Ben Alpers at the Society for US Intellectual History Blog provides a useful capsule history on American Exceptionalism: For most of the history of the term – which originally emerged in the 1920s in debates between Lovestoneites and Stalinists over…
In ignoring the geographic, political-economic, ethnic, religious impediments to the universalization of the human idea, Americans repeat those ineluctably pleasing, necessary operations of the spirit that tell us our luck – or the sum of our combined advantages in relation to geography, politics, economics, ethnicities, and religions – is deserved, a product of our virtues and a proof of them, whatever costs to others not only unavoidable, but just.
