Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 65

ESSAY

JAMES MONROE AND THE
SOURCES OF AMERICAN
EXCEPTIONALISM
James P. Lucier

The political system of the allied powers is essentially different . . . from that of America.
-James Monroe, Message to Congress, 1823 (the Monroe Doctrine)

I

n looking for the sources of American
exceptionalism, historians should avoid
subjective or emotional evaluations. There
is an objective criterion that sets the United
States apart. That criterion is our structure of
law. The common law and the U.S. Consti-
tution set us apart. Together their unspoken
presumption is that man is a fallen creature
and that human nature will never change. To
protect the rights of the individual citizen,
the machinery of government must place
obstacles in the way of the corrupt acquisi-
tion of power by any faction in society.
The rest of the world operates under a very
different system, called civil law, or some-
times Roman law, updated by fashionable
ideology. At the heart of that ideology is the
presumption of the perfectibility of human
nature under the wise guidance of the state.

The right of the individual is subordinated
to the order of the common good. The civil
law is imperial in design; it demands that the
common good be achieved by the benevo-
lence of the state whether the people want to
be changed or not.
Unfortunately, civil law is the basis of
so-called international law and the law of
treaties. Just as civil law molds the individual
through the consensus of experts, so inter-
national law seeks to mold nation-states into
the consensus of international institutions,
whether the nation-state is willing or not.
The rest of the world is genuinely puzzled by
the planned chaos of our internal political
arrangements, and our resistance to the rule
of consensus. The world thinks America,
clinging to its guns, its God, and its Consti-
tution, is a threat to world peace.

James P. Lucier is a former staff director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served on the
staff of the U.S. Senate for twenty-five years as a specialist on treaty law, national security, and global terrorism.
65



Modern Age - Fall 2014

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