Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac,eds,America Through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Abstract

Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac, eds, America Through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, PA, 2009; 277 pp., 1 illus.; 9780271033907, $65.00 (hbk); 9780271033914, $34.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Karen Racine, University of Guelph, Canada

This edited collection consists of 10 articles that grew out of a conference titled ‘America Seen Through Foreign Eyes’ held at Indiana University Bloomington in March 2005. The editors explicitly state that they hoped with this volume they could

revisit some of the classical accounts of American society and politics, [so] we can shed some light on the genealogy and the coherence of the current controversies about ‘America’ and thereby help, in some small way, to make possible more productive debates about what the United States is and what it does. (4)

Unlike many edited collections, it is clear that the organizers did give their conference participants (now volume contributors) a very specific theme on which to focus. For this reason, most of the authors produced work that circles around issues of vision, seeing, sight and ocular observation in British and French writing on America. In fact, many of the articles even incorporate those exact words into their titles. This effort to enforce some degree of coherence in the themes being treated is a definite strength of this collection. In an interdisciplinary context, there could have been some greater engagement with the recent turn in literary criticism that invokes the Lacanian idea of the Gaze; as political scientists, they are more concerned with explicating the origins and theoretical constructs of concepts such as civil society, policy and practices, national character, philosophical musings, and even the way that science and sociology started to influence political writers over the course of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.

There are four sections set out in a chronological order. The first consists of a single article by Alan Levine that offers a brief overview of America in the history of European political thought (provocatively subtitled ‘From 1492 to 9/11’). The second part deals with America and the Enlightenment and has three articles. Costica Bradatan discusses the messianic and utopian quality of George Berkeley’s work. Guillaume Ansart argues that French philosophes from Raynal to Diderot sought out first-hand, accurate, detailed information as part of the ‘blend of their historical analysis and liberal political aspirations’ (72). Nick Nesbitt finds that both Alexis de Tocqueville and Victor Schoelcher used their travels in America to gather first-hand information in order to add weight and credibility to their efforts to lobby for an end to slavery in the French colonies.

Not surprisingly, the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville loom large in the two sections on French and British authors. Aurelian Craiutu discusses the US travels of Victor Jacquemont. Christine Dunn Henderson examines Gustave de Beaumont’s play Marie. Jeremy Jennings gives a general overview of French visions of America from Tocqueville to the Civil War. Richard Boyd discusses the transition from ‘aristocratic politesse to democratic civility’ as a way of getting at what Fanny Trollope did not see in America. Russell L. Hanson discusses James Bryce as the British counterpart to Tocqueville. Patrick J. Deneen offers a philosophical approach to his discussion of G. K. Chesterton’s impressions of the United States. The volume concludes with remarks by one of the editors, Jeffrey C. Isaac, attempting to reconcile America’s past and future. He restates the collective project’s operating assumption that the world has just passed through ‘the American century’ but at the same time he recognizes that there is a ‘complex and contingent character of America’s ascendancy to what political scientists call “unipolar” hegemony’ (259).

The chapters are uniformly interesting and written with scholarly thoughtfulness. The overall concept of the collection does raise some questions, though. In the introduction, editors Craiutu and Isaac obliquely gesture towards an acknowledgment that ‘America’ is a broader term that encompasses a much larger geographical space than the country now known as the United States. They note that they wanted to go beyond the conventional meaning of ‘America’. However, not only have they not gone very far down that path, it does also seem odd to assert that the traditional meaning of America is limited to the United States. Surely Latin Americanists, Atlantic World scholars and Early Modern European historians would disagree. A second, and related, concern is that the volume fortifies the impression that Britain and France, those solid wartime allies, are the only two European countries whose opinions mattered.

As American political scientists self-consciously writing in the years immediately after 11 September 2001, they are quick to jump to their country’s defence and equally quick to make some dubious sweeping assertions. They claim that the twentieth century was ‘an American century’ in which the United States stood against fascism and communism and acted as the protector of Western values of liberal democracy. They express surprise that there are so many global citizens who know so little about the US that it remains a terra incognita to them. And, in a statement that is more revealing of the character of American politics than the authors might initially have realized, they claim that they want to direct their work to ‘America’s critics around the world, who often rely on myths and preconceptions of American society that are vicarious expressions of their dissatisfaction with their own societies’ (3). While that charge may be true in some cases, such a generalized assertion skirts dangerously close to suggesting that those people who dislike America just do not understand it.