It has been the genius and fate of American political thought to appear as both universal in application and utterly unique in place and circumstance. Though in the days of the Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century America was to appear to Europe as a symbol of world liberalism, yet to the American this was something fortuitous, unasked for, even unwanted: to him his political thought was valuable precisely because he was born with it and had not made it by act of reason in the image of the French Enlightenment. He had rejected Europe and thus the concern of European liberalism to replace class with doctrine. Being able to start from the premise of equality before the laws (and, compared with Europe, a substantial economic equality) the American found his future promise in the material development of the new, in a glad and purposeful isolation from Europe and from doctrine, not in a commitment to a conversion of the old. Tom Paine soon became a sad foreigner, more of Paris than of Philadelphia, and it was a just irony that an English radical, old Cobbett, should steal his bones and bring them "home" to England. The first Inaugural Address of Jefferson's strikes the note of a national manifest destiny, gall to a European liberal: "Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe . . . acknowledging and adoring an overriding Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter . . ."—for the American this is almost a truism. And what does Jefferson add as the final condition "to close the circle of our felicities"? "A wise and frugal government, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement . . ." Nascent in the common man of Jefferson there is already the big business man of McKinley and Hoover.
(Bernard Crick, "The Strange Quest for an American Conservatism," The Review of Politics 17 [July 1955]: 359-76, at 373-4 [italics in original])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 