Americanism

The American Revolution brought a new and vital power to the world and created the political, social, and intellectual conditions that continue to govern the lives of Americans today. Jurgen Gebhardt's Americanism, originally published in German, analyzes the origins of the American public philosophy. Gebhardt uses the term civil theology - which he describes as a belief system grounded in social and religious ideals and based upon the principle "one nation, under God " - to set forth the character of that philosophy. The focus of Gebhardt's study is the relationship between the concepts of founding and order in the self-understanding of the country's early leaders. This focus leads to the core of the symbolic self-interpretation of American society. Through careful scrutiny of the writings of the Founding Fathers - and with a special emphasis on those of John Adams - Gebhardt studies the philosophical and Christian origins of the American ideals of republicanism and revolution. He then considers the process by which the design for living envisaged by the founders embodied in the concept of the paradigmatic republic - found expression in the political, economic, and social institutions of the new society, producing a form of civil theology that was soon identified as Americanism. Americanism raised a universal claim that God, the world, humanity, society, and history all existed within the cosmos of American observances. But in the twentieth century, according to Gebhardt, Americanism has been subverted by the emergence of an individualism unconcerned with pursuit of the common good and by the concomitant rise of an industrialized society at odds with the republic's political-spiritual ethos. Jurgen Gebhardt casts an outsider's keen and observant eye on the structure of the American Republic. Americanism is a first-rate study of the philosophical origins of the American paradigm of order and of how the American quest for a good polity has failed in our time.