American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea

, 2021; online edn, Chicago Scholarship Online , 19 May 2022 ), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.001.0001, accessed 5 Sept. 2024.

Tyrrell, Ian. American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea . University of Chicago Press , 2021 . Chicago Scholarship Online , 2022 . https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226812120.001.0001.

Abstract

This book traces the emergence and different iterations of the idea of American exceptionalism; it treats exceptionalism as a discourse that cannot be empirically established as fact, but which constitutes a flexible pattern of belief. It discounts the notion of a Christian nation and explores how spatial expansion as a form of settler colonialism and prehistoricist and providential notions of American history became core to the generation of these exceptionalist beliefs. Exceptionalist knowledge as a circular and self-made discourse is stressed; personal identity formation, mobility, individualist self-making, and gendered identities shaped attachment to national identity; yet through this same discourse faced persistent and sometimes systemic challenges from non-exceptional critiques and anti-exceptionalist jeremiads, through anti-slavery, the Civil War, class and labor conflict, formal imperialism, and socialism. The book explains how and why the idea of exceptionalism strengthened as the capacity of the nation-state, material abundance, and global power grew. Finally, it examines how and why a post-1980 realignment of evangelical religion, patriotism and politics fueled, as a response to changing geopolitical conditions and the threat of systemic national decline, ushered in a new, and yet unstable, exceptionalism of national chosenness.