Comparative History and American Exceptionalism: Origins, Debates, and Global Perspectives

COMPARATIVE HISTORY.While often characterized by a focus on national cohesion, the "consensus" historians of the mid-20th century actively engaged in comparative history to define American exceptionalism. A seminal figure in this approach was Louis Hartz, whose work The Liberal Tradition in America contrasted American and European political development. Hartz argued that America was a unique "fragment" of 17th-century European liberalism, isolated from subsequent feudal and socialist conflicts. This fragment theory was later expanded in Hartz's 1964 comparative study of settler societies, framing nations like Australia as "radical liberal" fragments. His ideas were underpinned by reinterpretations of the frontier thesis, notably David Potter’s 1954 theory of a national culture shaped by resource abundance.

This comparative lens was applied to world frontier studies, most controversially in Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Frontier (1952), perpetuating Progressive historians' focus on environment and opportunity. Parallelly, scholars conducted foundational comparisons of slavery across the Americas. Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946) was seminal, arguing that differing Iberian and Anglo-American legal traditions led to distinct racial outcomes. This genre reached a zenith with Carl Degler’s 1971 study of race relations in Brazil and the United States. These works spawned further research into Caribbean and Latin American slave societies, investigating racial mixture and differential emancipation patterns.

The comparative scope extended beyond the Americas to the broader Atlantic world. In the 1970s, George Fredrickson pioneered the comparative study of race relations in the United States and South Africa. Trans-Atlantic intellectual history was bolstered by institutions like the Institute for Early American History and Culture, founded in 1947. Scholars such as J. R. Pole explored the transmission of political ideas, while R. R. Palmer analyzed the 18th-century democratic revolutions in France and America as a common Atlantic process. This period also saw Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood produce landmark works on the ideological origins of the American Revolution and constitutional creation.

Despite its contributions, this sweeping comparative work faced criticism from specialized historians. European scholars, for instance, viewed Palmer’s work as overly influenced by Cold War-era Atlantic cooperation. Webb’s frontier thesis was similarly criticized for homogenizing diverse global experiences. Nevertheless, the field gained institutional legitimacy with the 1958 founding of Comparative Studies in Society and History and the 1968 publication of C. Vann Woodward’s anthology, The Comparative Approach to American History. Paradoxically, these studies often reinforced, rather than undermined, notions of American uniqueness, as seen in the work of historical sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset.

AREA STUDIES. The rise of comparative history coincided with the growth of area studies, driven by expanded U.S. strategic interests after World War II. This movement significantly widened American historians' geographical and thematic horizons. In Slavic and Russian studies, the foundation was laid by inter-war Russian émigré scholars, with post-war work often framed within comparative modernization paradigms. Latin American studies, already a strength, advanced through comparative slavery research and the work of scholars like Richard Morse on Brazil and Lewis U. Hanke on Spanish colonial rule.

A major expansion occurred in Asian studies, particularly regarding China, propelled by the foundational scholarship of John King Fairbank and his students. In African history, a key focus by the 1970s was the transatlantic slave trade, revolutionized by the quantitative demographic work of Philip D. Curtin. His research established the broad statistical contours of the trade, which later scholars like Paul Lovejoy would refine in the 1980s, shifting emphasis toward Africa's internal dynamics and cultural history. European history also received extensive treatment from American outsiders who offered fresh perspectives; historians like Charles Maier identified cross-national commonalities and reconceptualized standard categories of European historical analysis.

This interdisciplinary, area-based approach was complemented by the American Studies movement, centered on journals like American Quarterly (founded 1949). This field, intensely historical in the U.S., produced the influential "myth and symbol" school initiated by Henry Nash Smith, which analyzed the unique narratives shaping national identity. Together, comparative history and area studies transformed mid-century American historiography, balancing a persistent inquiry into national distinctiveness with an increasingly global and systematic framework for analysis. This dual focus ensured that the study of American exceptionalism was continually tested and refined against the complexities of world history.