Rethinking anti Americanism : the history of an exceptional concept in American foreign relations There are two ways to write about the history of anti Americanism. Until now many scholars the anti anti Americans have taken the term at face value and assembled catalogues of published statements exhibiting animosity towards the United States. These histories often convey the impression of continuity consistency and consensus so that they in effect present a single transnational tradition of anti Americanism. From Enlightenment philosophers deriding the New Worlds climate to Latin American nationalists blaming U.S. imperialism for all their countries ills we are invited to contemplate an apparently unbroken chain of irrational hostility an enduring ideological mindset with a long pedigree. Anti Americanism in the conventional approach is understood as an obsessive and particular hatred of the United States expressed in exaggerated language and traceable to a fundamental hostility toward democracy freedom and modernity