THE END OF POLITICAL EXCEPTIONALISM?

* Un paper de Seymor Martin Lipset, otro personaje importante de la Ciencia Política.

The United States, as noted by Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Engels, among many other visitors to America, is an “exceptional” country, one uniquely different in its organizing principles and social class structure from the more traditional status-bound postfeudal nations of the Old World (Tocqueville 1948: 36-37).1 The term “American Exceptionalism,” first formulated by Tocqueville in the 1830’s, and since used in general comparative analyses, became widely applied after World War I in efforts to account for the weakness of working class radicalism in the United States. I have dealt with the first usage in a recent book, American Exceptionalism (Lipset 1996: 32-35, 77-109). In this paper and a forthcoming work, I discuss the second (Lipset and Marks 1999 forthcoming).

Texto completo: http://www.march.es/ceacs/publicaciones/working/archivos/1999_141.pdf