Jon Thares Davidann critiques one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors (Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century. Duke, 1999)
The second issue which is both a strength and weakness of the book is Cumings' reading of history in parts of the world outside of East Asia. He stretches the book into the literature of both American exceptionalism and world history approaches. His argument is informed substantially by his vast knowledge of East Asian history but unfortunately also informed by a more superficial reading of American and world history.
For instance, his discussion of the possibilities of reading the history of American exceptionalism (Toqueville, Hartz) as the history of the influence of the American middle class suffers from a weak grounding in the literature of American history. American historians have been doing battle over class and exceptionalism for some time, and it is clearer than ever now that Americans have had a class structure, not just a dominant middle class as Cumings suggests.
Even more importantly, American arguments for uniqueness were made possible by that most invisible of Americans, the African slave. Edmund S. Morgan argued in American Slavery American Freedom that a commitment to freedom was animated by the assurance of a captive underclass which would not be permitted under any circumstance to participate in politics. Consequently, while some can argue that the predominance of small landholders allowed Americans to bypass the worst European aspects of class inequality and pursue liberalism to a greater extent, race took the place of class as the most powerful dividing line in American history. Cumings misses all of this and ends up endorsing rather than critiquing the exceptionalist arguments of Toqueville and Hartz. And since the study of American exceptionalism can now be linked to a rapidly growing literature on world-wide nationalism, both American and Japanese arguments for uniqueness can be seen within the framework of modern nationalism, in which arguments for exceptionalism are simply the demand of the modern nation for uniqueness in a world of nations. See Prasenjit Duara's work for the most sophisticated analysis of the complex forms nationalism has taken.
(H-Diplo, July, 1999)
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