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Book Review
Methods/Theory
| David W. Noble. The Death of the Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism. Foreword by George Lipsitz. (Critical American Studies.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2002. Pp. xlvi, 352. Cloth $54.95, paper $19.95.
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| David W. Noble draws on Thomas Kuhn's notion of "paradigm shifts" to explain the decisive changes in the orientation of the field of American Studies that have taken place over the past seventy years. Kuhn argued that a paradigm shift occurs when the anomalies that cluster around a dominant paradigm result in contradictions that require the construction of an alternative paradigm. The interpretive community that emerges in the wake of the new paradigm is composed of members who define problems according to hypotheses designed to resolve the impasses effected by the preceding paradigm. According to Noble, from the time of its founding in the 1930s, American Studies underwent three major transformations in the conceptual models coordinating the direction of scholarship in the field. |
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Noble argues the first of these paradigm shifts transpired in the 1940s when counterprogressive historians and critics overthrew the cultural hegemony of the perspectives fashioned by the progressive historians Charles Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington. Beard and Parrington fashioned this hegemony through their retrieval of a pre-existing structural distinction between virtuous space and corrupt time that permitted them to correlate the United States' republican virtue with the national landscape and the United States' imperial ambitions with the nation's emulation of corrupt European traditions. But whereas these progressive historians were isolationists who deployed republican theory to criticize capitalism, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., represented the counterprogressive school of historians who emerged in the wake of World War II to advocate a version of international capitalism that repudiated the vision of the United States as a particular expression of timeless natural laws. |
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In Noble's estimation, World War II constituted a decisive moment of historical transformation in which bourgeois elites of the Atlantic nations rejected most elements of the bourgeois nationalism underwriting Beard's and Parrington's accounts—the national landscape and the nation's people—and embraced a culture of international capitalism. Whereas Beard and Parrington underscored the conflicts between the market demands of international capitalism and the core democratic values upon which the United States was founded, in the aftermath of World War II, counterprogressive historians like Schlesinger and Hofstadter came to think of equality and fraternity as threats to market freedoms. |
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Throughout his account of the transformation in American historians, Noble focuses on the definitions of space—both geographical and cultural—used by American historians from the 1930s onward to explain how the conversion that took place in the 1940s was related to the defeat of both bourgeois nationalism and Marxism by the new culture of international capitalism. Noble claims that scholars in American literature who lived through World War II underwent an even more profound questioning of the beliefs that had buttressed their scholarship than had American historians. Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen were representative of this more pervasive crisis, Noble observes, in that both scholars had lost faith in the possibility of anything but the triumph of the international marketplace over the United States as the embodiment of nature's higher laws. But after representing this shift in historical attitude, Noble enters the paradigm drama that he had previously described. |
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