Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Exceptionalists All! The First Hundred Years
- 2 Brooks Adams: Marx for Imperialists
- 3 Walter Lippmann and a New Republic for a New Era
- 4 When the Future Worked and the Trains Ran on Time: Lincoln Steffens
- 5 Dr. Beard's Garden
- 6 Kennan, Morgenthau, and the Sources of Superpower Conduct
- 7 Reinhold Niebuhr and the Foreign Policy of Original Sin
- 8 God Blinked but Herman Didn't
- 9 On Wisconsin: Madison and Points Left
- 10 The Brief of Norman's Woe: Commentary and the New Conservatism
- 11 It Ain't Over till It's Over – and Not Even Then
- Note on Sources
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Exceptionalists All! The First Hundred Years
- 2 Brooks Adams: Marx for Imperialists
- 3 Walter Lippmann and a New Republic for a New Era
- 4 When the Future Worked and the Trains Ran on Time: Lincoln Steffens
- 5 Dr. Beard's Garden
- 6 Kennan, Morgenthau, and the Sources of Superpower Conduct
- 7 Reinhold Niebuhr and the Foreign Policy of Original Sin
- 8 God Blinked but Herman Didn't
- 9 On Wisconsin: Madison and Points Left
- 10 The Brief of Norman's Woe: Commentary and the New Conservatism
- 11 It Ain't Over till It's Over – and Not Even Then
- Note on Sources
- Index
Summary
If a single theme pervades the history of American thinking about the world, it is that the United States has a peculiar obligation to better the lot of humanity. Call it a Puritan survival, or a sport from the Lockean roots of natural-rights philosophy, or a manifestation of American exceptionalism; but for whatever reasons, Americans have commonly spoken and acted as though the salvation of the world depended on them. From the moment John Winthrop planted his “city on a hill” as a self-conscious example for the whole world to see; through the era when the American revolutionaries cast their conflict against Britain as a blow for the unalienable rights of all men; to the day when Abraham Lincoln defended the war for the Union as a struggle to guarantee that government of the people, by the people, and for the people not perish from the (entire) earth; to the day when Woodrow Wilson called for a crusade to make the world safe for democracy; to Franklin Roosevelt's extrapolation of the Atlantic Charter to the Pacific and Indian oceans; to John Kennedy's pledge to pay any price and bear any burden in the defense of the liberty of Berlin and other Cold War hot spots; to George Bush's assertion of the need for Americans to secure a “new world order”; to Bill Clinton's dispatch of troops to Bosnia to enforce an American-brokered peace in that broken and bleeding land – which is to say, from the beginning of American history to the present – this sense of obligation to suffering humankind has been a persistent theme in American thought, speech, and writing about the world.
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- Information
- What America Owes the WorldThe Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy, pp. vii - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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