If what we now call postmodernism is any indication, we have yet to come to terms with the risks, matched only by the atavistic hankering, involved in asking the question, what does it mean to be American? Even the form of the question itself seems somehow quintessentially American: a sign, perhaps, of its essentialist allure and ahistorical dangers, and not only for Americans. As Régis Debray's famous quip about the post-1968 Left in France testifies – they set sail for Maoist China and landed in California – and as Jean Baudrillard's recent forays into the Epcot Center of the American Mind indicate, it seems as if the whole world (or at least that part of it which can afford to) is asking itself that same question. In fact, FredricJameson has argued that recent Continental theories of the postmodern self are “secretly North American in their content, if not their form.” And Jameson's suspicion is seconded by Stuart Hall, who reminds us that postmodernism is really about “how the world dreams itself to be American.”

America, in other words, seems to be an idea whose time has come. What is curious, however, is that this appears to have always been the case. For nearly two centuries, European thinkers have seen in America (for better or for worse, depending on their ideological positions) the “end of history” and the egalitarian, antiauthoritarian, and democratic society identified (with a similar range of ideological response) by presentday theorists of the postmodern.