thought needed to afford “ascriptive Americanism” full and equal status as a constitutive paradigm of American political thought.
Many others of note both before and after Myrdal, ranging from Hector St. John de Croevecoer, to Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, to Ernest Tuveson (Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, 1968), to Samuel Huntington (American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, 1981), have articulated creedal understandings and visions of American political thought. A closely associated genre are works that have posited an “American character” or an “American mind,” such as Frederick Jackson Turner (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893), David Potter (People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character, 1954), or David Hackett Fischer (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, 1989). Both the creedalist and “American character” genres posit a set of quintessentially American beliefs and inclinations. They advance a diverse set of arguments about their ostensible roots, ranging from the country’s distinctive geographic and material conditions to the national/ethnic/racial characteristics – the demographics – of the people who populated it. Notably, it was only a short step from this approach, in the minds of some of these scholars, to the positing of the underlying values and principles to which “we,” as Americans, are ostensibly committed, and the mind and character “we” ostensibly share. Such homogenizing and essentializing theses, while they remain attractive to many, are also, these days, quite controversial. This is because they not only tend to posit a broad consensus among a diverse and disparate collection of people, but additionally suggest that that consensus has been largely fixed across time, across which the United States experienced many changes, not least in the composition, and political agency, of its populace.
While these understandings, and American creedalism, are typically taught as philosophies or coherent wholes, a variety of observers have seen their importance in American life not as rooted in a deliberate philosophical choice among Americans but in the conditions of their settlement and demographics, and their economic status and class. They have also been embodied in and informed by narratives and stories.
Stories About America
Among political theorists especially, liberalism and republicanism are typically understood, and taught, as political philosophies. They start from core premises and build outward to construct logically coherent and cohesive theories of government, which can then be critiqued, criticized, revised, refined, or rejected. While the political thought of Americans has certainly been informed by underlying political philosophies, however, it has also been informed by narratives and stories, which have their own dynamics different from those involved in arguing a point of political philosophy.
In later work, Rogers Smith wrote about American political thought as (also) being informed, if not foundationally structured, by a set of “people-making,” “ethically constitutive stories.” These stories look to and interpret the nation’s past, offering shared readings of the country’s mores in light of stories about where their tellers imagine the country has been and is going. These might be stories of spiritual aspiration, or prodigal wandering, of anointment or chosenness, or foresakenness, of belonging, privilege, or exclusion, of restoration or redemption, of treachery or betrayal, of decline or triumph. One way to think about such stories is that they are bids at meaning-making, whether by an individual, a group, or the political community as a whole. To be effective, such stories (or narratives) will appeal not just to the intellect but also to the emotions, inspiring feelings of loyalty, resentment, pride, anger, hope, and even love. Such stories are a staple of everything from political speeches and campaigns to national anthems and pop songs, and of the design of flags, government buildings, and public monuments like the Lincoln or the Vietnam memorials. The relationship between the stories Americans have told themselves over the course of their history interact with political philosophies in diverse and complicated ways. Sometimes the stories are enlisted to illustrate and reinforce a particular political framework or philosophy. At other times, they evince their own distinctive, and orthogonal, dynamics.
Conclusion
Many Americans are inclined to treat the study of American political thought as a catechism. In this catechism, the country is held to adhere to a set of abstract, and celebrated, creedal commitments – liberty, equality, democracy, justice – which its institutions were designed to honor and implement. Individuals and the nation may not always live up to these American ideals, and its institutions may from time to time fail to realize them, but, if that is the case, a course correction is always on order, to set the nation – “man’s last best hope on earth” (Lincoln) – back on the right path to the realization of its noblest ideas.
Others, however, approach the subject entirely differently. Many of these other approaches emphasize pluralism, contention, and an open-endedness, provisionality, and perpetual incompleteness that does not lend itself to catechism. In one important study, for instance, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (1987), the Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers posited a cynosure set of words (utility, natural rights, the people, government, interests, the state, and freedom) around which the conceptual debates of American political life have dilated over the course of American history. Given who they are and what they do, great poets – Robert Frost in “The Black Cottage” (1914), for instance, or Tracy K. Smith in “Declaration” (2018) – have also emphasized the open-endedness of core American events and ideas, while still gesturing toward the idea of a discernable American political tradition. Argument, contestation, and irresolution may, by some lights, be as constitutive of a political culture and tradition as unity and finality. Power might matter. But power might be challenged, and shift. In this regard, in her poem, Smith acts not only as legatee subject, but also as self-determining agent of American political thought.
For native-born Americans, the tradition of American political thought is presumably a birthright and inheritance. For naturalized Americans, it is often a chosen history and family. For non-Americans, given the global reach and influence of US power, politics, institutions, and ideas in the twenty-first century, whether undertaken willfully or not, it is commonly an encounter. Knowing the history, habits, perils, and promise of American political thinking is an illuminating part of any rounded political education.
Questions
1 Is there a substantive content to “American” political thought as a distinctive subject of study (as opposed, for instance, to the study of political theory, intellectual history, or even the study of American politics more generally)? If so, in what sense?
2 Is it possible to construct a canon of American political thought? If so, what are the standards enlisted to determine selection for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the canon?
3 In studying American political thought, how accurate or helpful is it to talk about core, shared understandings of concepts like “liberty,” “equality,” “democracy,” or “justice”?
4 How might we think about the political thought of particular individuals across the temporal span of their lives and experiences? Does it make sense to speak of the political thought of, for instance, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or Ronald Reagan as if they had a stable philosophy that extended across the entirety of their lives?
5 How useful, or dangerous, is it to posit an “American exceptionalism”?
6 What is gained or lost in positing either a hegemony or a (delimited) pluralism of overarching ideologies or frameworks to understand American political thought? Relatedly, does it ever make sense to enlist the category of “we” in our discussions of American political thought?
7 Do
