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Wendt Scholar Nicholas Eberstadt

The idea that the American political experiment bears profound significance for all humanity is one rooted deep and long in American soil--it far predates the actual establishment of the United States of America (witness Governor John Winthrop’s famous “city on a hill” sermon in Massachusetts in 1630, nearly a century and a half before the American Revolution). By the same token, the notion that America was characteristically different from all of the societies from which its emigrant populations had been drawn (the “American difference”) was an early and continuing theme of discussion about United States, not only among the revolutionaries who created this independent federalist state in the late Eighteenth Century, but also among discerning observers and well-wishers from the Continent. The concept of “American exceptionalism” was in fact formalized by Alexis de Tocqueville in his opus Democracy in America, after his travels through the USA in the early 1830s.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in political economy at AEI.