|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
What Makes a Nation Great?
| Article
# : |
19212 |
|
|
Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
2,785 Words |
| Author
: |
Max Lerner
Max Lerner is a historian and political theorist. He is author
of America as a Civilization (new edition 1987, Holt). His
latest book is Later than You Think: The Need for a
Militant Democracy (1988), a new edition with an introduction
by James MacGregor Burns and a foreword by the author
(Transaction Press 1989). |
For a nation to become great, it must possess a great idea--one that animates it and gives it distinctiveness. America has had such an idea, from its earliest settlers out of England and Western Europe to its latest wave of immigrants.
It is more than the idea of freedom and of individual rights, basic as that is. What has given America its mythic quality, drawing people like a magnet from the farthest corners of the earth, is the idea of the intrinsic worth of individual effort. It is the conviction that in America, more than anywhere else, through hard work and skill, one can make something of one's life. This idea makes America more than a congeries of individual greeds and scramblings for status.
But an idea is an abstraction, needing flesh and blood and personality to give it being. Back in the 1780s, before the Constitution was framed, Hector St. John Crevecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer, asked the now historic question "What then is the American, this new man?" His answer was that he is "a new man who acts on new principles."
More than two centuries later the near miracle is that the world is still asking that question and giving that answer. There have not been many instances of a "new man" emerging in the history of civilizations. There was Greek man, Roman man, Renaissance man, Western man, and then, "the American, this new man."
For a time from 1917 on, there was even an effort to create a "communist man," complete with a new political religion. But that proved to be "the God that failed," collapsing along with the collapse of communism's animating idea. The Utopian dream that had animated communism became a dystopian nightmare. Communist man was no longer credible.
As nations go, America is still young. A little more than two centuries is not a long life span for a civilization. China, India, Japan, Russia, the European West--all have existed for much longer. But they all have experienced major breaks, whether of tyrannies, war disasters, occupation, or Holocaust. America sustained the continuity of a free people in a civil society, with constitutional protections and the rule of law. The element of permanence, of continuity amid change, underlies the quality of optimism that has characterized America from the start.
Can it last? The answer is that it has survived a sequence of daunting challenges within. The
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
