Roberto Breña responds to Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
An Inevitable Exceptionalism
For a non-expert on the intellectual history of the United States, The Ideas That Made America byJennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is a very stimulating reading in many respects. The book, published in 2019, is a well-written and attractive itinerary of the most significant currents, authors, and texts of that history. However, when one ponders the book and reviews it carefully, certain doubts emerge and some significant lacunae come to light. I must say that there is no way that a book of only 180 pages, that covers the whole intellectual history of the North American colonies and the United States, will not have gaps of some kind or another. Curiously, the first one of them is adumbrated by the author herself when she writes, in the first page of the book, that for an intellectual historian the context of an idea “is as important as the idea itself.” I cannot agree more with Ratner-Rosenhagen on this point. By itself, it can be posited as an implicit recognition that the task she has ahead is, in a significant sense, an impossible task or, to put it mildly, a Sisyphean endeavor.
Exceptionalism, under different guises, is one of the common threads of the book….
Notwithstanding this recognition, the author goes ahead and ends up writing a very good introduction to the most important ideas that have contributed to shape American society, mindset, and culture from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. However, there are some premises and notions in the book with which I dissent and some approaches that appear to me as biased. It is not difficult to agree with Ratner-Rosenhagen when, in the first chapter, she establishes a direct link between Puritanism and American exceptionalism, but I disagree with her assertion that the latter provides a view of America “in the wider world” (I would go as far as saying that very often this exceptionalism, or any other, excludes the rest of the world). Exceptionalism, under different guises, is one of the common threads of the book; this is due mainly to the fact that it is a common thread of American intellectual history (the object of study of The Ideas That Made America). To that extent, exceptionalism had to play a very important role in the book.
Nevertheless, as an outsider, I perceive this very peculiar trait of the US American mentality very differently than the author. What lacks in American exceptionalism (I would say in every exceptionalism) is an acknowledgement that “a wider world” really exists. If only because exceptionalism privileges what, supposedly, makes a country different from all the rest and ignores not only the commonalities with other nations and other cultures, but also the things that those nations have to offer, to contribute. This would be a humbling experience. Excepting Emerson and Thoreau, it is difficult to find a sense of humbleness in any of the protagonists of The Ideas That Made America regarding the place that the US occupies, will occupy, or “should” occupy in the world, in world history, and in the future of mankind.
American exceptionalism has a long lineage; among its contributors, the author highlights John Winthrop, John Locke and, of course, Thomas Paine. That the self-made author of the pamphlet Common Sense viewed the American Revolution the way he did during the first revolutionary years is understandable, but that a contemporary academic like Ratner-Rosenhagen characterizes the American Revolution with the Declaration of Independence and, in the same sentence, characterizes the French Revolution with the invention of the guillotine is, in my view, another way—more sophisticated of course—of disseminating an insidious notion of American exceptionalism.
I think it is about time to leave these misleading contrasts and historical simplifications behind (at least in the academic world). As an avid reader of books on the Age of Revolutions, I can assure the readers of the present comment that contrasts like the one Ratner-Rosenhagen establishes are not uncommon. Only five pages ahead, she falls into a variation of the American exceptionalism I am criticizing and asserts that even if making a claim for the causal force of ideas “is always a little risky,” nonetheless “in the case of the American Revolution, it is unassailable.” I do not agree regarding the causal force of ideas; in any case, the same would apply to the other three “great” Atlantic Revolutions: the French, the Haitian, and the independence movements of Spanish America. The American Revolution has no monopoly on the power of ideas.
Overestimating the Power of Ideas
It has been a long time since Isaiah Berlin wrote a phrase that he attributes to the German poet Heinrich Heine: we should not underestimate the power of ideas, because, in Berlin’s words, “philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.” This oft-repeated quotation appears in “Two Concepts of Liberty”, a lecture pronounced in 1958 (that is, near the middle of the Cold War, a context that is crucial to grasp some of the main assumptions and weaknesses of the most influential essay in the history of ideas of the twentieth century). I have always doubted “the causal force of ideas,” if only because establishing any causal links between ideas, books, and authors, on the one hand, and political and social practices and events, on the other, seems to me a very risky business indeed. Asserting that the American Revolution is an “unassailable” case of the aforementioned force is, in my view, another variation of American exceptionalism, one in which ideas have the capacity to “produce” history. In a certain sense, this implies adding another exceptionality to a history that is already considered exceptional (from the arrival of the Pilgrims to North American shores in 1620 right up to our days, as we will see in the next section). I think that academics, all around the world, but in American universities especially (if what we are dealing with is the exceptionalism of the US), should try to debunk “exceptionalist” premises, beliefs, or approaches, and adopt a critical view towards them or, at least, not add to them.
In chapter eight, Ratner-Rosenhagen returns to this very important issue of ideas as causes in history. Once again, however, the reader is left with an uneasy feeling. Of course ideas can be “stimuli,” as she writes; that is, ideas are much more than symptoms. However, she immediately asserts that the period in American history known as “the sixties” started “in ideas” (or with ideas, if I understand correctly). If they are stimuli, ideas, by themselves, cannot make things happen. Stimulating a historic process is not synonymous with starting it.
The interaction or intercourse between ideas and events is as complex as it can be; this is evident for any historian or intellectual historian. As soon as we delve into any historical period, what we call events, practices, or facts, can often be even more “stimulating” than ideas. In any case, ideas are never closed, decided, or fixed. In fact, in order for them to stimulate, they should leave things open, debatable, unfixed (up to a certain point at least).
A Present that Seems Distant
In the Epilogue, Ratner-Rosenhagen returns to what I consider to be another variant of the kind of American exceptionalism I am trying to challenge, when she poses the following question: “Is the cause of America the cause of all mankind?” Thomas Paine used this expression, in the affirmative, almost 250 years ago in the extremely agitated political and social context of the Thirteen Colonies of 1775-76. To be honest, I cannot imagine a book on the intellectual history of any country other than the United States, written at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, which poses this question as a sort of closing statement. To do so is to contribute rather than dispute American exceptionalism; amplifying it, instead of showing its false presumptions, its “traps,” and its immense limitations.
It is also in the Epilogue that the author pays attention to Imagined Communities, written by the Anglo-Irish political scientist and polyglot Benedict Anderson (this book, a classic on nationalism, was published in 1983) and to the AIDS epidemic (that started in the first half of the 1980s). Even more importance is given in these final pages to Richard Rorty, a thinker whose ideas, arguably, achieved their highest influence in the second half of the 1980s. I am not saying or even insinuating that Anderson’s book or the AIDS epidemic or Rorty’s oeuvre are not important in the intellectual history of the United States; sure they are. My point here is that during the four decades that have elapsed since, say 1984, many undertakings, actions, ideas, debates, and events of major significance have transpired in American history and, therefore, in American society and, inevitably, in the intellectual history of the United States. If this is so, readers wonder why so much attention is given in these last pages of The Ideas That Made America to books, events, and thinkers that are relatively distant from our present time (in some ideological, political, and international issues or aspects, I would say very distant).
Return of the Genteel Tradition
Even more bewildering is the fact that the book closes with a sort of eulogy of the “long conversation” that, according to the author, has taken place in American society since the Pilgrims set foot in North America. A conversation in which, supposedly, Americans of every stripe took part: “learned and self-taught, native-born and immigrant, religious and secular, and left and right.” This, in my view, is what outside the US is often characterized as “political correctness,” but what in the US is sometimes also understood as “consensus liberalism.” The metamorphosis of what can often be fraught ideological contestation into “conversation” masks profound, complex, and pervasive power relationships.
…Ratner-Rosenhagen uses the rosy notion of a pluralistic and amicable conversation to mollify hard-to-swallow social realities.
I think that Ratner-Rosenhagen uses the rosy notion of a pluralistic and amicable conversation to mollify hard-to-swallow social realities. In her words, this conversation offers “new arguments and key terms for Americans to think about the world, themselves, their truth, and their America.” These words, that close The Ideas That Made America, may sound good in certain ears, but considering the context of 2019, they sound naïve to me; mainly because they seem to camouflage the bluntness of the economic, social, and political power structures that very much define the history of the United States. These structures were very evident during the Trump administration. If this is the case, I think we are very far from anything that can be properly called a “conversation.”
In this regard, Ratner-Rosenhagen’s attitude recalls the “genteel tradition” of American philosophy, which George Santayana so harshly criticized in a famous essay published in 1911. More so because the author herself seems to coincide with Santayana in the moralistic and evasive nature of the American intellectual temperament, which, in her view, is “suffused with light yet casting no shadows, an unthreatened, if unthreatening view of the universe and man’s place within it.” The genteel tradition was deferential to prevailing opinion, it was polite, and it was moralistic. With these notions in mind, I think Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book evinces more than remnants of this tradition. Understood, of course, as one of the many possible twenty-first century avatars of the original genteel tradition. Evidently, we are at present in a very different context (very much beyond Calvinism and Transcendentalism, which Santayana considered the essential fountains of the aforesaid tradition). Clearly, the present American context has other sources. Some of them will come to light or may be inferred from the closing paragraphs of this comment. Somewhat paradoxically, because we tend to think the postwar period is a thing of the past, one of these sources is the “staid traditionalism, stifling uniformity, complacency, and consensus” of postwar American intellectual life. A set of attitudes very well complemented by Louis Hartz’s “liberal tradition,” assumed not only as the defining feature of American history, but also as the tradition that would determine its future.
Self-referentiality and Two Distinct Absences
One of the aspects of American history and American intellectual history that inevitably catches the attention of any reader who is not American is the infinite capability of Americans concerning self-reference; in other words, their proneness to be self-referential. From this fact stems a provincial attitude vis-à-vis a whole gamut of issues; a stance that very often turns itself into a purported superiority, into a moral self-righteousness, and into a complete lack of interest regarding other nations and other cultures (not to speak of other languages). In sum, to any different way of considering the values that should guide social interactions, society in general, and the relations among human beings.
One of the most glaring lacunae in the book in question is an author who would have agreed entirely with the content of the last paragraphs: James Baldwin, a thinker who does not receive a single mention in The Ideas That Made America. There is no need for me to list here Baldwin’s most important books, ideas, worries, or aspirations during his lifetime (1924-1987); this is not the place. In any case, from a very insightful personal, domestic, and international perspective, Baldwin offered a radical critique of America’s socio-political problems; a critique that would have profoundly troubled Ratner-Rosenhagen’s narrative in The Ideas that Made America. However, even Baldwin may appear to be a bit distant (in chronological terms) if we are talking about the last pages of a book published in 2019. As Ratner-Rosenhagen was drafting her book, American society was tearing itself apart in several aspects (among them: race, immigration, economic inequality, polarization of several kinds, concentration of wealth, and inability to address climate change, even to accept it). In fact, during the Trump years, there was almost nothing in American public life that could be seriously considered an instance of “public conversation”; instead, what could be heard all around were innuendoes, fake news, alternative facts, and outright lies.
On the other hand, those four years were preceded by the eight years of the two presidencies of Barack Obama, another influential and relevant public figure who is conspicuously absent in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book. I mention Obama not only because, as far as I can tell and possibly with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, he is the most articulate president that the US has ever had (not a minor issue if we are talking about ideas), but mainly because of a simple fact: he is an African-American. Therefore, it is evident that his arrival to the highest office of the US government in 2008 meant momentous things for American society, for American history, and, in “good logic,” for American intellectual history. In my opinion, Ratner-Rosenhagen’s silence regarding Obama is also telling. In any case, a book on American ideas, American society (“the context of the idea is as important as the idea itself”), and American intellectuals, published in the middle of Trump’s administration, closes with this phrase: “And so the conversation of American thought continues.” For me, in historic and contextual terms, these words represent intellectual complacency and academic smugness. In the previous section, I referred to these attitudes as a sort of updating of Santayana’s genteel tradition.
Contents, Lacunae, and Openings
I do not want to end this comment on The Ideas That Made America without saying that it is a book from which those that are not familiar with American intellectual life will learn many things. Despite its serious blind spots, it puts on the table many interesting aspects of intellectual life in the history of the region that, since 1783, is internationally known as the “United States” (but that defines itself as “America”). Among them are: the scope of Emerson’s critical stances and the import of Transcendentalism; the enormous influence of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on American intellectuals, including a thinker as original as William James; the significance of Pragmatism for American intellectual life and the “omnipresence” of its towering figure, John Dewey; the depth and critical edge of Randolph Bourne’s progressivism; the novelty (at least for me) that the year 1962 can be considered axial from the perspective of Western intellectual history; the role played by the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, written by Thomas Kuhn, on fields that went way beyond what we conceive as “science”; and, to end this brief list, the contradiction that lies at the heart of the critique on universalism that took place during the 1980s vis-à-vis the human rights discourse (an important debate then and very much alive today). It will depend, of course, on the level of ignorance of each person (and mine is considerable regarding American intellectual history), but all those who read The Ideas That Made America will not only learn many things, but, more importantly, will be propelled by the author to further their intellectual quest on a wide variety of topics.
Coming back to the lacunae I could discern in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book, I will almost conclude this comment with an inventory of authors, currents, and books that I missed (besides James Baldwin and Barack Obama). As mentioned, these, or any other absences that could be identified, are inevitable in such a concise book. Therefore, my list (or any other for that matter) should be taken with more than a grain of salt. That being said, here it is: De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (not only as an eulogy of American society, as it is all too often considered, but also as a scathing critique of it); Sinclair Lewis, not because of his 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature (the first won by an American writer), but because of what his novels of the 1920s tell us about American society; Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) and what this best-seller conveys about America after the Great Depression; Oppenheimer’s deep and very active anti-nuclear thought and practice since the very end of World War II (to no avail, it may be added); C. Wright Mills’ contributions to American sociology in the 1940s and 1950s; A Theory of Justice by Rawls (1971) and its enormous influence in the social sciences and the humanities; the libertarian critique of Rawl’s book (Nozick especially) and what libertarianism in general reveals about American society (in this regard, I think Hayek’s presence in the US during the 1960s and his influence on American academia deserved a couple of lines); the republican critique of liberalism by historians (Bailyn and Wood, among them) during the 1970s (and beyond); the communitarian critique of liberalism by political philosophers during the 1980s (among them, Sandel and Walzer, both Americans); and, finally, the debate sparked by Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated article “The End of History?” (1989), that put on the table topics like the alleged (and short-lived) “victory of liberalism”, the meaning of “liberal democracy” in what would soon become a multipolar world; and, in a more philosophical vein, the variegated meanings of the concept liberty in a post-Cold War era.
The discussions that emanated from Fukuyama’s article and from the book that followed it in 1992 adopted a very different tone, even lost part of their significance, with the events that took place on 9/11. This fateful date (that had a vast array of consequences in domestic and international affairs, in practice and in theory) does appear in the book in question, but in such a hasty way, that the readers are not given elements or even clues to calibrate some of its consequences for American intellectual life. Summing up, I think the inclusion of some of the oversights mentioned in the last paragraphs would have taken The Ideas That Made America in less polite and less ingenuous directions and, even more important, would have forced Ratner-Rosenhagen to grapple with much more somber, ambiguous, and troubling aspects of the history and intellectual history of American society.
A final remark: this essay was drafted at the request of Professor Michael J. Kramer of the Department of History at the State University of New York (SUNY Brockport) and editor of the new online publication of US cultural and intellectual history, The Carryall. I may add that we never had established any contact before he sent me an e-mail a few months ago, in which he invited me to participate in a roundtable on The Ideas That Made America. As a gesture of appreciation, I must mention that Professor Kramer made useful observations to the first version of this comment, that I sent him in the month of September. More importantly, I think that inviting an “outsider” (I am Mexican) to this forum on Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book is an example of a promising alternative attitude within American academia that goes beyond mere discourse and beyond any kind of exceptionalism. It seems to me that invitations like this one leave self-reference completely behind by opening, in practice, towards other perspectives, other experiences, and other countries.
About the Author
Roberto Breña is professor and researcher at the Center for International Studies of El Colegio de México in Mexico City. His main academic interests are the history of liberalism, liberalism in the Spanish-speaking world, the Atlantic Revolutions, intellectual history, historiographic issues, and contemporary historiography on the Age of Revolutions. He is the author or editor of several books on first Spanish liberalism and the Spanish American independence movements. He has been visiting professor in the United States, Canada, Spain, France, and Italy. Among his relatively recent publications, there are two related with the present roundtable: “Tensions and Challenges of Intellectual History in Contemporary Latin America”, Contributions to the History of Concepts, vol. 16, 2021; and “Revoluciones hispánicas and Atlantic History: a Spanish language historiographical interpretation and bibliography,” Age of Revolutions, (An Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Journal, May 2021. His latest publication is “La era de las revoluciones bajo la lupa. Análisis crítico de dos libros recientes de la historiografía estadounidense” (“The Age of Revolutions under the microscope. A critical analysis of two recent books in American historiography”), Foro Internacional, No. 258, October-November 2024. The English version of this historiographic essay, revised by the author, appeared in Age of Revolutions (An Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Journal), December 2024. He can be reached at rbrena@colmex.mx.