American exceptionalism

In The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity From 1492 to 1800 , Jack Greene reviews the literature on “American exceptionalism,” and takes exception to the common notion that this theme is a 19th or 20th century phenomenon. He opposes the “current effort to assimilate colonial American to early modern European history.”

The main reason is that this assimilation fails to do justice to the common perception among early modern observers that America was in fact different: Contemporary interpreters of America depicted the country in comparative terms “as an exceptionally promising field for the pursuit – and realization – of collective as well as individual aspirations. Far from being the creation of later historians and social analysts . . . the concept of American exceptionalism with its positive connotations was present at the very creation of America . . . . the very pervasiveness and persistence of the assumption of American distinctiveness throughout the colonial era strongly suggests that modern analysts are making a mistake not to take it seriously. If the early modern inventors of America were wrong in thinking that social conditions there different markedly from those in Europe,. how could such an idea have enjoyed such widespread currency for so long – and why? . . . we need to consider whether, if America was not exceptional in the sense modern scholars have employed the term, it was exceptional from the point of view – and within the terms employed by – contemporaries.”