What is the American Way? Four Themes in Search of Their Next Incarnation

Abstract What is the American model? What has happened to this model during, specifically, the last thirty years? What is, finally and in that light, the apparent fate of ‘American exceptionalism’? The essays in this volume have pursued these questions through a focus on major sectors of American life. In this pursuit, four grand aspects of the larger society—govemment, the economy, religion, and culture—have been singled out for special treatment. So has the applied realm which is perhaps most commonly offered in our time as practical evidence for a continuing exceptionalism—namely, education—and so has the wider realm of public policy, which emerges out of all the preceding. Such an approach to the three questions opening this chapter is, most fundamentally, an attempt to give these questions a concrete and pointed reality, by embedding them in a precise and specifiable (an empirical) social context.