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American Exceptionalism: Challenges and Renewals

from V - Ideologia Americana or Americanism in Action: Exceptionalism and Democracy Promotion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

Benjamin P. Greene
Affiliation:
United States Naval Academy
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Summary

The notion of American exceptionalism, a receding trend among historians of America, has been resurgent in some political circles. Many historians view the organizational framework of exceptionalism that once dominated the national narrative as an outmoded paradigm. It runs against the currents in the profession to internationalize the study of American history. For these scholars, the attributes identified as uniquely American are overdrawn. For example, current historical scholarship challenges an earlier view that America developed in isolation. Instead, it emphasizes America's development within a global context, heavily influenced by a range of transnational actors, events, ideas, and processes. Politicians and commentators, in contrast, have renewed claims of a distinct American character, though the attributes of this character have changed over time. The end of the Cold War prompted some politicians and political commentators to view U.S. hegemony as the confirmation of exceptionalism and the justification to reassert the characteristics seen as the sources of America's supreme power in the world. The triumphant version of American exceptionalism that followed identified and celebrated exclusive attributes of the world's sole superpower. In their view, America provided the world a single surviving model of human progress, one worthy of imitation. This reformulation of American exceptionalism had important implications for U.S. foreign policy and for the nation's image in the world, most of them negative. This recasting of exceptionalism severely challenged the nation's moral authority and fostered the rise of anti-Americanism.

Type
Chapter
Information
The United States and the World
From Imitation to Challenge
, pp. 287 - 292
Publisher: Jagiellonian University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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