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Review Essay 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 1 2 3 4 5 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). 769 770 Mary Nolan 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. 6 7 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1997 Against Exceptionalisms 771 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. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1997 772 Mary Nolan 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). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1997 Against Exceptionalisms 773 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 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1997 Mary Nolan 774 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). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1997