| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy. By Walter L. Hixson. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. xii, 377 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-300-11912-7.)
In The Myth of American Diplomacy, Walter L. Hixson has mined the secondary literature associated with the cultural turn in the history of American foreign relations for its most significant and pithy observations. Unsurprisingly, those observations show that American culture and identity have been patriarchal, racist, arrogant, and warlike. But Hixson goes further to imply that this vicious patriotic culture is the sum total of American identity and has been the dominant factor in United States foreign policy throughout American history.	1
Hixson is admirably explicit in his methodology. He employs discourse analysis to deconstruct rhetoric, symbols, and rituals and to tease out the power relationships implicit in them. He uses psychoanalytical theory to explain how Americans have sought their identity by creating and demonizing the "other." He draws on Antonio Gramsci to assert that America's warfare state was not the democratic choice of its people; instead, it was a product of the American elite's ability to create a cultural hegemony within which ordinary people consented to their own enslavement. Finally, he cites postmodern theory to discredit empirical rationalism and the pursuit of objective truth.	. . .

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