"Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy." —Margaret Thatcher
Commentators often suggest that Americans have no political philosophy. The standard line is that Americans are doers, not thinkers; pragmatists, not philosophers. On first glance, this seems insightful; however, close examination of the corpus of American political thought makes clear that this thought-action dichotomy is illusory. Born of English parents and developed in changing and increasingly heterogeneous contexts, American political thought has cycled around an essentially liberal core for nearly 400 years.
Although Americans tend not to think explicitly in terms of abstract theory, our very institutions are informed by theory. In fact, as Garry Wills has noted, America is an “invented” country, the construct of men who consciously built political structures to govern a nation. The traditional concerns of political philosophy guided them: the nature of humans, the sources of legitimate social and political authority, the nature of, the role of the individual citizen, and the proper ends of social and governmental order. Thus, instead of being theory-poor, American institutions are rooted in, and have developed from, explicitly philosophical origins. Wittingly or not, this conditions American citizens: Our thought and actions are theory bound and guided.
source credit Joseph F. Kobylka, professor of political science