An argument (from François Cusset 
) that French critical/cultural/philosophical speculations was turned into capital-T Theory only after they were imported into America. It shares this property with other "global" trends. He describes three causes.
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The Sequence of Events (Cusset) was that ideas from a disjoint set of French (mostly) thinkers took root in the American non-academic avante-garde. From there, they were widely adopted and "americanized" by academics in the humanities. From there, they spread back to Europe and the Global South, eventually making it back to France, where it proved unpopular.
Cusset's Thesis is that, because of its unique history and situation, America is prone to this kind of importing/transforming/exporting.
His three causes are:
* Homogenization (Cusset): The French thinkers didn't have much to do with each other, but American's lumped them into a single topic or field: capital-T Theory.
* Institutionalization (Cusset): This reduced the force of the ideas and slowed innovation. (Discussion became focused on people rather than ideas?)
* A Bias Toward Action (Cusset): Americans want their theories to *do* something. They want it to be in service of *goals*.