UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies
UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland | Director: Professor Liam Kennedy
Donald Pease (Dartmouth College)
The Janus-Face of American Exceptionalism
The question as to how America could represent itself as at once an exception to the laws of nations and as an exemplary political experiment has posed a perennial challenge to the imaginative powers of its interpreters. As an analytical categorization, American exceptionalism is, as Seymour Lipset has observed, resolutely double-edged. It can support representations of what Antonio Negri has described as the “constituent” powers of the American people, but it can also refer to the state’s military force and economic dominance. However there is a world of difference between the facet of American exceptionalism that posits Americans’ exemplary power to change its constituted laws and the face of American exceptionalism that positions American as an exception to the laws of history. The contradictory aspects of this Janus-faced term have resulted in part from the different agents--national-popular movements and the militarily powerful state--to which these aspects have been rendered applicable. America’s constituent nationalism and the state which exempts itself from the constituted laws it defends and secures comprise the two crucial, mutually antagonistic, yet co-constituting faces of American exceptionalism. Throughout the history of its usage, the significance of American exceptionalism has been the negotiated outcome of the difference between valuations of these conflicting terms. By describing American exceptionalism as Janus-faced, I intend to call attention to the fact that America has, since the time of its founding been (and continues to be) at once an exemplarily utopian political experiment yet also productive of violent states of exception.Recommended Readings.:
Agamben, Girogio: The State of Exception (Palo Alto:Stanford University Press), 2006.
Appleby, Joyce. “Recovering American’s Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism.” Journal Of American History 79 (1992): 419-435.
Frederickson, George F. “From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History.” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 587-604.
Geyer, Michael and Charles Bright. “World History in a Global Age.” American Historical Review 100 (1995) 1034-1060
Djelal Kadir,“Defending America against its Devotees,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal vol. 2 (2) 2003:135-152.
Kammen, Michael. “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration.” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1993): 1-43.
Amy Kaplan, “The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal vol.2(2) 2004
Madsen, Deborah L.. American Exceptionalism. Jackson: University of Mississsippi, 1998.
Pease, Donald E.. "Imperial Discourse". Diplomatic History 22 1998): 605-615.
See Daniel Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Rodgers, Daniel T. “American Exceptionalism Revisited”. Raritan 24, #2 (2004) 21-47.
Ross, Dorothy. ”Liberalism and American Exceptionalism.” Intellectual History Newsletter 24 (2002): 72-83.
Stoler, Ann Laura “Imperial Formations and the Opacities of Rule.” in Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power, ed. Craig Calhoun Frederick Cooper, Kevin W. Moore (New York: The New Press, 2006).
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