The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity From 1492 to 1800

In writing The Intellectual Construction of America, Jack Greene pursued two different but compatible goals. His first aim was to trace the changing view intellectuals held of America from the first discovery of the new world through the establishment of the republic. To do so, he relied on the words of the premier European and American philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; preeminent intellectuals like Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin, among others. In doing so, Greene hoped to achieve his second goal of disproving the currently popular belief among social historians that America was not, as their predecessors had argued, an exceptional country whose history could not be understood by using the same paradigms applied to other nations. These revisionists have argued that conditions in America were often similar to those in Europe, and that American history should be viewed as a process of class struggle between exploitative forces and ordinary Americans. Greene, however, believes that despite how ordinary people might have lived, they did not view their experiences in such a negative manner, and that furthermore, if current Americans come to do so, it will have a negative affect on how they view their country's history, and quite possibly upon how they view their role in the outside world as well. The first goal is convincingly achieved, as Greene has amassed an overwhelming amount of primary evidence to support his assertion that the opinion makers of the day believed America to be an exceptional land, providing opportunities for freedom and prosperity that Europe, with its hierarchical social structure and lack of developable land clearly could not offer. However, he is unlikely to convince anyone that America was indeed bereft of all the social and political maladies that plagued the continent, or even that most Americans shared the views of the intellectuals he quotes, many of whom never even visited the colonies. While it certainly seems logical to assume that colonists bought into the "American dream," Greene does not offer any concrete evidence that this was the case; indeed, he does not consider any sources composed by non-elites. Moreover, he makes no attempt to disprove the quantitative evidence that for many, this "dream" remained only that, or that for others, like slaves and Amerindians, it was more correctly a nightmare. Also problematic is that Greene ends his narrative with the founding of the republic, just as class tensions in America were heating up due to the Federalist-Republican clashes over political economy. Even if scholars could agree that the ready availability of land created exceptional opportunities for social mobility and independence during the colonial period, none would dispute that with the introduction of a manufacturing and commercially based economy, The United States ceased to be a "classless" society. Ultimately then, Greene may have proven that the concept