A government of limited powers 15the period up until the Revolution, colonial political ideas followed closely
upon those of the mother country. There was, however, from the beginning,
a basic incompatibility between these European ideas about politics and the
actual circumstances of American life, an incompatibility that became more
and more evident as the eighteenth century progressed, and which burst into
the open with the outbreak of the Revolution. For the society that established
itself in America was not composed of a cross-section of the then existing
European society; neither were the circumstances in which it found itself
those of Europe. As Louis Hartz has explained, the most important factor
of American history is that it lacked altogether an ancien régime. Feudalism
never existed in America in spite of the existence of the great landowners
and planters of colonial times, or of the bond-slaves who arrived from Europe
to serve out their time under their American masters. America is not, and
never has been, a classless society, but there is a very real sense in which
it has always been a middle-class society, without the extremes, except in
relation to black slavery, of European class attitudes. In an age when Europe
was dominated by kings and nobles, America represented an ideal of a more
egalitarian society in which, with ability and industry, a man might easily rise
to the highest positions. The absence of a socialist tradition in America is in
large part the result of the fact that there was not the same class structure
for the socialist to react against as in Europe. This is what is often referred
to as ‘American exceptionalism’.
There was always an underlying conviction among Americans that they
had broken away from the corruption of old Europe to create a new and clean
society. They were influenced, it is true, by European institutions and Euro-
pean ideas, for they had no other source upon which to draw, but they felt
able, by the exercise of human reason, to select those things that were good
and to reject those that were bad. Thus when they came to write the Con-
stitution of the United States they were deeply influenced by the balanced
constitution of eighteenth-century England, but they did not copy it slav-
ishly. They created something new, something unique, and they were aware
that they were doing so. The Federalist Papers, written in 1787–8 by Alexander
Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, urging the acceptance of the pro-
posed Constitution, provide perhaps the greatest example of human reason
attempting to combine the wisdom of tradition with the rational solution of
new and unprecedented problems. There is, therefore, a sense of unique-
ness in the American experience that ensures the autonomy of the American
political tradition.
The fact that the American polity is a conscious creation is an explanation
of its ‘Americanness’, but it is also the explanation, in part at least, of other
aspects of American life that it is harder for the outsider to understand. Iso-
lationism, the sense that America should not become embroiled with the
problems and rivalries of Europe or the rest of the world, became associated
in the 1930s and 1940s with groups who had a particular reason, usually their
ethnic origins, for not wanting to become involved in Europe’s quarrels. But