The genius of American democracy comes not from any special virtue of the American people but from the unprecedented opportunities of this continent and from a peculiar and unrepeatable combination of historical circumstances. These circumstances have given our institutions their character and their virtues. The very same facts which explain these virtues, explain also our inability to make a ``philosophy'' of them. They explain, therefore, why we have nothing in the line of a theory that can be exported to other peoples of the world. We should not ask others to adopt our ``philosophy'' because we have no philosophy which can be exported. My argument is simple. It is based on forgotten commonplaces of American history—facts so obvious that we no longer see them. I argue, in a word, that American democracy is unique. It possesses a ``genius'' all its own. By this I mean what the Romans might have described as the tutelary spirit assigned to our nation at its birth and presiding over its destiny. Or what we more prosaically might call a characteristic disposition of our culture.
In one sense, of course, everybody has a political theory, even if it is expressed only in hostility to theories. But this is a barren paradox, concealing more than it discovers. In our political life we have been like Molière's M. Jourdain, who was astonished to discover that all his life he had been speaking prose. We have not been much interested in the ``grammar'' of politics; we have been more interested in the way it works rather than in the theory behind it.