ABSTRACT
According to Brooks Adams, American supremacy has been made possible only through applied science. Today, the belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in the nation's future. This chapter retraces the course of the American belief in exceptionalism and looks at where America stands as the country approaches the third American century and the second Western millennium. Manifest Destiny was the civil religion of nineteenth-century America. The United States, though isolationist after World War I, could not retreat to an insular role in 1945. If space and security meant “freedom to go about one’s affairs” and a relaxed social fabric, then the freedom and relaxation that America has known for a hundred years may be at an end. Given the scale of American corporate investment abroad, the United States may in the next decade become a rentier economy,.
