Exceptionalism

Given the significance of the keyword “exceptionalism” to ideologies of US American nationalism, it is certainly ironic that the word is not originally an “American” coinage. Joseph Stalin devised the phrase “the heresy of American Exceptionalism” in 1929 to justify his excommunication of the Lovestoneites from the ranks of the Communist International (J. Alexander 1981; Tyrell 1991). The Lovestoneites were a faction whose leader, Jay Lovestone, had already broken with the American Communist Party over what was then referred to as the national question, specifically the question of whether and how to work with established US trade unions. The Lovestoneites provoked Stalin’s condemnation when they proposed that the United States was “unique” because it lacked the social and historical conditions that had led to Europe’s economic collapse. In sharp contrast, the founders of American studies as an academic field reappropriated the term in the 1930s in an effort to portray the United States as destined to perform a special role in the world of nations. By installing a uniquely “American” exceptionalism as the foundational tenet of American studies, the field’s founders elevated the United States into a model that offered European societies an image of their future that would be liberated from the incursions of both Marxism and socialism.