"We really only came around to accepting and integrating the propositional dimension of identity into a concept of ourselves at the time of the American Revolution"
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Huntington is smuggling an argument about modernity into a single, chilly phrase: identity, he suggests, wasn’t always something you reasoned your way into. “Propositional” is the tell. It frames identity as a set of explicit claims you assent to - creed, principles, a theory of the self - rather than lineage, church, village, or inherited rank. The American Revolution becomes not just a political rupture but a psychological one: a moment when Americans learned to narrate who they are in the grammar of statements.
The intent is polemical even when it sounds clinical. By dating “accepting and integrating” to the Revolution, Huntington implies that earlier forms of belonging were pre-ideological, maybe even more stable. That timeline quietly elevates the Revolution’s Enlightenment logic while also setting up a critique: if identity is built on propositions, it’s vulnerable to dispute. Creeds can be revised, reinterpreted, rejected. A nation held together by arguments will inevitably fight about the arguments.
Context matters because Huntington spent his career worrying about cohesion - what binds a political community when ethnicity, religion, and tradition loosen their grip. Read alongside his later work on national identity and civilizational conflict, this line anticipates a familiar Huntington move: treat culture as infrastructure. The subtext is a warning as much as a description. If American identity is fundamentally a creed, then civic unity depends less on blood and soil than on shared assent - and in eras of polarization, assent is the first thing to fracture.
The intent is polemical even when it sounds clinical. By dating “accepting and integrating” to the Revolution, Huntington implies that earlier forms of belonging were pre-ideological, maybe even more stable. That timeline quietly elevates the Revolution’s Enlightenment logic while also setting up a critique: if identity is built on propositions, it’s vulnerable to dispute. Creeds can be revised, reinterpreted, rejected. A nation held together by arguments will inevitably fight about the arguments.
Context matters because Huntington spent his career worrying about cohesion - what binds a political community when ethnicity, religion, and tradition loosen their grip. Read alongside his later work on national identity and civilizational conflict, this line anticipates a familiar Huntington move: treat culture as infrastructure. The subtext is a warning as much as a description. If American identity is fundamentally a creed, then civic unity depends less on blood and soil than on shared assent - and in eras of polarization, assent is the first thing to fracture.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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