The distinguished University of California sociologist Claude Fischer is unhappy with historians' failure to provide the grand narrative — in this case the grand narrative of American history. But instead of waiting for recalcitrant historians to tie up the "loose threads that comprise the study of American social history,'' Fischer provides his own metanarrative, neatly laid out in the introduction.

Fischer is convinced that there is an American national character that makes America exceptional and that its central feature is voluntarism, defined here as something like individualistic collegiality: We are "sovereign individuals,'' but we love to be in groups that we can leave when we so choose.