ABSTRACT
The term ‘an old-fashioned American’—and almost every American who has passed a certain age finds moments when he claims to be one-contains, as an Hegelian would suspect, an internal contradiction. An old-fashioned American likes things big, and done in a big way. But in the nineteenth century this was a vice shared with the entire élite of Europe in that period, in politics, in business enterprise, even in literature. What else was the unification of Italy and Germany but a tidying up of the history of those peoples into nation states, the sweeping away of ridiculous, fussy, ‘petty’ principalities, of lesser and impotent local sovereignties? How else to explain the death-grip of the Hapsburg Monarchy on southeastern Europe, the determined, ruthless power of the tsarist army and bureaucracy over the peoples of Eurasia, the imperialismcultural and political-of a centralized French Republic, and of course, Britain.
