The Great Nation of Futurity

Abstract

Abstract This book’s central premise is that conceptions of American national identity and geopolitical purpose embed a crucial temporal element that situates the nation in a privileged position vis-à-vis the future. It argues that Cold War foreign policy discourse embeds the claim that America is the exemplar of the future and, as such, has a special right to shape the geopolitical future. It further argues that this claim is inherently hegemonic, as it legitimates a foreign policy focused on shaping the global future in the American image. The book’s overall goal is to elucidate the discursive means by which the future—as a discursive construct, rhetorical resource, and conceptual space—has figured in America’s conception of its place and purpose in the world. This project is situated within the discourse and ideology of American exceptionalism, which has undergirded the nation’s identity throughout its history. It draws out the temporal dimension of the exceptionalist ideology, namely, the construal of America as the “great nation of futurity,” and examines how this identity manifests linguistically and functions rhetorically in Cold War foreign policy discourse. Working within a critical discourse analytic framework, this project examines the space-times construed within foreign policy discourse and demonstrates that these space-times consistently position the United States in a privileged position vis-à-vis the future. This positioning, in turn, sanctioned a foreign policy approach focused on global future design.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.