Transcript
WILIAM GALSTON: Let me make it clear that exceptional does not mean superior, contrary to what many Americans believe, and contrary to what many non-Americans believe we believe. Rather, exceptional means different. It means an instance that breaks with a general pattern. Let me give you the most familiar example of that. A century ago the famous sociologist Max Weber hypothesized that with the progress of modernization would come a steady increase in secularization. As everybody knows, he was mostly right about Europe and mostly wrong about the United States, and the question or a question is why? What does that mean? There are dozens and dozens of examples like that not all of them so dramatic, but all of them significant. It is these phenomena that this book explores.
Americans are famous rightly so for not understanding other nations, a lack of understanding that often has practical consequences. It is less well known but equally true that other nations don't understand the United States very well either. Tocqueville's book "Democracy in America" has instructed generations of Americans in their polity, but if you look at Tocqueville's forward and introduction it was clearly designed to explain America to the French and more broadly to Europeans. It was written about America, but its target audience was overseas. This volume I think will serve to explain us to ourselves but also to the extent that these essays receive the attention they deserve, will explain us to the rest of the world as well.
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