1. Appleby, Joyce, “Recovering American Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism,” Journal of American History 79 (09 1992): 419–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a contrary, “universalist” stance, see Higham, John, “Multiculturalism and Universalism: A History and a Critique,” American Quarterly 45 (06 1993): 195–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar, followed by several responses and his own rejoinder.

2. In 1987, a first conference on “Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature, and Theory” was held at the University of Southern California. According to two of the organizers, the aim of the conference was “to open up dialogues among a number of diverse communities dealing with problems of ecological balance, gender equality, and planetary survival in the contemporary world.” See the special report by Diamond, Irene and Orenstein, Gloria, “Ecofeminism: Weaving the Worlds Together,” Feminist Studies 14 (Summer 1988): 368–70Google Scholar; and Diamond, and Orenstein, , eds., Reweaving the World: the Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990).Google Scholar

3. Kateb, George, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. I quote from the Introduction, p. 27. The American political philosopher Kateb has particularly in mind is John Rawls (see p. 6 and cp. note 71 herein), chs. 3, 5, 6, and 10 are the relevant ones for my study.

4. Cf., for example, Mumford, Lewis, The Transformations of Man (1956; rept. New York: Collier, 1962), ch. 6.Google Scholar

5. Buell, Lawrence, “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised,” American Literary History 1.1 (Spring 1989): 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar [5]. Cp. also Marx, Leo, “The American Revolution and the American Landscape” [1974], in The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 315–36Google Scholar. I also refer to Stevens, Wallace's “The American Sublime”Google Scholar and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in The Collected Poems (1954; rept. New York: Knopf, 1967), pp. 131, 470Google Scholar. Stevens's earlier poem functions as a very effective leitmotiv in Wilson, Rob, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).Google Scholar

6. Time and space allowing, this would be the place for a reflection on the ideological and political implications of the usurpation of the name America designating the United States alone. I have touched on this issue in “A aula de literatura (norte) americana,” in Actas do V Encontro da Associaçāo Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos (Braga: University of Minho, 1984), pp. 67–80.Google Scholar

7. John Burroughs, as quoted in Shi, David E., The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 200.Google Scholar

8. Cf. Shi, , Simple Life, p. 212.Google Scholar

9. Canby, Henry S., “Back to Nature,” Yale Review, n.s., 6 (1917): 755–767Google Scholar [755, 757]. Cf. my discussion of the establishment of national parks at the turn of the century below.

10. Here and in what follows I draw heavily on Thompson, Michael, Ellis, Richard, and Wildavsky, Aaron, Cultural Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990).Google Scholar

11. Cf. Thompson, et al. , Cultural Theory, pp. 26–31.Google Scholar

12. Cf. Wildavsky, Aaron, “Resolved, that Individualism and Egalitarianism be made Compatible in America: Political-Cultural Roots of Exceptionalism,” in Shafer, Byron E., ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 116–37.Google Scholar

13. Why else would the topic be considered to possess “all the essential elements for a successful Anglo-American conference at Nuffield College in Oxford, to celebrate in part, the emergence of a focus of American Studies there”? Certainly not only because it “was intrinsically fascinating.” I am quoting from the introduction to the collection of essays that sums up the conference. See Shafer, , Is America Different? p. ix.Google Scholar

14. In Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville maintains that “[t]he position of the Americans is […] quite exceptional.” In his view, the Puritan origins of the American people, their exclusively commercial habits, the very nature of the country they inhabit (which deviates them from literary, artistic or scientific interests, even though, by the proximity of Europe, without the risk of sheer barbarism), as well as many other factors, have “singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects” (Democracy in America, trans. Reeve, Henry [New York: Schocken, 1961], vol. 2, p. 42, my italics)Google Scholar. In order to define better the exceptional character of the American people, Tocqueville, we recall, had to invent a new word: individualisme.

15. Cf. Bell, Daniel, “The ‘Hegelian Secret’: Civil Society and American Exceptionalism,”Google Scholar in Shafer, , Is America Different? pp. 46–70 [p. 51].Google Scholar

16. Seymour Martin Lipset is deservedly famous for his work on the subject. A seminal piece of writing is his “Why No Socialism in the United States?” in Sources of Contemporary Radicalism, ed. Bialer, S. and Sluzar, S. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1977)Google Scholar. See also The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Norton, 1979)Google Scholar; and, more recently, “American Exceptionalism Reaffirmed,” in Shafer, , Is America Different? pp. 1–45.Google Scholar

17. Cf. Marx, Leo, “Pastoralism in America,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Bercovitch, Sacvan and Jehlen, Myra (1986; rept, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 36–69Google Scholar. Marx revises here some aspects of his classic The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; rept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

18. Marx, , “Susan Sontag's ‘New Left’ Pastoral: Notes on Revolutionay Pastoralism in America,” in The Pilot and the Passenger, pp. 291–314.Google Scholar

19. Shafer, Byron E., “What is the American Way? Four Themes in Search of Their Next Incarnation,”Google Scholar in Shafer, , Is America Different? pp. 222–61Google Scholar. Shafer speaks of the need felt in the United States particularly at certain times to have “‘naturalization’ classes through the public schools” so as to allow for the integration of “[m]assive waves of immigrants” (p. 248). Citizenship as Americanism naturalized (in both my senses of the concept).

20. Cf. Stevens, Wallace, “Of Mere Being,” Opus Posthumous, rev. ed., ed. Bates, Milton J. (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 141.Google Scholar

21. Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution,” Massachusetts Review 17 (Winter 1976): 597–630Google Scholar; The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar; “The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus,” in The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture, ed. Girgus, Sam (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), pp. 5–43Google Scholar; and The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar

22. See Tunnard, Christopher, The City of Man (New York: Scribner's, 1953), pp. 119ff.Google Scholar

23. Whitmanian quotations are from “Song of the Broad Axe,” 3Google Scholar, and “Song of the Open Road,” 5Google Scholar (the figures refer to the sections of the poems in the so-called death-bed edition).

24. I quote from Stewart L. Udall's Introduction to The National Parks of America (Waukesha, Wis.: Country Beautiful of America, 1972), p. 9Google Scholar, emphasis as found. For the Tocqueville allusion, see Runte, Alfred, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 6.Google Scholar

25. Cf. Runte, , National Parks, esp. pp. xii, 11–12, 31–34, 41–47.Google Scholar

26. In her study of 19th-century American landscape painting, Angela Miller makes a similar point. See Miller, Angela, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape,” American Literary History 4.2 (Summer 1992): 207–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Whitman, Walt, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), esp. pp. 5–26, 50Google Scholar (I quote from the 1855 version of “Song of Myself”).

28. Cf. “Song of Myself,” 20Google Scholar; “Song of the Broad Axe,” 11Google Scholar; and “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” 3.Google Scholar

29. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 9.Google Scholar

30. Fisher, Philip, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): pp. 60–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar [p. 68]. Fisher's essay has inspired me in more than one way. In my essay I basically argue that the rhetoric of the naturalization of ‘America’ has also played an important role in the construction of “a democratic social space” and “an aesthetics of transparency” in the United States.

31. Stevens, , Collected Poems, p. 512.Google Scholar

32. Ammons, A. R., “Hibernaculum,” 48, in Collected Poems, 1951–1971 (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 351–88Google Scholar [p. 367]. Cf. Elder, John, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 136.Google Scholar

33. Baudrillard, Jean, Amérique (Paris: Bernard Gresset, 1986), pp. 159ffGoogle Scholar. Though Baudrillard does not quote it at all, the book by Paz he is referring to is most probably the American edition of Tiempo nublado, titled in English One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, trans. Lane, Helen R. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1985)Google Scholar. See the second chapter, “Imperial Democracy,” esp. pp. 31, 36.Google Scholar

34. Miller, Perry, “Nature and the National Ego” [1955], in Errand into the Wilderness (1956; rept. New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 204–16Google Scholar. Included, almost verbatim, but with a different title (“The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature”), in a posthumous collection of essays prepared for publication by Miller, Elizabeth W. and titled Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1967), pp. 197–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Cf. Leuchtenburg, William E., The Perils of Prosperity: 1914–32 (1958; rept. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967), pp. 228–29.Google Scholar

36. I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Southerners, Twelve [1930] (New York: Peter Smith, 1951)Google Scholar. In a letter to John Crowe Ransom in 1929, Donald Davidson states the Twelve Southerners' goal: “to save the South from civilization.” Quoted in Young, Thomas Daniel, Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), p. 7.Google Scholar

37. Reich, Charles A., The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar. I also refer to Lash, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979)Google Scholar. For the Christo reference, see Wilson, , American Sublime, p. 52.Google Scholar

38. Lears, Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981; rept. New York: Pantheon, 1983).Google Scholar

39. Porter, Carolyn, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

40. Marx, , Machine in the Garden, p. 195Google Scholar; Porter, , Seeing and Being, p. 72Google Scholar; and Marx, , “Pastoralism in America,” p. 44Google Scholar. I am here reminded of an interesting observation by Thoreau in Waiden. Missing the rooster's crowing he has been deprived of in the exile of his own naturalization, the poet remarks, “The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods …” (Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Thomas, Owen [New York: Norton, 1966], cf. p. 85Google Scholar). Leo Marx deals with the same topic again in Pilot and the Passanger, cp. esp. “The American Revolution and the American Landscape,” pp. 315–37.Google Scholar

41. Cf. Everett, Edward, “Fourth of July at Lowell,” in his Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little and Brown, 1850), vol 2, pp. 47–68Google Scholar (quotes from pp. 48, 54, 56–57, 65).

42. I borrow the term “neutralization” from Marin, Louis, Utopiques: Jeux d'Espaces (1973; rept. Paris: Minuit, 1988), esp. ch. 1Google Scholar. Lack of space prevents me from elaborating here on the relation between the neuter and Utopia (in both senses of the term: outopia as ‘nonplace’ and eutopia as ‘place of hope’), as discourses of ideological disguise or mediation of contraries (see also Fredric Jameson's analysis of Marin's book in “Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,” Diacritics [Summer 1979]: 2–21Google Scholar). That the process of naturalization/neutralization of the social in American culture is well under way at Lowell by the 1830s may be seen in the manner in which the plain living cherished by early agrarian republicanism is being recommended by the affluent owners to the workers alone (cf. Shi, , Simple Life, pp. 92ff).Google Scholar

43. Cf. Cronon, William, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 23–54, esp. p. 41.Google Scholar

44. There are in Everett's speeches many other examples of the rhetorical use of nature to support the cause of industrial progress. One of the most interesting occurs in “Education the Nurture of the Mind,” when the author, with embarrassing un-self-consciousness, explains the success of the European race in the New World in contrast with the failure (indeed, the disappearance) of the “natives of the continent.” The substance of Everett's analysis implying the Europeans' privileged relation to nature, is that “the red man,” unlike “the white man,” did not have a scientific mind (Everett, , “Fourth of July,” pp. 278–79).Google Scholar

45. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, introduction and notes by Emerson, Edward W. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), vol. 1, pp. 1–77.Google Scholar

46. Cf. Burke, Kenneth, “I, Eye, Ay – Emerson's Early Essay ‘Nature’: Thoughts on the Machinery of Transcendence,” in Emerson's ‘Nature’: Origin, Growth, Meaning, ed. Sealts, Merton M. Jr., and Ferguson, Alfred R. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969), pp. 150–63.Google Scholar

47. Sartor Resartus, we recall, was published by the first time in book form by James Munroe in Boston in 1836 (the same date as Nature) at the request of and with an unsigned preface by Emerson. Emerson and Carlyle met in Scotland in 1833 and, though at a distance ever since, they managed to keep a long-lasting friendship by correspondence.

48. For Emerson's reservations about the possible communitarian and even social(ist) implications of his theories, see, for example, his letter to George Ripley, December 15, 1840, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Rusk, Ralph L. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), vol. 2, pp. 368–71Google Scholar. Cf. the passage of his journal in which he reffers to Ripley's, Fuller's and Alcott's “new social plans” as a “larger” prison than his own solitary one. Further down in the passage, Emerson explicitly says that to adhere to the project would be to renege his ideas: “to join this body,” says he, “would be to traverse all my long trumpeted theory, and the instinct which spoke from it, that a man is a counterpoise to a city, — that a man is stronger than a city, that his solitude is more prevalent and beneficent than the concert of crowds” (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson [10 17, 1840], ed. A. W. Plumstead and Harrison Hayford [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1969], pp. 407–8). Eventually, the failure of Brook Farm, and even more so of Fruitlands, alas, would prove him right.Google Scholar

49. The Journals (11 1963)Google Scholar, ed. Linda Allardt and David W. Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1982), vol 15, pp. 4045. In “The Fortune of the Republic” (1878) Emerson uses exactly the same phrasing (Works, vol. 11, p. 530).Google Scholar

50. Cf. Simple Life, pp. 154ff.Google Scholar

51. The phrase “a political education for isolation” is Stanley Cavell's characterization of Waiden, as cited in Rosenblum, Nancy, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Stevens, , “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”Google Scholar (“The grass is full // and full of yourself;” “You become a self that fills the four corners of night”), Collected Poems, pp. 209–10Google Scholar; and Ammons, A. R., Sphere: the Form of a Motion (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 75.Google Scholar

52. Kateb, , Utopia and Its Enemies (New York, Schocken, 1972)Google Scholar; and Utopia: Controversy, edited and introduction by Kateb, (New York: Atherton, 1971).Google Scholar

53. Kateb misreads the poem (and I don't mean this in Harold Bloom's sense of misprision), by ascribing the excerpt quoted to the woman speaker.

54. Cf. Utopia: Controversy, pp. 1, 23.Google Scholar

55. I am quoting from Kateb, George, “Thinking about Human Extinction (II): Emerson and Whitman,” Raritan 6 (Winter 1987): 1–22Google Scholar [1]. Also important for my discussion here is the first part of “Thinking about Human Extinction (I): Nietzsche and Heidegger,” Raritan 6 (Fall 1986): 1–28Google Scholar. On Thoreau, cf. Marx, Leo, Machine in the GardenGoogle Scholar (p. 242): “Waiden may be read as the report of an experiment in transcendental pastoralism.” Michael T. Gilmore, in his turn, has shown how Thoreau anticipates the Marxist analysis of the reification of capitalist society, which, by covering up or mystifying the role of human beings in the production of their own social reality, results in the apprehension of reality as a second nature and hence in the destruction of freedom. There is, however, a crucial difference, Gilmore adds, “[Thoreau] portrays his townsmen as the slave drivers of themselves […] but he launches his attack against history rather than in its name, with the result that he mystifies the temporality of his own experience, presenting it as natural or removed from social time” (Gilmore, , “Waiden and the ‘Curse of Trade,’” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, p. 297Google Scholar

56. Kateb, George, “Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics,” Political Theory 12 (08 1984): 331–60 [332].CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. Kateb's paper, titled “Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” was later published, along with the commentaries, in Political Theory 18 (11 1990): 545–600.Google Scholar

58. Kateb, , “Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” pp. 545, 548.Google Scholar

59. I allude here to “Specimen Days,” the 1872 Preface, and the 1879 Preface (Whitman, , Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 921, 1000, 1010Google Scholar). On the relative erasure of history in the successive revisions of Leaves of Grass, see Pearce, Roy Harvey, “Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1855,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 83–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60. Kateb, , “Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” p. 570Google Scholar; and Whitman, , Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 362–68.Google Scholar

61. Kateb, , “Thinking about Human Extinction (II),” p. 19.Google Scholar

62. Shafer, , “What Is the American Way?” p. 249.Google Scholar

63. The third one (now chapter 4 of Kateb, Inner Ocean) was “Thinking about Human Extinction: Nuclear Weapons and Individual Rights,” Dissent 33 (Spring 1986): 161–72.Google Scholar

64. “Thinking about Human Extinction (I),” p. 1.Google Scholar

65. Schell, Jonathan, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982), esp. pp. 36–49, 106–8, 124–25Google Scholar. In “Esthétique du Mal” Stevens wrote, “except for us, / The total past felt nothing when destroyed (Collected Poems, p. 314).Google Scholar

66. This has been very eloquently argued by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in his most recent work. See, in English, “The Postmodern Transition: Law and Politics,” in The Fate of Law, ed. Sarat, Austin and Kearns, T. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp. 79–118)Google Scholar; “A Discourse on the Sciences,” Review 15 (Winter 1992): 9–47Google Scholar; and Toward a New Common Sense (New York: Rout-ledge, forthcoming).

67. Schell, , Fate of the Earth, pp. 219, 226.Google Scholar

68. Kateb, , “Tinking about Human Extinction (II),” pp. 15, 19Google Scholar

69. Kateb, , “Thinking about Human Extinction (I),” pp. 1, 2, 4, 27.Google Scholar

70. The misgivings of Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa that Whitman's notion of identity as the naked fusion of one and all may ultimately be superficial and sentimental reminds me of a passage in the first chapter of Walden in which Thoreau speaks of the identity and authenticity of the human being in sartorial images: “We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury.…” (cf. p. 16). For Pessoa's “Salutation to Walt Whitman” in English, see Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans, and ed. by Honig, Edwin and Brown, Susan M. (New York: Ecco, 1986, pp. 72ff).Google Scholar

71. Kateb is arguably even more vulnerable than Rawls to Octavio Paz's critique of American political philosophy in his One Earth, Four or Five Worlds (pp. 33ff). Paz examines here the trajectory of the American nation — whose “common good,” he thinks, is but “the harmonious existence of individual ends” — from its origins in the “dreams” of three “individualists” (“the ascetic, the merchant, and the explorer”) to Rawls, John's A Theory of Justice (1971)Google Scholar. Rawls's work is, for Paz, “the best posssible example of American indifference to history.” Because it “omits politics and does not examine the relation between morality and history,” Rawls's book proves to be a perfect example of American moral philosophy (cp. pp. 30, 48–49).

72. Kateb, , Inner Ocean, p. 34.Google Scholar

73. One of the reasons given for the lack of a working-class consciousness in the United States, we remember, is that American adult suffrage was not won by but freely given to the workers very early on. Cf. Sampson, Leon, Towards a United Front (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933)Google Scholar; and Lipset, , First New Nation.Google Scholar

74. Lipset, , First New Nation, p. 330.Google Scholar

75. Buell, , “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised,” p. 8.Google Scholar

76. William Cronon pointed out recently that the ideology of American pasto-ralism differs from that of English pastoralism as described by Raymond Williams in his The Country and the City. In the United States, says Cronon, “the nineteenth century landscape could be seen as ‘natural’ without having to erase its working class (only the Indians had to be forgotten, usually by being assimilated to a vanishing version of nature itself).” I would suggest, and Cronon's quote from Emerson bears me out, that in the United States neutralization makes erasure unnecessary; as regards the native Americans, however, it seems indeed more appropriate to speak of assimilation to nature. See Cronon, William, Nature's Metropolis, p. 392, n. 13.Google Scholar

77. Cf. the Orphic poet's prophecy at the end of Nature: “disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes (… will disappear …)” (Works, vol. 1, pp. 76–77).Google Scholar