At home abroad.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Book Review

BEING AMERICA: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World by Jedediah Purdy Knopf, $24.00

IS AMERICA THE BENEFICENT protector of global liberties or a naughty rogue super-state? Such questions, previously confined to academic conferences and oak-paneled rooms at the Council on Foreign Relations, have become the quotidian fare of everything from cable news networks to the op-ed pages to online polls. But the nature of our newfound interest in other countries remains curiously solipsistic. We're still not really that interested in how other nations see the world. Rather, since 9/11, we've gone from thinking only about ourselves to thinking about what the rest of the world thinks of us--"But enough about me; what do you think of me?" A new Pew Research Center poll surveying attitudes among the citizens of 42 different countries set off paroxysms of national angst. "World Image of US. Declines," trumpeted a Washington Post headline. "World Survey Says Negative Views of U.S. Are Rising," said The New York Times.

Of course, with the White House provoking waves of anxiety abroad, it does make sense to be especially concerned right now about how the world perceives us. And Jedediah Purdy is among the worried. In Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, he sets out to trace our influence into every nook and cranny of the globe. If containment sought to dam Soviet communism, the new American credo, as Purdy and many others see it, is expansionism. Purdy, a fellow at the New America Foundation, has written a brilliant if uneven book in which vivid insights (nationalist movements are "not the enemies of the future. Instead, they are contenders for it") jostle uneasily with banal platitudes ("The United States should approach a gray world knowing the limits of our power"). Drawing on Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, among others, Purdy hopes to provide a meditation on the causes and consequences of American might and prosperity abroad. He has also done a good bit of legwork, visiting activists and workers everywhere from Cairo to Jakarta, to report--and reflect--upon perceptions of America.

To Purdy, American power and influence are self-evident. "Once again," he opens, "America is a prophetic nation." By this, he means that America represents the world's image of the future, that it is the first modern nation, and that all societies, however tenaciously they cling to their own customs, are heading toward individualism...