Featured White Papers
- Webcast: Growing your business with CRM (BNET)
- Enterprise PBX comparison guide (VoIP-News)
- Enterprise PBX buyer's guide (VoIP-News)
Content provided in partnership with
Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought
Anglican Theological Review, Winter 1999 by Danford, John
Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought. By James W. Ceaser. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. x + 292 pp. $30.00 (cloth).
Professor James Ceaser teaches political science at Thomas Jefferson's university, the University of Virginia. His aim in this study is to defend the achievement of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin, and others, against the increasingly common use of "America" as a symbol. In the view of much of the modern academic and cultural elite-not only in Europe but increasingly in the U.S.-America has become a symbol for "that which is grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, deforming, rootless, uncultured, and-always in quotation marks- `free"' (p. 1). Each of the words enumerated in this litany has actually been used to describe American culture, as Professor Ceaser points out. The book thus seems to belong to the genre of cultural commentary. Why was it written by a political scientist? In answering that question we come to the key insight in this excellent study, for Professor Ceaser links the symbolic distortion of America to the distortions in our understanding which result from the abandonment of serious political science, the kind of practical political science so characteristic of the founding generation, for example. In the eighteenth century, where his story begins, the emerging discipline of scientific anthropology (linked to the great natural philosopher, Buffon) gave rise to theories linking varieties of animals and plants to specific geographical locales, and provided an explanation for the sparse population and relatively primitive human communities of the New World: they were inferior because the climate and geography of the New World could produce only degenerate forms of human beings. Professor Ceaser shows how the fascination with scientific explanations misled observers, and how the political science of at least some of the American founders produced a better understanding.
He takes up the story next in its nineteenth-century version, when various racialist theories again supplanted prudential political science. This is a complex story, in which America figured as a positive symbol for some, but more commonly stood for all the fears of racial mongrelization and degeneracy which preoccupied European aristocrats. Professor Ceaser carefully traces these notions, focussing especially on the thought of Arthur de Gobineau. He shows how pernicious views were widely disseminated, and how they were countered by the political science of Alexis de Tocqueville, Gobineau's contemporary (and sometime friend). Once again the theme is that political science-which approaches directly and in ordinary language such questions as what is human nature and how should human beings live-is superior to modes of thought which take up these questions through the prism of non-political, "scientific" theories (which reduce matters to geography, or to race, or to history).
In the final third of the book Professor Ceaser traces the "symbolic America" into the twentieth century, when America gradually replaced Germany as the quintessential modern society, and negative symbol for modern intellectuals. Using the writings of Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger, among others, Ceaser shows how America comes to represent crude utilitarianism, greed and materialism, and above all rampant technological growth smothering humanity's finer sentiments. In the author's words, according to this view "the symbolic America is not just beyond all hope; it is beyond all guidance" because human beings are unable to control or even influence their own fate. For many contemporary intellectuals influenced by Heidegger, "America thus stands as the supreme impediment to spiritual reawakening. It must be overcome or destroyed if any kind of renewal is to take place" (p. 187). Ceaser juxtaposes these views, along with the End of History perspective associated with Alexander Kojeve, to the old fashioned political science of Leo Strauss. Professor Ceaser cogently argues that in just the same way that the American founders responded to Buffon in the eighteenth century, and Tocqueville countered the antipolitical racial theories of the nineteenth century, Strauss's political writings serve to correct the twentieth century's attempt to make America a symbol of all that is bad in modern life. Reconstructing America is a judicious and moderate book. Its title alludes to the contemporary intellectual movement known as deconstructionism, which originated as a literary theory but is widely deployed in the academy to undermine and abuse the literary and cultural achievements of what are called hegemonic Western societies, of which America has become the preeminent example and therefore the juiciest target. Professor Ceaser has done a service by tracing the roots of this movement, or impulse. He not only shows that the use of America as a negative symbol has a long and ugly history; he helps us understand the sources of this inclination to distort, and points us in the direction of the remedy.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Technology
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »