American Exceptionalism, Past and Future
BOOK FORUMWednesday, September 13, 2000
4:00 p.m.
Featuring the authors: Seymour Martin Lipset, Hazel Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University; and Aaron L. Friedberg, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University.
The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
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Read the event transcript (PDF, 55 pp, 101 kb)
Americans across the political spectrum embrace individualism, skepticism about government, and a faith in social mobility. Other developed nations, in contrast, have often embraced socialism and a strong state. Two new books document the advantages of this "American Exceptionalism."
In It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks examine cultural and political reasons for the triumph of limited government in this country. Aaron L. Friedberg, author of In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy, argues that our devotion to limited government prevented undue limits on individual freedom during the Cold War.
As the final weeks of the presidential election roil the surface of public life, please join us to plumb the deeper currents of American politics.