A compelling examination of American exceptionalism at a crossroads
The idea of American exceptionalism claims that the United States has a superior character, special mission, and unique destiny. Often treated as a factual claim subject to empirical verification, this idea is better understood as a set of narrative themes that saturate thought and discourse about the United States' role in the world. Policymakers and other narrators routinely tap into these themes amid contested interpretations of national identity and international visions, powerfully shaping how US foreign policy is constructed, implemented, and understood.
American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy shows how American exceptionalism is also a crossroads concept, sitting at the intersection of other factors including nationalism, liberalism, race, religion, and status. It serves as a vector channeling related biases and moral assertions into institutional practices, elite discourses, and public opinion. It inspires activism in US foreign policy and also exposes it to crucial vulnerabilities.
Amid profound narrative contestation over the country's role in the world today, there is no better time for renewed scholarly attention to the multifaceted relationship between American exceptionalism and foreign policy. This book's agenda-setting, interdisciplinary scholarship lays a strong foundation for this engagement.
Reviews
"This much-needed book brings conceptual clarity and rigor to our study of 'American exceptionalism,' explaining across a wide variety of perspectives what these words have meant in the development of the country's narrative and their impact at home and abroad. The essays by a first-rate group of authors possessing a deep understanding of US foreign policy history will help scholars and students of US foreign policy and international relations theory understand the ways in which capitalism, nationalism, religion, racism, polarization, and more have featured in US engagement with the world from the country's founding to the present."—James Goldgeier, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, American University
"Can anything new be said about American exceptionalism? Yes! This incisive collection opens up novel conversations about this "meta-narrative" underpinning, legitimating, and shaping US foreign policy. Richard W. Maass and Hilde Eliassen Restad's American Exceptionalism and U.S. Foreign Policy marks the start of a new wave of scholarship on this critical concept and its varied dimensions, intersections, contradictions, comparisons, and consequences."—Ronald R. Krebs, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota
"This book provides indispensable clarity on the idea of American exceptionalism. Maass, Restad, and their co-contributors treat the term not as a representation of self-evident fact, but as an overarching framing device for interpreting American foreign policy. Politicians, scholars, and the wider public should read this book."—Ian Tyrrell, author, American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea
About the Author
Richard W. Maass is an associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University and author of The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited US Territorial Expansion.
Hilde Eliassen Restad is an associate professor of international studies at Oslo New University College. A Fulbright Foundation alumna, she is the author of American Exceptionalism: How an Idea Made a Nation and Remade the World.
