Reviewing Charles Murray’s new ebook, American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History, Richard Gamble finds fault with his understanding of the Founding. The critique is a useful reminder that Charles is not a conservative in the sense of someone who sees everything embedded in the intimations of the past as they relate to the future:
Murray’s preoccupation with innovation ignores more than a century of colonial America’s prior experience in self-government and constitutionalism and its acknowledged debt to ancient, European, and most of all English political theory and practice. It is hard to recognize historical reality in Murray’s depiction of America’s past. America was not sui generis; it was a variation on themes reaching back thousands of years. The republic did not emerge de novo in the New World; it altered—to use the word the Declaration of Independence chose—an existing form of government while announcing the more general right of a people to abolish their government.
Murray complains at one point about “both liberals and conservatives quoting snippets of [the Founders’] writings” to endorse their own views. But Murray’s own snippets are vulnerable to the same charge.
He uses an 1825 letter from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, for instance, to show that after 50 years of reflection Jefferson called the rights language of the Declaration “an expression of the American mind.” If this is true, it comports nicely with Murray’s claim that America transformed an ideology of natural rights into an enduring political creed. But Jefferson’s letter never makes this connection. In fact, the full text of Jefferson’s letter makes a hash out of Murray’s insistence on an America made “from scratch.” The “object of the Declaration of Independence,” Jefferson told Lee, was “not to find new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.” He continued: “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.” And he then cited “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.” This letter may not prove a counter-argument against Murray’s claims, but it certainly doesn’t support them.
Larison complements the critique:
This is familiar territory for Prof. Gamble. He wrote a TAC article on the same subject last year, and wrote In Search of the City on a Hill: the Making and Unmaking of an American Myth to investigate the origins and uses of the “city on a hill” rhetoric that now regularly crops up in appeals to American exceptionalism. As he wrote in his article last year, there are two competing traditions of American exceptionalism:
The old exceptionalism was consistent with the ethos of American constitutional democracy; the new is not. The old was an expression of and a means to sustain the habits of a self-governing people; the new is an expression of and a means to sustain a nationalist and imperialist people. The old exceptionalism suited a limited foreign policy; the new suits a messianic adventurism out to remake the world.
As we have seen once again in the last few weeks, Americans have no appetite for such adventurism.
The Dish 