Americans participated in the discovery of modern society that occupied European social thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but put that discussion and its social scientific discourse to a partially distinctive use. Many of the cultural components that developed in Europe into historicism were also present – Protestant Christianity, the secular Enlightenment, republican political discourse, and romanticism. Yet historicism did not develop contemporaneously in America and indeed made little headway until late in the nineteenth century. Engaged in founding and defining their national existence, Americans developed from these cultural resources a different historical consciousness, and with it a variant social scientific tradition.

The national ideology of American exceptionalism

If America did not follow Europe into historicism, one major factor was that Americans regarded their own revolution, unlike the French, as a success. Americans understood the success of the Revolution and the establishment of republican government in the Constitution as events in Christian and republican time. Protestant Americans already had available a Christian paradigm to which the establishment of the new nation could be assimilated. Reformation prophecy allowed them to believe that the millennium was a progressive historical period on which the Reformed world was about to enter, and the Puritan errand to New England moved the scene of that hope to the New World. When national independence was won, fervent Protestants identified the American Republic with the advent of the millennial period that would usher in the final salvation of mankind and the end of history.