American Foreign Policy Traditions

This four-volume collection brings together the academic writings of scholars who have examined America's foreign policy through the lens of diverse and often contradictory political traditions that stretch back to the founding of the United States, including liberalism, messianism, and isolationism. The selected papers address the historical development of these traditions, their application for understanding contemporary US foreign policy, the emergence of new traditions such as neoconservatism, and the perpetual existence of anti-Americanism.

Introduction

A compilation of the volume Introductions.

Introduction to Volume I and II: America's Conflicting Foreign Policy Traditions: An Introduction

BrendonO'Connor

The study of political traditions is one of the most important American contributions to the study of political history and the social sciences. In the twentieth century Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition (1948), Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) and Seymour Martin Lipset's American Exceptionalüm (1996) were three of the stand-out works in the field of politics. All offer bold assessments of American political history and the American condition, and follow in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville's sweeping and rightly recognised nineteenth-century masterpiece Democracy in America. These works challenge readers to think broadly about the human experience often across decades, if not centuries. ...

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