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American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. - book reviews
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by John H.M. Laslett
Seymour Martin Lipset has for many years been the historical sociologist most closely identified with the controversial idea of American exceptionalism, but this is the first of his many books to include the phrase in its title. Central to the exceptionalist idea is a set of immutable American values including liberty, equalitarianism (defined as equality of opportunity, not reward), individualism, anti-statism and laissez-faire, which - together with an intense moral emphasis deriving from Puritanism - have made the U.S. a uniquely successful democratic and capitalist society.
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Lipset has elaborated on this Toquevillian thesis many times before. In this book he brings his analysis up to date by citing copious survey data showing how different America is from European countries on such matters as race relations, welfare and education policy. While America spends less on government support for the poor than Germany, Britain or Italy, for example, it spends much more on education. Two other ideas mark a departure from his previous work. The first is a successful attempt to refute some of his earlier critics, myself among them,(1) by arguing that the dominance of these values does not necessarily mean that American history has been conflict-free. To the contrary, an inherent tension has always existed between the effort to ensure equality of opportunity, on the one hand, and the social and economic freedoms associated with individualism, on the other. This tension shows up today in arguments over such issues as welfare and affirmative action, whose proponents seek artificially to protect the position of people of color at the expense of the white majority population. Over time, Lipset argues, the conflict between these two sets of values have led both to the world's most successful capitalist economy and to neglect of the poor, both to a respect for law and to a wasteful litigiousness, and both to a respect for private property and to a high crime rate. These downsides represent the double-edged sword of his subtitle.
If one applies Lipset's methodology to America's current difficulties, there is much to commend it. He shows convincingly how today's conservative swing back to an exaggerated and socially destructive form of individualism (or a willingness to put self above society) helps explain such varied problems as school indiscipline, weak trade unions, high crime rates, or even a high level of divorce. But two fundamental problems remain. The first derives from the danger of treating value systems as if they were the sole engines of history. Even in his most successful chapters, on the role of blacks in American history and on the absence of a powerful socialist movement, Lipset's historical explanations are both excessively determinist and oversimplified. Contrasting Canada's mild success with social democracy to its relative failure in America, for example, he attributes the latter to anti-statism, to the weakness of U.S. unions, and to the ethnic fragmentation of the labor force. If these explanations were sufficient, how do we account for multi-ethnic support for the Socialist Party of America, for the extent of Progressive labor legislation, or for the fact that the pre-1914 A.F. of L., which refused to support a labor party, was almost as large as the British T.U.C., which did? In Chapter Four, Lipset cites poll data to suggest that a large minority of blacks are out of step with current conservative opinion (which is more properly called free market liberal opinion) when they continue to hold out for preferential treatment at the hands of the state. But he underestimates the degree to which the materialist forces of technological change are pushing people of color into an underclass, and by citing poll data rather than providing a proper history of the civil rights movement he slights the contribution which blacks have made to their own history. On page 119, for example, Lipset suggests that the initial impulse for affirmative action came, not "from specific demands made by blacks or the American left. Rather, they seemed to represent an innovative effort by segments of the white elite." Statements such as these distort the historical record.
The second, and related problem, derives from Lipset's apparent confusion about the meaning of exceptionalism itself, which leads him to draw matters into his discussion which seem to have no place there. The classical definition, which he quite often cites, is that America has been uniquely successful among advanced industrial societies because it lacks a feudal (status or hierarchy-based) past. It is this position which enables him to advance his argument both about the weakness of socialism in American (no feudal past = no Marxist class dialectic) and the special status of blacks (slavery as a feudal remnant = conflict with dominant U.S. values). But why, under these circumstances, include chapters about American Jews and American intellectuals, neither of which raises the same issues?
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