Understanding anti-Americanism

In a world of uncertainties, the last certitude would be the attachment of any contingent cause to the broader sense-making cause of an attack on the United States. The phenomenon of anti-Americanism is so widespread that we are blinded by its sheer ubiquity, by its organizing ability. It will be the task of this essay to carry forward the task of understanding it, which is to say, not just to identify its key histories and varieties, but also to do this so as to understand what kind of thing it is. Guiding our inquiry throughout is the thought of anti-Americanism as an anthropoetically definable structure, an esthetic-ethical phenomenon. Instead of asking, as Ceaser does, why it is that people have anti-American attitudes, and then explaining it by tying to other strands of history, we seek to understand what anti-Americanism is, as an anthropoetically defined axiological (ethical and esthetic) structure. We begin with aspects of how it evolved, not so much for history’s sake, but in order later in the essay to see what it does, how it works. Because if our contention that anti-Americanism is a complex structure of autocritique is correct, then it is a foundational dimension of contemporary society, and as such, so far from constituting an attack on distinct or overlapping American and / or Western values, it is actually an attempt, witting or no, to reinforce them.