The history of the rise, decline, and fall of the British Empire has most often been told as the story of an empire whose foundations lay in India during the second half of the eighteenth century. That empire formally encompassed parts of south Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. It will also recognize the possibility of the presence of other traditions that have not been allowed much prominence in the historical debates about America’s intellectual origins and development. Can we say that America was born into and grew out of any predominant political-cultural intellectual tradition or family of ideas? Or was the origin of America the result of a constructive synthesis or perhaps a tumultuous fulmination of two or even more intellectual and emotional forces being manifested in a boisterous new world? This document will attempt to trace, through various major historians, two of the most recognized intellectual traditions of American political-cultural thought. Is the moral essence of America “public virtue” or “liberal competitive opportunism”? Or is America attempting to square the circle? Is America striving to maintain a politics and culture of freedom through which it can achieve shared public benefits through strenuous individual and group competition? One way to try to answer these questions is to examine the political and cultural ideas which were fulminating during the pre- and post-Revolutionary history of America. The question is: What should they do about it? The result has been that WASPs everywhere have become a "stateless" people. The argument made here is that WASPs throughout the Anglosphere, including Pocock's own homeland in New Zealand, face the same problems of dispossession and ethnic displacement. The article contests that conclusion and argues that Pocock's conception of the British past as the history of the British state is fundamentally flawed. Pocock believed that the American Revolution led America to depart from the realm of British history. The republican tradition in America was created by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the "historic American nation." That ethnic group is now being displaced and dispossessed by hostile elites who have opened the floodgates to mass Third World immigration. This article examines the origins and development of the American republic through the lens of the "republican synthesis" in American historiography and, in particular, the work of J.G.A.Pocock.
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