The Genius of American Politics

by Daniel J. Boorstin

How much of our political tradition can be absorbed and used by other peoples? Daniel Boorstin's answer to this question has been chosen by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for representation in American Panorama as one of the 350 books, old and new, most descriptive of life in the United States. He describes the uniqueness of American thought and explains, after a close look at the American past, why we have not produced and are not likely to produce grand political theories or successful propaganda. He also suggests what our attitudes must be toward ourselves and other countries if we are to preserve our institutions and help others to improve theirs.

". . . a fresh and, on the whole, valid interpretation of American political life."—Reinhold Niebuhr, New Leader

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, Political Science

210 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 1953

About the author

Daniel Joseph Boorstin was a historian, professor, attorney, and writer. He was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress from 1975 until 1987.

He graduated from Tulsa's Central High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the age of 15. He graduated with highest honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD at Yale University. He was a lawyer and a university professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution.

His The Americans The Democratic Experience received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history.

Within the discipline of social theory, Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image A Guide to Pseudo-events in America is an early description of aspects of American life that were later termed hyperreality and postmodernity. In The Image, Boorstin describes shifts in American culture—mainly due to advertising—where the reproduction or simulation of an event becomes more important or "real" than the event itself. He goes on to coin the term pseudo-event which describes events or activities that serve little to no purpose other than to be reproduced through advertisements or other forms of publicity. The idea of pseudo-events closely mirrors work later done by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. The work is still often used as a text in American sociology courses.

When President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress, the nomination was supported by the Authors League of America but opposed by the American Library Association because Boorstin "was not a library administrator." The Senate confirmed the nomination without debate.

Boorstin died in 2004 in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one part polemic and one part sweeping interpretation of history. Boorstin is a lively and engaging writer with a couple of big points to hammer home. The biggest is that American institutions and political systems (although he's pretty vague on what those actually are-democracy, individualism, constitutionalism?) are so specific a product of their environment that they simply cannot be replicated elsewhere. That's the underlying meaning of genius: it is something unique to a culture/nation, that can't be learned or adopted (it's like Steph Curry's jump shot, in other words). The environment that Boorstin is talking about is mainly the largely unoccupied space of North America, especially the frontier (this is a very Turnerian book), on American character and institutions. It made us tough, practical, individualistic, religiously tolerant, and most importantly for Boorstin, appreciative of different regional cultures that are adapted to specific groups and conditions. That last aspect of the American genius is, for Boorstin, the root of our federalist political system.

One of the major effects of this intimate link between environment and political culture is that Americans have almost no use for political theory and have developed little of it. This relates to our concept of givenness, or the sense that our values and institutions formed early in our experience and haven't really needed to be changed in the following centuries. Boorstin describes American politics as largely about means rather than ends. He sees no real difference between Republicans and Democrats other than different stresses on gov't or the market as ways to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity (this book was from the 1950s, the peak of the liberal consensus period in US history). Even in the Civil War, a seeming break from the essential continuity of our history, was for Boorstin a struggle between regions that essentially saw themselves as carrying out the true vision and values of the Founders and the Constitution, just with different interpretations (there's some truth to this, although I think Boorstin overlooks the South's defense of its civilization as a radically different and superior way of life, one based not so much in freedom as in "natural" order. To be honest, this book completely overlooks race, which is both a product and a reflection of his time period).

As a result of the essential agreement on the ends and boundaries of politics, as well as the fact that Americans have been self-governing basically since the start, Americans for Boorstin are bored and repulsed by top-down political theorizing that is such a big part of European history. AMericans have to dig to really figure out what their ideology is; Boorstin never really clarifies that. Hartz, for instance, would say that it is an essential liberal individualism. Boorstin would treat the American ideology as a kind of Burkean anti-ideology, the willingness to let different regions, cultures, and individuals develop freely and "organically" because those who are closest to the ground level of life are best equipped to adapt their values and institutions to that reality.

This is an essential work of consensus history, and I wonder what Boorstin felt when the parties started to ideologically sort themselves in the 60s and 70s. I think he is both right in a big sense (the whole 40 yard lines bit in that political era, the narrower spectrum of American political discourse, the general-and probably wise-American distaste for abstract political systems) and wrong in that later political conflicts really did stem from profoundly different visions of "the good life," the role of government, and rights and opportunities of individuals. Furthermore, his preference for the regional and local seems to preclude the federal gov't stepping in to protect the rights of individuals, which is not acceptable to me. No amount of "organic" culture (whatever that means) justifies systems of oppression like Jim Crow; our government was instituted to protect the rights of citizens, not cultures or regions. It is "we the people," not "we the organic regional cultures." This is a problem I find in conservative thought generally; the assumption that organic cultures just kind of happen without coercion, to put it mildly.

These criticisms aside, this is a book worth wrestling with. Boorstin presents an aspect of conservatism that increasingly appeals to me; the sense that the institutions and values of our society are not replicable in other societies and that it would be folly to go about trying to systematize or universalize (in the fashion of Marxism, for instance) our political system. His view of freedom melds with this point. He describes the contradiction of freedom as that "which affirms a value but asserts it only to allow a competition among values." To me this is an essentially liberal concept; it reminds me of psychologist Josh Greene's notion of liberalism as a meta-morality: a moral system designed to mediate between and allow the co-existence of different cultures and individuals that starts with the baseline assumption of protecting the individual, not the group. That might be one of the essential differences between, say, my liberalism and Boorstin's conservatism.

[Stuart Levy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love Boorstin and the insight that he has. Another great way to understand the American way of life.

[Piker7977 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The consensus historian Boorstin takes us on a journey through crucial points of American history. He brings interesting arguments to the table but some are now dated. I wonder how he would view today's neo-conservative school of thought?

[Jim Melcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in the 1950s in reaction to Joe McCarthy but still applicable. I read it as an undergraduate and have loved it ever since.