Voluntarist Nationalism with the Idea of Self-Invented Nation: An Aspect of American Exceptionalism

Abstract

Nationalism is never anything less than an invention. Where is there is a national identity that is truly natural? Where a nationalism that has not been forged in the collective imagination of a self-conscious culture? But America's sense of national self-identity is unique even by these standards, for more than any other nation America is self-invented — an express creation of a people who knew itself to be engaged in an act of self-conscious artifice.

The conception of the American nation as self-constituted, as a second chance for humanity away f;om Europe's ticking historical clock, is then anything but unproblematic. Yet “the New order of Things” promised by the Great Seal of the United State as an aspect of American excqtionalism still offers hope of a community held together by bonds free of the taint of blood and the repressive hierarchy of kinship.