[Ads-l] Antedating of "Exceptionalism"

[Shapiro, Fred]

There has been discussion, on this list and elsewhere, about the term "exceptionalism."  The focus has been on the United States's emphasis on American exceptionalism (now our country is becoming more and more exceptional every day !)  The OED's first use for the word is dated 1929, when "American exceptionalism" appeared in print.  Ben Zimmer has written about my discovery that the Times of London used "exceptionalism" in American context in 1861.  I have pasted relevant postings at the bottom of this email.

Here is a further antedating, this one not in a U.S. context:

1848 Standard (London) 4 July 2/2 (Newspapers.com)  We even hope that the tedious stupid West India debates of the last fortnight may be accepted as the sweeping away of the last heap of the rubbish of exceptionalism.

Fred Shapiro

________________________________
From: Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2013 8:09 PM
To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: RE: some terminology developments

Note that the Times (London), August 20, 1861, page 7, had an article on "The Civil War in America," in which the following appears:

It is unfortunate for the United States that it has by turns affronted nearly every Government in Europe, and left to itself only the natural sympathies of the peoples for those who appear before them as the friends of liberty.  There is one thing to be said about civil wars -- they do not last long.  It is probable that the "exceptionalism," if one may use the word, on which the Americans rather pride themselves, will not prevail in the case of the struggle between North and South.

Fred Shapiro
Editor
YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS (Yale University Press)



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Ben Zimmer [bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2013 2:53 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: some terminology developments

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> The Atlantic has an article from March 2012 on the supposed origin of
> the term "American Exceptionalism".
>
> http://goo.gl/lZmAS
>
> Although they correctly point to the collocation circulating in the US
> Communist Party documents in the early 1930s, the attribution to Stalin
> is rather ludicrous. The article has resurfaced due to the ebb and flow
> of conservative politics. Josh Marshall, apparently not realizing that
> the article is 18 months old, takes them to task for ignoring that the
> meaning of the term as used by the Communists was quite different from
> its current incarnation, which, he suggests, took root in post-WWII
> political economy. I suspect he's off by more than a few decades (the
> Reagan-Bush version is built on popular Protestant notions of American
> Exceptionalism--not quite so-named--from the 1800s), but certainly the
> neoconservative philosophy that makes regular use of the term dates back
> to that period.

I wrote up something for Language Log (reprinted on Slate's Lexicon
Valley blog) dismissing the idea that Stalin should be credited with
coining "American exceptionalism."

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7225
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/09/27/american_exceptionalism_neither_joseph_stalin_nor_alexis_de_tocqueville.html

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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