America: The End of the Dream?

Abstract

America, the undiscovered and virgin continent, fired the imagination of Europe in a peculiar and unique fashion. The rumour of it stirred Shakespeare. Franklin, as epitome of its Natural Man, became part of the European Enlightenment; Rousseau, and for a while Thomas Jefferson, saw it as the novus ordo saeculorum. For Europeans like Coleridge and Priestley, for Du Pont de Nemours and Robert Owen, it was a place uncorrupted by power, congenial to experiments in human perfectibility, inhabited by a chosen people.