¹ Other dimensions and perspectives relating to the external behaviour of this or any other state are not, of course, of inherently lesser significance. I shall in fact be referring on occasions to such matters as international and domestic structures, for example; but I cannot hope to do them justice, or to explore the crucial and demanding question of the causal interrelationships and hierarchies that link, inter alia, structures with political culture itself; that link socio-economic and political-economic dimensions to what Clifford Geertz calls “world views”, or Jürgen Habermas “lifeworlds”, or Berger and Luckmann “symbolic universes”. In other words, I have much sympathy with Carole Pateman when she argues that much of the early work on political culture tended to ignore the potential significance of structures and of political socialization. See here “The Civic Culture: A Philosophical Critique”, Almond, G. A. and Verba, S. (eds.), The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, 1980)Google Scholar. I do not follow those like Pierre Bourdieu who would give theoretical primacy to what he terms the “objective structures”, but am in accord, rather, with those such as W. G. Runciman and Michael Mann who emphasize the reciprocal relationships involved, and who tend to accord primacy empirically, on a case-to-case basis. I am also in agreement with Robert Packenham when he observes: “It is certainly true that ideas are conditioned by historical, economic, and socio-cultural forces…. At the same time, however, especially under the press of historical crises, ideas can also acquire autonomy.” See Bourdieu, P., Outline of a Theory of Practice trans. Nice, R. (Cambridge, 1977), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Runciman, W. G., A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory (Cambridge, 1989), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mann, M., States, War, and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford, 1988), viiGoogle Scholar, and The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1986), 1–2Google Scholar; Packenham, R. A., Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton, 1973), 319–20Google Scholar. See also e.g. Cox, R. W., Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York, 1987), 29.Google Scholar

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³⁰ Kattenburg, P. M., The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–75 (New Brunswick, 1980), 69 ffGoogle Scholar. This is not to suggest that ideas and principles do not enter into the defining and functioning of societies in other lands. But the degree to which this has been so in the U.S.A., together with the sheer size and diversity of the peoples involved, appear to justify the notion that the American case is exceptional in this respect.

³¹ These ideas were to have been pursued at greater length in a book that Christopher Thorne was working on when he died, and which would have been entitled, The Demanding Dream: American Society, the American Polity, and the World Beyond, 1941–1964.

³² Quoted in Burns, E. M., The American Idea of Mission: Concepts of National Purpose and Destiny (New Brunswick, 1957), 219Google Scholar. On Croly, see Ross, D., The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 5.Google Scholar

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⁴⁷ On attitudes towards domestic “Others”, see for example, Norton's, Alternative AmericasGoogle Scholar, and Drinnon, R., Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. On one set of connections between attitudes towards internal and external “Others” respectively, see Williams, W. L., “U.S. Indian Policy and the Debate Over Philippine Annexation,” Journal of American History, 66 (03 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On one, current aspect of the interconnections between the politics of domestic pluralities and international affairs, see Sleeper, J., The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York, 1990)Google Scholar. Sleeper observes that, just as New York City's problems cannot be overcome within the context of the prevailing national political-economic system, so in turn “the wealthiest nation on earth has become an increasingly interdependent part of a larger world capitalism that has no stake in America's resolution of its own inequities…. Expanding the economy might still be; balanced and controlled by Americans it is not. Unskilled, semi-skilled and blue-collar workers and the unemployed - categories comprising a majority of the nation's blacks – are the losers” (103, 161).

⁴⁸ See e.g. Burns, , op. cit., 257.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ See e.g. Tuveson, E. L., Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968), 212Google Scholar and passim. For a recent, interesting discussion of America's ambivalent attitude to its overwhelming power and the way that its predominance has weakened the main justification for the projection of U.S. power abroad – namely, that America itself is vulnerable to attack – see Thompson, John A., “The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition,” Diplomatic History, 16, no. 1 (Winter 1992).Google Scholar

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⁵⁴ Quoted in Dallek, R., The American Style of Foreign Policy (New York, 1983), 141–2.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Mead, M., New Lives For Old, Cultural Transformation: Manus, 1928–1953 (New York, 1961) 19Google Scholar; And Keep Your Powder Dry (London, 1967)Google Scholar, ch. 13. As Phyllis Grosskurth has observed, “Margaret Mead was as American as apple pie. She believed in efficient know-how. She believed that the world could be made a better place. She believed that there were answers to everything – and that she knew a lot of them…. She had a normative view of American behaviour against which others were implicitly judged…. In a sense there was a real meeting of Mead's narcissistic needs and the narcissistic values of her society.” Margaret Mead: A Life of Controversy (London, 1988), 15, 56, 94Google Scholar. None the less, Mead was by 1968 strongly criticising her country's failure to eradicate poverty within its own borders. See Windmiller, W., The Peace Corps and Pax Americana (Washington, D.C., 1970), 149.Google Scholar

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⁵⁹ Gleason, P., “American Identity and Americanization,” in S. Thernstrom (ed.), The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic GroupsGoogle Scholar; Ninkovich, F. A., The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge, 1981), 181–3 and passim.Google Scholar

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⁶⁷ Chace, J., “A Quest for Invulnerability,” in Ungar, S. J. (ed.), Estrangement: America and the World (New York, 1985). For a rather different perspective see Thompson, “Exaggeration of American Vulnerability.”Google Scholar

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⁹² Lewis, M., The Culture of Inequality (New York, 1979), xiGoogle Scholar. Also relevant is the dimension explored by Pierson, G. W. in The Moving American (New York, 1973)Google Scholar: “More citizens of the United States may own their own dwellings than in any other civilized society,” he observes. “But what they own has been drained of much of its human feeling and associations” (115). Similarly, Richard Hofstadter was writing in 1954: “This has become a country in which so many people do not know who they are or what they are or what they belong to or what belongs to them”: quoted in ibid., 153.

⁹³ Halle, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Chinoy, E., Automobile Workers and the American Dream (Garden City, N.Y., 1955)Google Scholar. Of the men he studied, Chinoy, echoing Lynd's comments on “Middletown” in the 1930s, recorded: “Both self-blame and the defensive rationalizations against self-blame…contribute to the maintenance of both existing economic institutions and the tradition of opportunity itself…. [Thus] American society escapes the consequences of its own contradictions” (129). See also Burawoy, M., Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago, 1979)Google Scholar, and, on the widespread adoption of hard-line Cold War nationalism among American workers, Gerstle, , op. cit., 304–5Google Scholar, and Davis, M., Prisoners of the American Dream (London, 1986), 88 ff.Google Scholar

⁹⁴ See e.g. Terkel, S., American Dreams: Lost and Found (London, 1982), 25Google Scholar: “During the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, the St. Louis cabbie…was offering six-o'clock commentary. ‘We gotta do it. We have no choice.’ ‘Why?’ ‘We can't be a pitiful, helpless giant. We gotta show 'em we're number one.’ ‘Are you number one?’ A pause. ‘I'm number nothin’. – He recounts a litany of personal troubles, grievances, and disasters.” Also ibid, 102 ff. Also Barnet, op. cit., 338: “The number one nation is dedicated to winning,” and the exemplification of the approach in question in Nixon, R. M., No More Vietnams (London, 1986), 212Google Scholar: “Since President Reagan took office in 1981, America's first international losing streak has been halted.” “If our way of life derives from America's ‘givenness’,” observes Wills, Garry, “Nixon is what will be given us”: Nixon Agonistes, 327.Google Scholar

⁹⁵ Gerstle, , op. cit., 304–5.Google Scholar

⁹⁶ Bercovitch, S., The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, 1975), 103, 135, 178. Emphasis added.Google Scholar

⁹⁷ I am broadly in agreement on this with the relevant arguments in Nye, , Bound to Lead, 21, 40, 86 ff, and chGoogle Scholar. 2 passim, and in Hall, J. A., “Will the United States Decline as did Britain?,” in Mann, M. (ed.), The Rise and Decline of the Nation State (Oxford, 1990).Google Scholar

⁹⁸ Nye, , op. cit., 111, 193 ff., 227Google Scholar; cf. e.g. the works by Bozeman cited above. One could refer, for example, to Americans having to discover, in recent decades, the extent to which Japanese have remained Japanese, despite the apparent “remaking” of their society and political culture under MacArthur following the Second World War.

⁹⁹ See the post-Gulf War comment of Robert J. Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the City University of New York: “We run the risk of seeing ourselves not only as a blessed country but also as the agent of an all-powerful technological deity. Militarised high technology becomes equated with absolute virtue, and as possessors of that virtue we have the duty to be the most powerful of world policemen”: “Last refuge of a high-tech nation,” Guardian, 12 12 1991Google Scholar. Cf. Gibson, J. W., The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston 1986)Google Scholar, and Franklin, H. B., War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

¹⁰⁰ Ball, G., The Past Has Another Pattern (New York, 1982), 422.Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ Fitzgerald, F., “The American Millennium,” in Ungar, op. cit.Google Scholar

¹⁰² Such anxieties antedated the furore caused by Kennedy's, Paul book, The Rise and Fall of the Great PowersGoogle Scholar. Robert Bellah and his colleagues, for example, found in their survey in the early 1980s “a widespread feeling that the promise of the modern era is slipping away from us”: Habits of the Heart, (Berkeley, 1985), 277.Google Scholar

¹⁰³ American Historical Review, 82 (06 1977).Google Scholar

¹⁰⁴ That is, to repeat, as it involves notions of the autonomous individual, the equal-advantaging of groups, the “automatic society”, the beneficence of the market, the informed, caring and participating citizen, and so on. On the make-believe and evasion surrounding issues of race and class, see for example the works of Sleeper and Ehrenreich cited above. There is also, obviously, a related but lower-scale element of make-believe in what David Calleo summarises as a “political system that votes the spending [but] is unwilling to vote the taxes”: Beyond American Hegemony, 110Google Scholar. On international affairs, I go beyond Calleo (ibid. 220) when he observes that “the American consensus has grown into a conspiracy to avoid reality.”

¹⁰⁵ Wills, G., Reagan's America: Innocents At Home (New York, 1987), 1 ff., 376, 386–7Google Scholar, and passim. And see e.g. Susman, W., “Did Success Spoil the United States?,” in May, L. (ed.), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar, and Dorfman, A. and Mattelart, A., How To Read Donald Duck, trans. Kinzle, D. (New York, 1975), 29–30.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁶ Quoted in Williams, W. A., Empire As A Way Of Life (New York, 1980), 99.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁷ Hartz, , op. cit., 286.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁸ Diggins, J. P., The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941–1960 (New York, 1988), 256Google Scholar; Hartz, , op. cit., 14–16, 287, 308–9Google Scholar; Mazrui, , “America and the Third World,” in Cultural Forces in World Politics.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁹ Crozier, , op. cit., 144Google Scholar; Hoffmann, S., Dead Ends: American Foreign Policy in the New Cold War (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 83.Google Scholar

¹¹⁰ Again, I find Wiebe's argument persuasive in this regard (The Segmented Society, 203)Google Scholar: “The principles of a segmented society applied with stark clarity across…distant [foreign] areas. The striking limits of empathy spread a dehumanizing haze over the multitudes of the world where the devastation of a strange society…might elicit feelines similar to those for the extermination of whales. Peace as a void demanded their exclusion from American life, for interaction and accommodation would inevitably entail abrasions, eruptions, trouble. The values of power justified almost any manipulation involving almost any number of humans that would minimize the disturbance from an alien source, and by the logic of those values, outsiders who did not respond to the subtler manipulations exposed themselves to a chilling sequence of more direct techniques for control…. The appalling price of an American system was paid abroad.” In other words, the rest of the world has been obliged to bear some of the consequences – harsh at times – of the perpetual American need to create identity, purpose, and the illusion of a coherent, communicating society. Note, for example, the notion, fostered by President Bush himself, that “America rediscovered itself during Desert Storm.” (New York Times, 5 05 1991.)Google Scholar Where had it been in the meantime, one wonders?