Brownson, America, and the 'Order of Reality'

• In Event: Nineteenth Century American Political Thought

Abstract

In The American Republic, Orestes Brownson manages to offer sharp criticisms of many species of what he regards as utopian political thinking, a category into which some varieties of American exceptionalism fall. Browson rejects, as a grounding for any exceptionalism, both hyper-particularism and, at the same time, excessively broad humanitarian sentiments. He takes to task both some supporters and some opponents of the American experiment, the religious as well as the irreligious, for indulging in exceptionalist distortions. Nevertheless, Brownson concludes his book with a rousing affirmation that the United States does indeed have a distinctive role to play in human history: the claim that “the political destiny of the United States is to conform the state to the order of reality.”

This paper will ask what exactly Brownson means by this phrase and by other, similar assertions made at other points in his work (elsewhere, he says the United States is “not realizing a political theory of any sort whatever [but] on the contrary, [is] successfully refuting all political theories”). It will begin by drawing connections between his arguments and related considerations found in the works of Henry Adams and Irving Babbitt, two other major American literary-philosophical thinkers who were concerned with some of the same issues as Brownson and shared some of his critiques. Babbitt, for example, overlaps significantly with Brownson’s critique of “humanitarian democracy.” Adams shares his concerns about potential derailments of the American regime and the fate of the nation as it moves into the twentieth century. All three thinkers manage to balance sophisticated cosmopolitanism with unquestionable devotion—intellectual as much as personal—to their native country. The paper will conclude by arguing, however, that (at least on this issue) Brownson offers a more satisfying answer to the question of American exceptionalism than either Adams or Babbitt do.

Author

• Matthew T Cantirino, Texas State University