ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that macro context confronts societies with distinctive learning tasks and learning conditions and thereby generates the broad tendencies of nation-states toward gradualist, transformational, or revolutionary politics. It discusses that political learning occurs as societal participants recognize new patterns of social reality and encapsulate such understandings in appropriate and widely shared metaphors that give a sense of order and meaning to politics. The chapter explores that American politics has been prone to extensive cycles of political transformation because it exists in a macro context that both magnifies the metacrises inherent in political life and yet ultimately facilitates the process of social learning and crisis resolution. The perspective developed in the chapter can be characterized as a process of evolutionary social learning. From this perspective, politics is a process of social learning and development because it centers around the social construction and reconstruction of a collective understanding of society and politics.
