First published in 1998. This is Volume I of nine in the Historical Sociology series and looks at the United States of 1776 in contemporary European philosophy. This is a developed study of a lecture given on ‘Bourgeois Ideal and Capitalist Reality’-the capitalist reality which is the natural outcome, and yet the complete perversion, of the bourgeois ideal of the eighteenth century. This lecture, which was delivered in November, I942, discussed in more general terms the development of which the social history of the United States between I776 and I800.