Over the nearly 250-year history of the United States, there have been many moments of political and social discord that have tested the strength and depth of the American character, and such crises have often led to positive social changes that have expanded the American community through passage of constitutional amendments and laws that expanded voting rights, defined and expanded citizenship, codified racial and gender equality, protected workers’ rights, increased economic opportunity, and provided greater access to equal educational opportunities, among many other advances. Yet, it is also the case that the American past never fully recedes from the body politic; there has been an ongoing tug-of-war between forces seeking to overturn social and economic progress and those forces working to solidify and expand rights that have often been rights in name only. What has occurred in the past is never excised from national memory and can reappear in virulent forms; the immigration-restrictionist policies and actions that characterized the darkest aspects of the Americanization movement in the early decades of the twentieth century have come full circle in the American presidency of Donald J. Trump.

The United States spends close to half of the world’s healthcare bill, yet this huge industry does not produce good health. Citizens believe the US is the best at almost everything. In the 1950s we were one of the healthiest nations. Now, comparisons show more diseases present in Americans than in the citizens of the other rich nations, even when considering the healthiest subpopulations here. Life expectancy is now declining here, a unique situation for advanced countries. This plight results in almost 800 excess deaths per day that wouldn’t happen in other nations. Well-being mirrors mortality here and has been declining, despite our pursuing happiness with all the advanced technology in our palms. Reasons include our high income inequality and poor social safety net

Chapter 10 reflects on the legacy of Guantanamo over the two dozen years since detention began in response to the changes in the United States after 9/11. It considers the impact on American law and how the outer shell of due process was after many years affirmed, but its core hollowed out. It notes how the executive knew that it had captured the wrong people but dishonestly kept up the illusion that it was doing something about terrorism. The US tortured everybody because that was what politics required even though it was well known that the process was not only wrong but futile. It also considers the impact of Guantanamo on American culture. Torture has become embedded and normalized in American life. American exceptionalism was distorted into a sense of unique grievance and entitlement to ignore core constitutional and international law principles. Guantanamo remains an image of cruelty in the service of retaliation against “the other,” in this case, Muslims. It was part of the build-up of a military security apparatus that undergirds a continuous justification for the executive to declare emergencies and suspend legal and ethical principles.

The American Revolution gave rise to a new republican logic of empire. Far from rejecting empire, American policymakers believed that their exceptional imperial model marked the beginning of a new era in the history of human progress. During the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson and the Confederation Congress laid out a blueprint for a transcontinental settler colonial empire based on republican principles of self-government. The empire of liberty was tied up with concepts of American exceptionalism. The original architects of the empire of liberty saw their imperial schemes as part of a broader, cosmopolitan enlightenment project to perfect human society. This changed during the early nineteenth century as Americans increasingly embraced a racialized and ethnocentric view of their empire in response to the revolutions in France, Haiti, and Latin America.

Mid-nineteenth-century American stories of self-making increasingly oriented toward material ambition rather than service. Values evolved within cultural venues as diverse as advice literature, temperance advocacy, business guidance, and phrenology. Expanding expectations for “self-reliance,” for example, promoted beliefs that alcoholism and status were entirely matters of personal choice and moved mainstream Americans toward accepting self-made success and failure. After the Civil War, more stories offered some version of self-making—always judging, prodding, urging, and rewarding. But no consensus had yet emerged on what it meant, what qualified someone as self-made, or how to measure a “self-made” man’s worth. Whereas Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1872 compilation of traditional biographies praised service and disdained wealth, James D. McCabe, Jr.’s 1871 anthology embraced wealth as a measure of worth. Despite her fame, his volume sold vastly better. His often repeated “We are emphatically a nation of self-made men” glorified a materialist American exceptionalism and a social and economic system that demeaned many while it praised a few.

Religion is central to human experience. This chapter examines the influence of religion on the political culture from America’s founding to the present, provides a framework for classifying and measuring religion, and gives an overview of religious belief, belonging, and behavior.

The rigid outlook of its supporters assured the KCIR’s emphatic defeat, which was broadly discrediting to labor courts. The positions taken against the KCIR also reveal the contours of the labor policy ultimately developed in the United States. The KCIR’s fascist premises were apparent by 1926, when the US made a decisive turn away from industrial compulsion. The evolutionary view of law was categorically rejected in the Wolff decision; Wolff’s decade of doctrinal ascendency ended an era of innovative state policy leadership in the United States. The procedural outlook of the KCIR’s liberal critics became the basis of New Deal labor policy, ushering in America’s unique model of labor law without labor rights. In rejecting these tenets of the KCIR, leading thinkers also turned away from international policy developments that shared those premises. Thus, America’s divergence from the labor policy of the rest of the world owed to the development of ideas, no less than institutions and structures, and it was liberals most engaged with global flows of ideas who did the most to turn the United States onto its distinctive path.

The final chapter brings us back to the contemporary political dilemmas we face today and discusses how the recovery of premodern conceptions of the nation helps us think through the challenge of national pluralism and resurging nationalist sentiment. It encourages openness to some virtues of empire as a multinational form of politics, considers the merits of a pluralistic political order, and suggests new avenues for cultivating democratic solidarity in diverse polities. In particular, the chapter engages with liberal multiculturalist arguments to illustrate the advantages of medieval approaches to national diversity. In place of self-government rights, the book suggests legal pluralism and policies of recognitions as more fruitful arrangements for multinational polities. Moreover, the chapter applies the insights of the study to the European Union and the United States, respectively. It concludes by responding to a number of liberal nationalist concerns, especially the need for pre-political partnership to undergird democratic politics.

This framing chapter focuses on the nation’s founding and the salience of inequality and race that is baked into our founding documents. It also discusses the concept of democracy that prevailed at the time of the founding and why it represented a radical departure from the past influences of Anglo and French political thought. It introduces the concept of multiple political traditions within American democracy.

This chapter looks at the ways sf visions of the future published in the decades following World War II both challenge the dominant ideology of American exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is a single homogenous nation uniquely exempt from history – and the Program Era division between literary and genre fiction. Both Program Era realism and sf develop representations of the present. However, sf’s mirror is a distorting anamorphic one, presenting imaginary futures that help its readers cognize the contradictions, conflicts, and struggles that are always at work in any historical situation, and which naturalizing formulations such as American exceptionalism occlude. The chapter traces shifting practices of representing the future, beginning with 1950s dystopias, postapocalypses, and alternate histories through the radical visions of the New Wave and the new practices of postmodern cyberpunk and critical dystopia up to the recent wave of literary sf and climate change fiction.

The concluding chapter starts by very briefly summarizing key patterns in the litigation over judicial selection and then returns to the de Tocqueville quote and the issue of American exceptionalism. To assess the exceptionalism question, the chapter includes a discussion of litigation over judicial selection outside the United States, finding that it occurs in very few countries and where it does occur, is generally very limited. One exception is the recent burst of litigation in international courts over judicial selection in Poland. Another possible exception is Israel where there has been litigation concerning several judicial selection issues. Overall, the chapter concludes that American exceptionalism in litigation over judicial selection does not lie in the existence of such litigation but in the frequency of that litigation.

The book opens with a discussion of a case from Delaware challenging a long-standing requirement for partisan balance on state courts in the Delaware state constitution. The chapter goes on to note that substantively Marbury v. Madison (1803) was a case about the judicial appointment process. After a brief discussion of recent litigation over the appointment of federal administrative law judges, the chapter notes that litigation over judicial selection is consistent with Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that “scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question.” The chapter identifies several expectations, describes the data collection process, and briefly outlines the chapters that follow.

The Journal de Saint-Domingue joined the Affiches Américaines in encouraging White male colonists to consider themselves members of an “enlightened” and distinctively “American” citizenry devoted to reason and the common good. While acknowledging metropolitan precedents for a general-interest publication, its editors trumpeted their publication’s novelty, claimed all of “America” as their journalistic jurisdiction, and stated their intention to generate original content, not just reprint metropolitan articles. The monthly Journal fostered the creation of American “taste” by publishing reviews and critiquing poetry by colonists. With strong ties to the local Chambres d’Agriculture and strong support from planter subscribers, it also published extensively on agriculture (Chapter 11). With the Affiches, it created a forum where colonists could appropriate the intellectually respectable terms of “political economy,” combining them with a robust rhetoric of citizenship to respond to criticism from merchants and metropolitan chambers of commerce; debate the reimposition of the trade restrictions of the Exclusif and proposed limitations on sugar refining; and seek to redefine the colony-metropole relationship.

This chapter situates the documentary movement of the 1930s and its preoccupation with the folk within the larger history of American modernism. I show how “the culture concept” emerged within the overlapping fields of anthropology and folklore to guide the practice of ethnography and its “study of modernity’s others” in the age of US imperialism and world war. For some Black and Native ethnographers, the folk offered an avenue for staking a claim of history, contribution, and modern belonging. New Deal documentary projects repurposed the folk as stalwart protagonists of the past, the backstory to a centralized narrative of national culture and its constituent parts. By contrast, many documentary books destabilized representations of the folk, producing a more self-reflexive account of social relations of power. While some texts anticipated the Cold War turn to the plight of the individual, others took aim at the racial fault lines of American exceptionalism.

This chapter explores the contrasting role of proportionality discourse in the USA and in Latin America. Although the USA provided an important constitutional model for Latin American countries, the latter does not share the former’s disinterest in the proportionality framework, which is considered foreign to the legal tradition of the country despite the fact it is arguably harmonic with the approach to law creation in the common law tradition. The chapter seeks possible explanations for the contrast in four elements: the importance in Latin America of centralized, specialized constitutional jurisdiction; the tradition of borrowing constitutional jurisprudence from abroad; the openness to constitutional change and innovation; and sensitivity to the egalitarian potential of rights review, even if that potential remains largely unrealized, which favors experimentation around proportionality. The USA sits at the opposite end of the spectrum along each of the dimensions that support proportionality analysis.

Chapter 5 engages with a larger transhistorical discourse of female personhood, considering how the challenges that accompanied Austen’s public status are echoed in the reading and reception history of Mansfield Park. I move this discussion back to the 1772 Mansfield Decision, and forward to consider the controversy surrounding the far less momentous twenty-first century decision to place Austen on a British bank note. The open-ended, improvisatory, and uncontrollable nature of feelingly impactful speech links cultural and critical conversations to what J.L. Austin calls the perlocutionary realm of performative language. Perlocution, the dimension of language that most signals organizational breakdown, bogging down the progress of J.L. Austin’s official speech-act theory, is also the dimension or capacity of language through which paratextual literary encounters – allusions, conversations, revisions, and eventful readings – persist. This concern with doing things by our words as well as in them evokes a central feature of the enterprise of literary criticism altogether, I argue. For Cavell, the very mood and project of criticism is praise open to rebuke.

A fundamental challenge for the labor movement is the necessity to provide a message that resonates. This is a matter confused and hobbled by the fact that the problems posed for unions in employment relationships have their roots in history. The state plays a less ambitious role in the United States compared to Europe and Japan. The unions have stepped into a vacuum, occupied through the exercise of collective bargaining, and simultaneously attempted to promote state expansion so as to augment the bargaining process.

In the early part of the previous century, the American Federation of Labor provided funds for unemployment or distress suffered by their own members.1 This may help explain the fact that, at that time and for a while thereafter, the federation had little or no enthusiasm for unemployment compensation statutes mandated by the state. This tradition is reflected in the restricted scope and content of unemployment compensation law, a product of the Southern Democratic part of the New Deal coalition.

Scholars used to view “early American literature” primarily as little more than a rustic precursor to what American literature would become in its maturity. For many years as well, it was the cradle of the “New England Mind,” that place where America’s religious origins might be found and established. In recent years, however, the study of early American literature has expanded in several intriguing directions. From the perspective of temporality or period, scholars now consider “early America” to extend back into the fifteenth century and as far forward as the 1830s. Linguistically, the archive “early America” now speaks and records in a number of languages other than English. Socially and culturally, we consider the literatures of enslaved persons, women, and Indigenous persons formerly forgotten by such histories. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a single book or perspective adequately capturing the proliferation of the field’s recognition, which is why this multivoice volume is so needed as this point.

The first chapter offers a general overview of the interpretative framework that guides the selections and commentary in this volume. One thing has remained a constant fixture in American history: the enduring belief in an American exceptionalism. This book suggests that, besides the remarkable endeavor of leaving the Old World and of framing a new government by the people for the people, what has made American political thought exceptional is the unique combination of theoretical influences that were intertwined during the founding era. American statesmen combined two languages—liberalism and republicanism—and two conceptions of the people: the understanding of the people as a corporate entity and as a multitude of individuals. This paradigm of the people’s two bodies may be nothing more than a fiction, but it shaped American history and institutions profoundly. The guiding threat of the subsequent chapters is to trace the combination of republican and liberal ideas about the people and about representation in the primary sources from the Puritans’ arrival on the shores of New England to the Civil War.