Power and the American Experience

This chapter identifies historical factors that contributed to the making of an American understanding of the effects of power. Our starting point consists in looking at two sets of elements: material factors, and ideas that animated the American Revolution and the formative years of the Republic. Throughout American history, these ideas and factors matured into the adoption of Liberalism, and later on Neo-Liberalism, as dominant ideology, conditioning the United States’ view of its role in the world, in turn conditioning a specific, commonly accepted American understanding of power that we call ‘collective memory of power’. Making use of Gramsci’s understanding of ideology, we argue that a conception of power is an ideological animal, finding its roots in one’s views of and one’s position in the world. ¹ As Dodge argues,

all agency, whether individual or collective, is socially mediated. Individuals and groups, be they the president, or the diplomats and the soldiers that he employed, do not react to neutral ‘objective’ situations. Instead, they make choices shaped by an assessment of possibilities. This assessment is based upon perceptions about the world in which they live.

(Dodge 2009: 257) Consequently, this ensemble of perceptions contribute to ‘collectively understood symbols and myths through which society represents itself and more importantly in this case understands other societies’ (Dodge 2009: 257). Thus, one’s view of the world is a personal and collective ideological construct that is permeable to many influences: personal beliefs, education, cultural factors, values, ideas, identity (individual and collective), and the result of one’s interactions with others. All contribute to the definition of one’s understanding of how the world works and of what power can do in that world. These factors leave some autonomy to agents and are to a certain extent under the control of or chosen by individuals. However, this autonomy is limited and as Dodge points out, ‘the consciousness of individuals within society is not given but constructed by the dominant ideological system the individual exists within’ (ibid.: 257). Thus, one can argue that the commonly accepted perception of power in a given society is conditioned by the dominant ideology operating in that society. As Perkins contends about the United States: ‘the revolution is an act of isolation from a society that saw itself very different than societies on the other side of the ocean’ (Perkins 1993: 22). This act of isolation formed the starting point of a specific ideology, Americanism: ‘As a new nation legitimated by an ideology, it differs from other countries, which take their identity from a common history, not a political doctrine, a national creed’ (Lipset 1990: 5).