This essay proposes an interpretation of the transformation in Western Enlightenment civilization between the founding political events of modern times, the French Revolution and the creation of the American Republic, and our twentieth- and twenty-first-century experience of extreme ideological violence.
It is primarily addressed to Americans, as the United States is the most influential, as well as the most powerful contemporary nation and is committed to a secular utopian ideology of universal democracy: an intellectually unsustainable idea as well as politically impossible to achieve, hence a cause for global concern. As Kenneth Minogue, the Australian political philosopher, has observed, a political ideology is implicitly a project to control the world.
—William Pfaff, The Irony of Manifest Destiny, (New York: Walker & Company, 2010), xi.
