American history is distinct from the rest of the world's

The argument

The claim concerns the founding rather than subsequent conduct: what distinguishes American history, on this view, is the basis on which the country was established. Its revolution is treated as exceptional because of what it produced rather than because it occurred. The United States was the first nation to be built on popular sovereignty, the principle that legitimate authority originates in the people themselves rather than being held by a ruler and extended downward. Other states of the period derived their legitimacy from inheritance, conquest, or divine sanction. A nation that begins by locating authority in its population begins from a different premise about what a government is for. The second distinction concerns national identity. Nations have ordinarily framed their identity around a dynasty, a crown, or an aristocratic order, with a shared past organised around those institutions. The United States was the first not to frame its national identity in a celebration of monarchical or aristocratic authority. Having no such institutions to celebrate, it had to be constituted around something else. What it was constituted around was the natural rights of the individual: rights understood as belonging to people as such rather than granted by a sovereign, and therefore not a sovereign's to withdraw. The patriotism that follows takes a correspondingly different form. Where allegiance elsewhere attached to a person or a lineage, here it rests on a belief in one's fellow man, in the capacity of ordinary citizens to govern themselves, which is the same proposition the state was founded on. Because its founding rested on popular sovereignty and individual natural rights rather than inherited authority, proponents argue, American history is distinct from the rest of the world's and the United States is exceptional.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The United States is not the only nation that defined itself as Republican even in the eighteenth century. For instance, the Netherlands or Italian city-states.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] This conception of what nations can be founded on is not unique to the US.