RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM and American character are inextricably intertwined, the one essentially defining the other. Perhaps no expression better describes the uniqueness of America and its people than rugged individualism and a dictionary definition of that term would lead back to a study of American character.
When sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset sought to understand America, rugged individualism, accompanied by its first cousin American exceptionalism, was his path. “The emphasis in the American value system, in the American Creed,” Lipset wrote, “has been on the individual.”1 Political scientist Louis Hartz searched for a unifying theme that would capture the essence of an American political philosophy. He, too, landed on individualism (and exceptionalism), calling “the reality of atomistic social freedom” the “master assumption of American political thought.”2 The economist F. A. Hayek argued that individualism was first a theory of society, then a set of political maxims, and the underlying basis for the economy.3
To be sure, individualism was planted deeply in the American soil in its founding era. The Declaration of Independence is thoroughly based in individual liberty; the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, is drafted in such a way as to protect it. The thinking of the founders, as revealed in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere, was fully grounded in American individualism. The American Revolution itself set the rugged tone of fighting for freedom. Truly something new and originally American was born in the founding period, something that came to be called American rugged individualism. As professor of religion C. Eric Mount Jr. has said, “Nothing is more American than individualism.”4
Few things are created entirely from whole cloth, and antecedents to American rugged individualism should be acknowledged. Historically, the search for the roots of individualism would have traveled back to the Renaissance, when a spirit of discovery and creativity allowed individualism to flourish. In the last fifty years or so, however, historians have developed a case for the discovery of individualism much earlier, during the medieval era.5
Both the longest and oldest strand of DNA carrying principles of individualism into the American founding is religion, especially Christianity. The essential message of scripture, particularly in the New Testament, is the individual as a child of God, alone responsible to God for the way he lives his life. According to Jesus, God knows each individual sheep and calls them by name (John, chapter 10). The Apostle Paul pointed out that individuals receive different spiritual gifts (Romans 12:6–8) and, according to Jesus’s parable of the talents, will be held accountable for their use (Luke 19:15). Free will and accountability, with individuals accepting God’s gift of grace or not, are touchstones of biblical Christianity through the ages that provide a lasting basis for the individual as the basis of society. In the recent and valuable treatment Inventing the Individual, Larry Siedentop argues that the key to Western liberalism—individualism—has been strongly supported throughout the ages by Christianity.6 The Protestant Reformation reinforced—we would say reopened—the individual unmediated relationship between man and God.
Religious individualism was very much present and influential in the colonial period and the founding of the United States. More than 90 percent of the colonists identified themselves as Protestant Christians.7 Another estimate holds that, at the time of independence, 98 percent or more of European Americans identified with Protestantism, primarily of the Reformed tradition.8 Puritans and others of the Reformed theological tradition believed they, like the Israelites, were God’s “chosen people,” called to be a light unto the nations, a city set on a hill.9 A study by Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz of documents published between 1760 and 1805 reveals that quotations from the Bible dominated those from sources such as political philosophers Montesquieu, Locke, Blackstone, and others.10 The book most often cited in their study was the Old Testament book of Mosaic law and history, Deuteronomy, which some found to be a model of civil government.11 Sermons of the colonial and founding era citing “liberty” (Galatians 5:1), a “city on a hill” (Matthew 5:14), and other biblical phrases became a regular part of the conversation of that era.
As a consequence, the role of religion in the ideology and thought of the founding was strong and uniquely American. This was clearly acknowledged by the founders themselves. George Washington devoted a third of his first inaugural address to the role of providence in the founding, calling it “the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men” so strongly in the United States.12 John Adams acknowledged that the “general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.”13 Daniel Webster noted that Christian principles had become the foundation of civil society and said that “the Bible is a book . . . which teaches man his own individual responsibility.”14 This spirit of American individualism became part of the American mind through the colonists’ and founders’ devotion to Christianity and Protestantism.
At the same time, it is important to note the moderating influence of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington who, together, led a movement to disestablish and privatize the role of religion in America. During the colonial period, governmental regulation of, and reliance on, religious practices was considered a legitimate role of government. But once Madison and others laid down the principle of individual right of conscience, the role of government in the area of religious practices was reduced and confined. State constitutions and bills of rights in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia, for example, all recognized religious practice as a private right, not a matter for government support or interference. Privatizing religion made it a matter of personal consent, thereby increasing its character as a part of rugged individualism.
A second strand of DNA contributing to American rugged individualism was the philosophical individualism that came from Europe. Here the story becomes more complicated as different strains of European individualism led in various directions. The French individualisme carried a largely negative connotation. Jean-Jacques Rousseau attacked individualism—right along with private property, which he regarded as theft—in the eighteenth century, arguing that the general or collective will should predominate over that of any individual.15 French philosopher and political economist Pierre Leroux, writing in the same general time frame, referred to individualism as laissez-faire and atomization, saying it produced “ ‘everyone for himself, and . . . all for riches, nothing for the poor,’ which atomized society and made men into ‘rapacious wolves.’ ”16 Meanwhile, in Germany the idea of individualism was more one of individuality, connoting unique characteristics or originality.17 As Steven Lukes observed, the French notion was “negative, signifying individual isolation and social dissolution,” whereas the “German sense is thus positive, signifying individual self-fulfillment and . . . the organic unity of individual and society.”18
But of the European approaches to individualism, the work of John Locke and other Scottish Enlightenment political philosophers greatly influenced the American founding and its understanding and appreciation of individualism.19 Writing in the seventeenth century, Locke identified the individual—not the class or the society or the state—as the central unit from which all analysis should begin. Everything else—class, customs, norms, rules, regulations—is acquired, Locke observed, so we should imagine the individual free of all those things and figure out what restraints enlightened individuals would consent to impose on themselves. Locke’s reasoning was that the individual came first, with individuals then creating a society and ultimately a government, but only through the consent of the governed. Individuals are endowed with reason and freedom, underscoring that rights come before duties. A good summary of Locke’s view might compare it to the Old Testament book of Genesis, though Locke would have said that in the beginning was the state of nature and that the Garden of Eden is a future garden of plenty if humans apply themselves and become productive.
According to Locke, the primary purpose of government, then, was to safeguard the natural rights of individuals. Governments were formed with the idea that the common good was a matter for public conversation and decision—the consent of the governed—not something preordained by the divine right of kings. Both political and religious arrangements, which had long dominated societies, were a matter of custom, Locke felt, and should give way to individual choices about them. Since government power was deemed to be a primary threat to natural rights, both natural law and social contract stressed protecting individuals from government power. Locke and those who followed in his classical liberal tradition tended to be suspicious about the search for the public good, as determined by some wise administrator or government official, and preferred individual liberty pursuing its own interests. One could summarize his view of the role of government as securing life, individual liberty, and private property, a phrase that would resonate and reverberate in the new nation’s Declaration of Independence.
A third strand of DNA influential with the founders was economic, especially the work of Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations (1776) further developed John Locke’s thinking about liberty, property, and individualism. In Book 1 of his work, Smith presented what he called “the System of Natural Liberty,” in which he asked the reader to imagine what might happen to an economy if individuals were left to their own “natural” inclinations. In modern terms, Book 1 discusses how individual initiative, with a limited economic role for government, could increase the overall economic pie. He argued that the natural inclinations of individuals who grow and extend markets are more important in the story of human liberty and improvement than the planning and implementation of some centralized human wisdom. The free barter and exchange of individuals is a form of consent in a natural market system and is not planned. This sort of peaceful and productive state of nature allowed Smith to entertain an even more limited government than did Locke. Smith’s notion of government is that it should be involved in defense, justice, and public works, the latter breaking down into facilitating commerce and educating youth.
Private property is the essence of this economic strand of individualism. In effect, goes the argument, God gave the world to man in common in the form of land. God intended that we should live well and gave us the means to do that. As rational and industrious people, we see the benefits of ruggedly working the land and, indeed, that also makes us happy. We privatize the land we work on, which makes us even happier because the land is ours. As we feed ourselves, the economy grows and we can trade our surplus. The right to own, then, what we have earned becomes a fundamental premise of American individualism.
The principles of individualism developed by these thinkers and others were not just a set of philosophical ideas but were believed to produce concrete benefits to a society that would follow them. Most practical was Adam Smith, who believed that individuals pursuing their own ideas and interests would create the wealth of a nation, what today we would call gross domestic product (GDP) or growing the economic pie. Only beggars, said Smith, rely on the benevolence of others for their daily bread. Free individuals were naturally inclined to “truck, barter and exchange” and thus participate in the project of improvement. John Stuart Mill, in his “On Liberty,” would later elaborate on how individuals who are closest to the economic action will be more dedicated and innovative and will make better decisions than remote government officials. Locke believed that individuals who were free to pursue their own interests would be far happier and more productive. Indeed, when combined with the strong Protestant work ethic of colonial and revolutionary America, these ideas were especially powerful.
It is not surprising, then, that from these roots—Christianity and the political and economic philosophies of John Locke, Adam Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment—would grow a spirit of individual liberty that permeated the American founding. It would be the intertwining and combining of these apparently diverse strands that would make American rugged individualism both so distinctive and so powerful. Thinkers from one dimension reinforced the contribution from the others. Private property, the core of economic individualism, is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Without the ability to make private decisions, the other forms of individualism are just misty dreams. Both political and economic individualism appreciate the importance of character and virtue that come from the religious strand. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” may be religious, we are not sure; George Washington’s “invisible hand” most certainly was. So it was all three strands joining together that created American individualism. We agree with Yehoshua Arieli who said in his study of individualism in America that the term meant something very different from previous understandings: “self-determination, moral freedom, the rule of liberty, and the dignity of man.”20 These are the very themes one finds in the American founding, as America developed the notion of individualism into more than a philosophy of personal and societal life but rather into a political philosophy and system of governance. Americans exercise their rugged individualism when they consent to the government, church, and economy of their choosing.
Long before the American frontier, which is popularly credited with the creation of American rugged individualism, came the settlers, the colonists, the revolutionaries, and the founders. In the rugged environment of new territory, they would begin to hammer out a philosophy of American individualism. As the writer G. K. Chesterton observed when he visited the United States: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.”21 That creed, centered on individual liberty, would ring clearly from its founders and permeate its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The Declaration documents a revolution, making a case to the “Supreme Judge of the world” for America’s secession from England. From the first few sentences, the rationale developed by lead author Thomas Jefferson and others in the Declaration is England’s failure to uphold individual rights, which are essentially the natural rights developed by John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers. The very birth of the American republic, then, was defended on the basis of individualism. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” begins the second sentence of the Declaration, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The document continues that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” adding that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles. . . .”
From the first words of the Declaration, the case for the new country was that the Creator had endowed individual men and women with certain natural rights and that securing those rights was the fundamental purpose of government. Since the king of England was abridging those rights, and other alternative means of redress having been exhausted, it was now appropriate to install a new form of government that would take these fundamental rights as their foundational principles. Indeed, by this way of thinking, individuals gave government its very power to exist, not vice versa. The era of republicanism had arrived in America.
Jefferson acknowledged his intellectual debt to John Locke, proclaiming Enlightenment thinkers Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon “the greatest men that have ever lived without exception.”22 In a letter to Roger Weightman, Jefferson wrote that the “form we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. . . . [T]he mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs.”23 All at once, America was publicly committed to a Creator, to natural rights, and to a republican government whose purpose was the protection of individual rights and whose very creation depended on individual consent. This was revolutionary, indeed, since no nation had been formed on such a profound philosophical statement.
One way of understanding the significance of American individualism is that it was not merely a philosophy embraced by some people; in America, it was actually integrated into the founding and political framework of the new nation. For one thing, a failure to respect and protect individual rights was deemed a proper justification for first petitioning and then rejecting a government. Indeed, much of the body of the Declaration is a bill of particulars of the many ways in which the king of Great Britain had failed to protect and, indeed, had overrun individual rights, all of which were deemed a proper case for finding his governance illegitimate. Going forward from petition to rejection, the Declaration stated that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” Protecting individual rights was the pass-fail level that a government must achieve or face the removal of the people’s consent.
Beyond rejecting the king’s leadership for a failure to protect individual rights, the founders planted American individualism itself deeply in the ground of the new republic. That which had been metaphysical and philosophical in Europe was now translated into real political terms. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” would become the fundamental rights and premises of the new nation. As Jefferson himself wrote in a letter to Henry Lee, in reference to the Declaration, “[I]t was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”24 American individualism would be the mind and soul of a new people and the foundational premise for its government, providing America’s answer to Plato’s question about what is the best regime.
It was one thing to declare that, unlike the king of England, government in America would vigorously defend individual rights and a government based on such rights. It was a further challenge, however, to develop and agree on the systems and processes of governance that would accomplish those goals. If the Declaration was the “why” of the American experiment, the Constitution, with all the debates leading to its adoption, would establish the “what” and “how.” The Constitution would promise through its wording, and protect through the processes it designed, a nation based on individualism and natural rights.
The Bill of Rights, contained in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, is a remarkable statement of individual rights that government must not abridge but protect. The concept of positive declarations of rights had been part of Anglo-American legal history at least since the Magna Carta that, in 1215, proclaimed principles such as no taxation without representation and the right to due process of law. State constitutions predated the federal one, and most of them contained declarations of individual rights, many as the preamble to their constitutions. Although the form of positive declarations of rights had existed for centuries, the specific rights guaranteed by the states were frequently expansive, including not only legal process rights, such as trial by jury and due process, but substantive rights, such as bearing arms and the free exercise of religion.
As the founders worked toward a constitution, it seemed evident that with state constitutions protecting individual rights against state governments, a national constitution should similarly protect individual rights from a federal government. Although drafts of the document under discussion included limits on Congress regarding habeas corpus, ex post facto laws, bills of attainder, titles of nobility, and the privileges and immunities of citizens across the states, some delegates wanted more protections of individual rights from the government. Delegate George Mason proposed that a bill of rights be added, but it was deemed unnecessary. Later, following suggestions made by the states of Virginia and New York in the ratification process, the first Congress considered adding a bill of rights, with George Washington urging reverence toward “the characteristic rights of freemen” in his first inaugural address and James Madison declaring that he, too, was in favor of a bill of rights if everyone understood those were not all the rights Americans would enjoy.
At the end of the process, the first ten amendments to the Constitution had become America’s Bill of Rights, declaring that individuals would enjoy freedom of religion and assembly, the right to bear arms, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and so on. To satisfy Madison’s concern that the Bill of Rights not be considered exhaustive, according to the Ninth Amendment, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The all-important Tenth Amendment added that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” All of this is a part of the American DNA from colonial times, writing state and federal constitutions and consenting to legal documents.
But as important as these declarations of individual rights are, the processes in the Constitution that ensure protection of individuals from their government and from factions are equally important. Checks and balances, and separations of power among the branches and levels of government, were carefully constructed to limit government power over the individual. James Madison opened No. 10 of the Federalist Papers by pointing out that a “well constructed Union” allows the country “to break and control the violence of faction.” Such factions, Madison recognized, are a “dangerous vice” that pose real danger to individual liberty and property when the “superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority” rises up. Rather than seek unrealistically to eliminate passions and factions, the founders saw that, in a large republic, one can pit the various passions, interests, and factions against one another so that the rights of citizens are not easily taken. Madison described this in Federalist No. 51 as “so contriving the interior structure of the government, as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.” To avoid too much power in the legislature, it would be divided into two branches; the overall government itself would be divided between two levels, state and federal; terms of office would be staggered and of different lengths; the president could veto legislation; vetoes could be overridden by a supermajority vote; and so on.
As noted in chapter 4, many of these checks and balances are under attack today as obstructing the work of government, but the founders had no doubt that they were important to protect individual liberty and property. Madison stated in Federalist No. 54 that “Government is instituted no less for protection of the property, than of the persons of individuals.” Or, as founder Thomas Jefferson would put it a few years later in his first inaugural address as president: “Restrain men from injuring one another but leave them otherwise free to follow their own pursuits of industry and employment.” American individualism had been not just the basis of a revolution against Britain but a political revolution in the founding of a new nation and political system.
While America’s leaders were planting individualism in its founding documents and governance processes, American individualism was taking root in the larger society of the new country. Indeed, rugged individualism is so closely identified with pioneering that it is often thought of as a creature of the American West. As James Bryce, British diplomat, historian, and ambassador to the United States, said in his important work, The American Commonwealth: “[A]n individualistic ethos, which began to emerge in American society during the late eighteenth century, became a dominant force—a fundamental organizing principle in explaining the ways that Americans have celebrated, justified, rationalized (and in some instances attacked) their social, political, and economic institutions along with their values, perceptions and beliefs.”25
Several qualities about the American frontier contributed to the rise of rugged individualism. The very ruggedness of the land challenged the men and women who conquered and settled it to be rugged themselves. Forests, swamps, wilderness, mountains—all awaited these pioneers of early America. Traveling was a hardship; when one arrived at a settling point, there were mud huts and log cabins to be built. It is not surprising that America’s heroes of this era were men like Davy Crockett, “king of the wild frontier,” and Daniel Boone, who always sought more “elbow room.” Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West (1900) captures this “Pioneer Spirit” that produced a “rugged and stalwart democracy.”
At a deeper psychological level, rugged individualism proved itself then, as now, an especially good match for frontiers. The sort of initiative required to set out to conquer new lands, territories, and ideas requires a certain rugged individualism. Then, too, the deeply religious nature of the American people contributed to the rise of rugged individualism. The pilgrims and Protestants, with their belief that they were individually responsible to read their Bibles and follow God as best they could, reinforced this individualistic mind and spirit. All of this contributed to an American mind-set that came later to be called rugged individualism.
The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner captured the powerful impact of the American frontier in his essays and papers, especially his famous “frontier thesis.” Writing in the 1890s as an academic at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was the product of a frontier upbringing in rural Wisconsin, where he “mingled with pioneers . . . [and] from them he learned something of the free and easy democratic values prevailing among those who judged men by their own accomplishments rather than those of their ancestors.”26 Turner thought historians had it wrong when they claimed that Americans were simply transplanted Europeans whose environment had little to do with their spirit or character. Instead, Turner felt that the American frontier was decisive in developing the American mind and character. Indeed, the American character of rugged individualism also developed the American frontier.
In 1893, Turner delivered a paper on “The Significance of the American Frontier in American History” at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. In it, he argued that key differences between Europeans and Americans had come about because of the physical environment in the New World, especially the availability of free land and the vast expanse of the continent that encouraged people to move ever westward. He continued the argument in “The Problem of the West” in 1896, noting that the “West, at bottom, is a form of society rather than area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influence of free land.” New land created “freedom of opportunity” for “new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals.”27
Turner, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others saw the American frontier and westward expansion as a great equalizer for American democracy. It “promoted equality among the Western settlers and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East,” Turner said.28 When land was widely available to people, both economic and political equality were readily available as well. Tocqueville put it more succinctly, calling the very “soil of America . . . opposed to territorial aristocracy.”29 Others would later argue those notions, noting that land speculators often stepped in, making free land a myth.30 A crisis developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when pioneers who reached the Pacific Ocean and the promise of westward expansion could no longer be part of the American psyche. Still, without question, the pioneering of the American West called forth rugged individualism, and Turner’s explication of it was important in popularizing American rugged individualism.
It is also worth noting that accompanying the narrative of individualism in the American frontier were counter-narratives, or perhaps companion narratives, of community. The novelist and storyteller of the American West, Wallace Stegner, noted that “cooperation, not rugged individualism is the pattern that most characterizes and preserves it, spelling survival on the frontier.”31 Stegner points to collective action in “wagon trains, posses, barn-raising, communal harvests and quilting bees.” Of course, individuals consenting to share rugged adventures with or near others does not undermine the essential nature of rugged individualism at work. We will nearly always find that American individualism is not naked individualism; it is accompanied by, or moderated by, something else, a theme to which we shall return in chapter 5.
Ironically, although Turner used the term “rugged” and also “individualism” in his work, he never put the two together—that was left for Herbert Hoover to do in a campaign speech in 1928. A further irony is that Turner is usually identified as a Progressive, a group that would later turn on and attack American rugged individualism as a mere myth and advance instead notions of collectivism. But Turner did not address that dilemma, lamenting later that “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”32
Among the most important observations about democracy and individualism were those made by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, when he published Democracy in America. In 1831, Tocqueville and his longtime friend Gustave de Beaumont received a commission from the French government to study prisons in America. They stayed for nine months, with Tocqueville taking copious notes on democracy and individualism, not just prisons. Considering America to be a lens on the future, he wanted to record its opportunities and challenges in a new book chronicling a helpful analysis of the relationship between these two phenomena, democracy and individualism, at the founding.
By democracy Tocqueville meant a form of egalitarianism (equality of conditions) rather than a form of government. It is said that one of Tocqueville’s discoveries in the new land was “individualism,” a term that he is credited with defining and developing, if not coining.33 Tocqueville called individualism “a recent expression arising from a new idea.”34 The word anglicizes the French individualisme, which to the French philosophers carried a negative meaning along the lines of selfishness, individual isolation, and self-absorption.35 Tocqueville articulated the new idea of individualism as follows:
Individualism is a reflective and peaceable sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and his friends, so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.36
One could say that Tocqueville saw American individualism as a mixed blessing: on one hand it created new freedoms and opportunities not available in aristocratic societies, but, on the other hand, it carried the risk that Americans would be so busy with their own affairs they would neglect the needs of the whole. As modern sociologist Robert Bellah concluded, Tocqueville “described [American individualism] with a mix of admiration and anxiety.”37 In fact, Bellah, Robert Putnam, Thomas Piketty, and other modern thinkers have concluded that American individualism has devolved into selfishness and believe that social equality is the solution.
While describing the new modern phenomenon of individualism in America, however, Tocqueville also saw other aspects of American character and society that would mitigate the dangers he saw in a selfish or isolating form of individualism. He noted how Americans were able to “combat individualism with free institutions” in an effort to allow democracy and individualism to work together.38 Tocqueville was struck by the American inclination to use private associations to “give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books,” concluding that whereas “everywhere . . . you see the government of France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.”39
In particular, Tocqueville saw something in the American character he called “self-interest rightly understood” that helped manage negative tendencies of naked or selfish individualism and moderate the inclination to abandon liberty in favor of equality. This practical quality of Americans to make “little sacrifices each day” for a greater good cannot really be called virtuous, Tocqueville thought, but nevertheless “forms a multitude of citizens who are regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted, masters of themselves.”40 Even as the Constitution provided checks and balances on the government, American society had its own checks and balances against excess, even on individualism and democracy.
1. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 20.
2. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 62.
3. F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 6.
4. C. Eric Mount Jr., “American Individualism Reconsidered,” Review of Religious Research 22, no. 4 (June 1981): 363.
5. See Walter Ullmann, The Individual in Medieval Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); Aaron Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
6. Siedentop, Inventing the Individual.
7. Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Harmony Books, 1993), 28–29.
8. Daniel D. Dreisbach, “A Peculiar People in ‘God’s American Israel,’ ” in American Exceptionalism: The Origins, History, and Future of the Nation’s Greatest Strength, ed. Charles W. Dunn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 60.
9. Ibid.
10. Charles S. Hyneman and Donald Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era: 1760–1805 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 191–92.
11. Ibid. We are aware of the debate surrounding this study’s reference to sermons. On one hand, sermons were widely printed and circulated, perhaps outweighing their influence in the literature of the time. On the other hand, the study only included sermons that also cited secular sources, greatly reducing the number of sermons included in the study. The point is that scripture was very much in the air at the time of the founding.
12. Dreisbach, “A Peculiar People,” 59.
13. In a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson on June 28, 1813. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), 13: 292–94.
14. Daniel Webster, Address Delivered at Bunker Hill, June 17, 1843, on the Completion of the Monument (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1843), 31; see also W. P. Strickland, History of the American Bible Society from Its Organization to the Present Time (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849).
15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, ed. G. D. H. Cole (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1913).
16. Steven Lukes, Individualism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 10.
17. Ibid., 17–18.
18. Ibid., 22.
19. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Chicago: BN Publishing, 2008). Others have identified Thomas Hobbes as originating the concept of the individual as the philosophical starting point. But according to Hobbes, the life of the individual in the state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only way for the individual to preserve himself, according to Hobbes, was to join a society in which government had virtual control over his life. So although Hobbes may have started out with the individual, he ended up with what we might call authoritarianism. We see Locke as a correction to Hobbes, standing for individualism in a positive light.
20. Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 193.
21. G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), 7.
22. Jefferson’s letter to John Trumbull, February 15, 1789. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 939. We note Garry Wills’s argument that Locke was not a major inspiration for Jefferson. See Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 229. But we believe the weight of the evidence favors Jefferson’s reliance on Locke’s work.
23. Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826. Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1516–17.
24. Ibid., 1500–1501.
25. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: 1888), 2: 406–7.
26. Ray Allen Billington, “How the Frontier Shaped the American Character,” American Heritage 9, no. 4 (April 1958): 4.
27. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Problem of the West,”Atlantic Monthly, September 1896, www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/ets/turn.htm.
28. Ibid.
29. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 7.
30. Billington, “How the Frontier Shaped the American Character.”
31. See Richard W. Slatta, “Making and Unmaking Myths of the American Frontier,” European Journal of American Culture 29, no. 2 (2010): 84.
32. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893, 112.
33. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 482.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 182–83, 187.
36. Ibid., 482.
37. Ibid., 174.
38. Ibid., 487.
39. Ibid., 489.
40. Ibid., 502.