In 1776, the Declaration of Independence, formally “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen States of the United States”, was adopted by the Second Continental Congress. The Declaration did not merely bring into being a new state. It did not merely announce an abstract but revolutionary self-evident truth that “all Men are Created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Unalienable Rights that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. From that improbable Republic would emerge a force that would transform civilisation itself.

Observers struggled to name the core characteristic of America. The enigmatic word they kept circling back to was “energy”. Edmund Burke described religion itself as a “principle of energy” in the colonies. But it was not a conventional religion. It was what he called the “dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant Religion”, almost as if it was a surplus of saying “no” to authority or command that defined America.

This excess of resistance had no inherent moral direction. It could be appropriated by the slave owner as much as the partisan for freedom; it could sustain a violent society that defended the right to bear arms in the name of liberty. Alexis de Tocqueville, on one count, uses the term “energy” more than 50 times in Democracy in America. Alexander Hamilton counted “energy” in the executive as a leading marker of good government. Henry Adams, in a way that foreshadowed the American Century, converted physical energy into a religion. The dynamo was a true symbol of “godly infinity”. The worship of material expansion was not so much about the objects it created, but the underlying energy it reflected. It is often said that the final draft of the Declaration of Independence removed explicit references to slavery and brought in references to providence. Yet this idiom of providence was never related to piety. Its measure was always going to be energy: Unleashing the capacities of a people to transform the nature of power in the modern world and becoming an object of universal desire.

In the American imagination, freedom became inseparable from power, from the energies it could release and the capacities it could enlarge. It was not simply a doctrine of individual dignity, but a deep faith in the limitless expansion of human possibility. But this energy had a double character. On the one hand, it would unleash an incredibly creative individualism, new forms of associational life,........

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