American Exceptionalism Revisited

A fairly prominent perception across the globe is that America has had certain exceptional features. While these are mixed in with various traditional ones, they still manage – or have managed – to make the country unusual in human history. TheAmerican Revolution, for example, is widely taken to have undermined a central element of the ancient regime, namely, top-down government. Instead of the government being sovereign – in charge of the realm – it was to be individual citizens who assumed the right of self-government. Indeed, that is what marks the difference between subjects and citizens.

As with other elements of public affairs, the switch from the ancient to the modern regime had not been complete. America became a mixed system, economically and otherwise. For example, while serfdom was pretty much abolished, so that no involuntary servitude was legally permitted in the country, taxation, the confiscation or extortion of resources from the citizenry, persisted throughout the country. So to a significant extent citizens remained subjects, at least as far as their work and resources are concerned. If one works, one's earnings aren't deemed to be one's private property to belong, in large measure, to society (to be used by the government as it sees fit). Changes as radical as what the American Revolution involved, at least as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, are easier to announce than to implement. The country, accordingly, is still a mixed system in which top-down government persists, never mind that the revolutionary rhetoric flatly contradicts that idea.

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