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Against Exceptionalisms
MARY NOLAN
AMERICA "HAS BEEN EXCEPTIONAL all through its history," proclaims Seymour Martin
Lipset, and the nature of that exceptionalism lies in enduring American values'!
The most important of these deep beliefs-liberty, egalitarianism, individualism,
populism, and laissez faire-make America "the most anti-statist, legalistic and
rights-oriented nation."2 Pervasive acceptance of this "American Creed" produces
intensely moralistic political and social conflicts but precludes class conflict,
socialism, or even a developed welfare state. Americanism as ideology is, Lipset
admits rather tentatively, "something of a double-edged sword," for it promotes not
only "personal responsibility, independent initiative and voluntarism" but also
"self-serving behavior, atomism, and a disregard for communal good."3 Nonetheless, the American Creed, which developed from the founding institutions and
principles of the United States, has in Lipset's complacent view produced and
reproduced a uniquely economically powerful, politically liberal, and morally
admirable nation. While other countries might now be inching slightly closer to the
promised land, as "they develop and 'Americanize,''' the extent to which America
"remains unique is astonishing."4
To a historian of Germany, and to many Germans who have analyzed America
and Americanism, both the assertion of American exceptionalism and the specific
terms in which Lipset defines it are puzzling and problematic. Germans have
certainly not ignored the issue of American uniqueness. It was Werner Sombart,
after all, who in 1904 coined one of the classic formulations of exceptionalism with
his Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?5 But twentieth-century Germans
have not defined the essence of America in Lipset's ideological terms, nor have they
accepted American self-definitions at face value as Lipset does.
Just as Germans have interrogated American exceptionalism, so have historians
of modern Germany questioned the validity of exceptionalist arguments. German
history and historiography have been haunted by debates about the uniqueness of
German society, culture, and politics. Germany's Sonderweg or special path is more
often defined in terms of deficiency and distortion than positive achievements.
Despite its economic development and successful state building, modern Germany
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Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996),28.
Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 20.
Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 268.
Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 292.
Werner Sombart, J¥hy Is There No Socialism in the United States? (London, 1976).
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did not have a bourgeois liberal revolution; it did not develop a robust civil society,
democratic institutions, or a liberal intellectual culture. In debating the validity of
such claims about Germany, many historians have developed a healthy skepticism
about the purportedly typical development in other countries against which the
German Sonderweg and American exceptionalism have been posited.
GERMANY FEATURES PECULIARLY in Lipset's exposition of American exceptionalism.
It is not the object of systematic comparison, as are Canada and Japan but, rather,
pops up here and there in discussions of economic competitiveness and patriotism,
voluntary associations and welfare provisions. Should Germany be inserted into the
arguments about Canada, where the question of class politics predominates, or into
the analysis of Japan, where the group is emphasized over the individual and gender
relations are more traditional? We learn how America differs from Germany (as
well as a host of other countries) in terms of such things as individualism among
business managers, hours worked, and the density and typology of voluntary
associations, but these constitute a laundry list of peculiarities, not examples of
uniqueness in relationship to other nations that form a coherent category. These
difficulties notwithstanding, there are serious grounds on which to question both
the explicit single-issue comparisons and the implied contrasts of class development, political systems, and enduring values.
Let us take the contrast between Germany's strong and relatively egalitarian
welfare-state system and America's much less developed and redistributive one.
Lipset attributes the high degree of income inequality and poverty and the low level
of welfare programs in the United States to anti-statism and individualism. In
Germany and Britain, aristocratic-based conservatism, with its noblesse oblige
communitarian values and dislike of capitalist competitiveness and materialism,
created strong welfare systems. Lipset's global description of the contemporary
differences between Europe and America is accurate but unoriginal and ignores
significant variations among European nations. 6 His explanation for these varied
outcomes is ahistorical and decontextualized, moving as it does from unchanging
and presumably universal values dating from some unspecified but pre-industrial
foundational era to the present. It overlooks the complexities of class conflicts, state
formation, socialist and feminist interventions, and the discursive transformations
of conceptions of citizenship, rights, needs, and social obligations. 7 Only by ignoring
the influence of all these factors on both welfare states and individual options can
Lipset glibly assert that Americans choose to work longer hours and to vacation less
than Germans do. s
Americans, Lipset notes, are deeply patriotic, expressing pride in being American
in much greater numbers than Germans express pride in being German. Viewing
Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 252.
To explore such influences, see Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the
European Welfare State, 1875-1975 (New York, 1990); Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the
Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds. (London, 1991);
Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); and Mothers of a New World: Maternalist
Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds. (New York, 1993).
8 Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 60.
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patriotism positively, Lipset fails to inquire where positive love of country ends and
irrational or xenophobic nationalism begins. This is a limited perspective for
America, an impossible one for Germany. In the wake of National Socialism,
German patriotism is a contested category. Should one profess loyalty to the
democratic constitution, take pride in German culture and economic development,
or express devotion to the Fatherland? Open professions of nationalist pride are
likely to provoke censure at home and abroad, but critiques of German national
character and past behavior meet a mixed response. Daniel Goldhagen's sweeping
condemnation of Germany in Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) as thoroughly
anti-Semitic and exterminatory was applauded in Germany, but recent exhibitions
linking the Wehrmacht to genocide on the Eastern Front have been roundly
criticized as distorted and unfair.
Survey research, on which Lipset relies heavily, asks the same question in
different countries but ignores the distinctive political and discursive contexts, the
complex historical trajectories in which terms such as patriotism and nationalism
are embedded. The answers elicited are not easily comparable. Moreover, neither
the status of patriotic pride as a core attitude nor its relationship to other enduring
values in Lipset's argument is clear. Had one polled Germans at the turn of the
century, for example, or in the late 1930s, far more than the current 20 percent
would have expressed pride in being German.
In his analysis of patriotism, as in that of basic beliefs and commitments more
generally, Lipset cannot account for shifts, reversals, and redefinitions. His
assertion of exceptionalism is premised on the continuity of values and resulting
political practices over several centuries. Are the core values of other societies
similarly immutable? If so, how does one account for the very different political
attitudes and practices that have evolved in a country such as Germany over the
course of the last century? Values are as much the product of complex historical
developments and deliberate interventions by states, groups, and individuals as they
are the creators of political institutions and behaviors.
Arguments about American exceptionalism invariably culminate in the proud
conclusion that America had no socialism. Such a sweeping and negative formulation hardly captures the complex nature of class politics and class consciousness in
the United States. 9 It ignores the high degree of state and employer violence and
coercion and is silent on racial conflict. Of greater importance, such an assertion
assumes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a
monolithically class-conscious Europe, with strong socialist trade unions and
political parties in contrast to an America of business unionism and two-party,
machine politics. But there was no one pattern of class formation, no one
articulation of class consciousness, no one form in which the economic, political,
and cultural demands of workers was expressed organizationally or ideologically.
France had syndicalist unions and a multiplicity of socialist parties, which weakly
coalesced only after the turn of the century. British trade unions did not begin to
9 For an introduction to the debates against American working-class exceptionalism, see Eric Foner,
"Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" History Workshop lournal17 (1984): 57-80; Sean
Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 17901920," International Labor and Working Class History 26 (Fall 1984): 1-24.
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break their alliance with the Liberals until the 1890s, and the Labour Party was
small, weak, and most definitely not Socialist until after World War Llf any country
was exceptional in the size and strength of its socialist party and trade unions, it was
Germany. And there, as well as elsewhere, large numbers of workers supported
political Catholicism, voted for bourgeois liberal parties, or remained distant from
political organizations and electoral politics. lO
In the interwar years, when welfare states first developed, there was similar
diversity. In the 1920s, the laissez-faire United States looked different from
Germany with its well-developed social policy, but New Deal America differed
more from Britain. In the post-World War II decades, patterns of class politics and
welfare states shifted again, but there was never a single European model, deriving
in teleological fashion from a shared feudal past and statist and communitarian
values.!1
CLAIMS TO EXCEPTIONALISM are hardly the exclusive preserve of Americans studying
America. In the last two centuries, Germans have anguished over their relationship
to West European and American thought, values, and models of economic, social,
and political development. While more conservative voices proudly asserted
Germany's distinctiveness and its mediating position between West and East, others
of a liberal or leftist bent advocated piecemeal emulation or far-reaching adoption
of foreign models that were deemed desirable or seen as hegemonic.
Since Nazism, historians of Germany have explored "the peculiarities of German
history," initially in terms of intellectual history and values, later in terms of
socio-political development. First the German mind or national character, then
cultural developments from Luther or Hegel or Bismarck were examined and found
to be both unchanging and productive of authoritarianism, intolerance, and
inequality. More recently, the German Sonderweg has been defined in social
structural terms. The emergence of industrial capitalism was not accompanied by
the development of democratic political forms and bourgeois-dominated civil
society; rather, the Prussian aristocracy retained political and cultural power. The
ultimate cause of National Socialism was rooted in this lack of a bourgeois
revolution and incomplete modernization. 12
Arguments about Germany's "special path" assume the existence of a "correct"
road, down which Britain, France, and America traveled as they developed
industrial capitalism, bourgeois civil society, and liberal democracy. This exceptionalist argument is doubly flawed, as David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley first argued
and many others have elaborated, for it simplifies and distorts many aspects of
German social and cultural development while completely ignoring others. 13 Take
voluntary associations, for example. Lipset argues that America is exceptional in the
number and diversity of such organizations, which are the building blocks of civil
10 See Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States,
Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, eds. (Princeton, N.J., 1986).
11 See note 6 above.
12 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985).
13 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (London, 1984).
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society and promote political engagement. But Germany, in contrast to countries
such as France or even Britain, has a notable density and diversity of voluntary
associations-and has had since the nineteenth century. This challenges any simple
correlations among voluntary associations, civil society, and liberal democracy and
suggests that social scientists should pay less attention to quantifying civil society
and more to understanding the qualitatively different meanings of associationallife
in different contexts. Societies can be, and since the nineteenth century have been,
bourgeois without necessarily being liberal.
By focusing on incomplete modernization, arguments about German exceptionalism have ignored the messiness of modernity. By stressing the persistence of
traditional values and antimodernist rhetorics, they have ignored the irrationalities,
inequalities, and gendered and racist assumptions of liberal theory and modern
science. Arguments about American exceptionalism promote their own silences and
omissions. Changes in economic and social structure, in gender relations, in the
social and discursive construction of race are neglected, for the values at the center
of American exceptionalism are purportedly impervious to these forces. Finally, in
both Germany and America, arguments about exceptionalism avoid any serious
comparative analysis of twentieth-century capitalism.
America looks different if cast as a capitalist nation, as the twentieth-century
capitalist nation, that has dominated the global economy until recently (or still does
and will for the foreseeable future, in Lipset's view). While America is unquestionably successful and powerful, it is neither unique nor destined to remain hegemonic.
The American model of economic modernity has neither totally conquered and
coerced other nations nor seduced them into slavish imitation. Rather, it has both
sought to impose itself and been embraced by others, albeit in negotiated form.
America was seen as providing a model of development that could be selectively
emulated, a language of modernity that could be spoken with quite distinct national
accents. The goal was to become Americanized while remaining oneself. American
exceptionalism, which proclaims the moral and material superiority of the United
States, denies the possibility of such emulation and negotiation. The ideology of
exceptionalism thus stands in sharp and ironic contrast to much of American
foreign and economic policy, from modernization theory to structural adjustment
programs, which are premised on America as the only economic and political
model.
Germans did not see imitating America as easy or always desirable. America was,
after all, a non-European other, strange, intriguing, at times frightening, and always
open to multiple readings. In the nineteenth century, America was seen as
immature, closer to nature, and of marginal relevance to German identity and
development; in the twentieth, it was regarded as advanced, as the modern,
rationalized, functional, and materialistic future toward which Germany might well
be heading, for better or worse. Throughout, it was placed under the broad rubric
of Western capitalist nations. From the 1920s on, the pervasive and passionate
German debates about Americanism, anti-Americanism, and Americanization
circled around which aspects of America could and should be emulated, not on
American exceptionalism. It was above all America's economic success that
Germans wanted to imitate, its production methods and products they felt forced
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to copy. Germans defined and debated America in terms of mass production, mass
consumption, and popular culture, not the American creed. They focused on
American economic and political interventions more than on the values behind
American institutions, on changing gender relations and youth culture more than
on timeless moralism and individualism. 14
In these debates, many of Lipset's characterizations of America have been
challenged. Lipset perceives strong individualism, while many Germans are overwhelmed by monotonous homogeneity and stifling conformity. Where he finds
egalitarianism, many Germans discover cultural leveling on the one hand and
startling inequalities in wealth and welfare on the other. While Lipset praises
American laissez faire, many Germans note American economic and political
intervention throughout the world.
The repeated assertion of American exceptionalism masks the complex nature of
American society and its similarities with and interconnections to other nations. It
dismisses the ways the rest of the world sees the United States. In both Germany
and America, exceptionalist arguments produce inadequate history, limited selfunderstanding, and arrogant politics.
14 Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New
York, 1994); Michael Ermarth, ed., America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945-1955 (Providence, R.I., 1993); Reiner Pommerin, ed., The American Impact on Postwar Germany (Providence,
1994).
Mary Nolan is a professor of history and the acting director of Women's
Studies at New York University. A specialist in modern German history and
working-class history, Nolan is the author of Social Dernocracy and Society:
Working-Class Radicalism in Dusseldorf, 1890-1920 (1980) and Visions of
Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (1994). Recent
articles include "Work, Gender and Everyday Life: Reflections on the Social
History of Nazi Germany," in Hitlerism and Stalinism, Ian Kershaw and Moshe
Lewin, editors (1997), and "America in the German Imagination," forthcoming
in a collection on Americanism edited by Heidi Fehrenbach and Uta Poiger
(Berghahn Books).
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