability of a willed and consensual political identity. Are we
especially blessed? Particularly patriotic or treasonous? Uniquely damned? In
Hartz’s and Rogin’s visions of American exceptionalism, this sort of undecid-
ability is not merely an eVect of radical political moments; it is central to one’s
life, an unavoidable part of living as a self-made individual. ‘‘Uncertain of the
motives of others and worried about their own, Americans were preoccupied
with natural states,’’ Rogin writes. ‘‘They gloriWed the authentic, spontaneous
natural man who wore no masks, played no roles, and never dissembled’’
(Rogin 1975 , 258 ). The paradoxical demand of this gloriWcation of the natural
was that oneperformthe role of the genuine, spontaneous, self-made, and
industrious individual. This opened a gap between performance and per-
former, and reinforced the anxiety that we are not who we pretend to be. 1
Rogin demonstrates how central racial performance becomes to this
dilemma. It serves, via popular pseudo-science, as the a priori foundation
of identity in America. Race becomes, in American political life, a clear
marker of who one is—rational or irrational, citizen or outsider, master or
slave. The power of subjugation for Lockean liberalism, in short, comes from
the ability to name, to identify precisely, who was rational and industrious
and who was quarrelsome or covetous. White Americans could know whom
they were by identifying Native Americans as the slothful wanderers who
refused to labor the earth and African slaves as the victims of just wars, and
both as examples of scientiWcally veriWed ‘‘inferior races.’’ And thus we return
to racial Othering, to Indian dispossession, slavery, and blackface, at the core,
not the frontier, of American exceptionalism.
Race and exceptionalism have thus been intertwined, either as practice or
in critique, since the beginning. Rogers Smith has attempted to untie that
Gordian knot, or at least identify the diVerent threads in the tangle. Smith has
argued that this campaign for American identity suggests a combination of
alternate and sometimes incoherent ‘‘multiple traditions’’ in US history. At
times, American political thought serves racism or patriarchal authority,
speaking for the sort of feudal absolutism that Hartz thought had never
1 This also fueled the conformity that disturbed Hartz. ‘‘Liberal society, as Adam Smith and John
Adams had described it, progresses by emulation. Always unsatisfied with their present condition,
men copied the successes of others and sought to improve themselves. They internalized personal
ambition and the desire for the good opinion of others. Since the external and internalized eyes of
society provided order, men could enjoy individual freedom’’ (Rogin 1975 , 207 ).
american exceptionalism in new contexts 291