Democracy's Literature: Politics and Fiction in America.
Edited by Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2005. 248p. $80 cloth, $29.95 paper.
Political Philosophy Comes to Rick's: Casablanca and
American Civic Culture. Edited by James F. Pontuso. Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2005. 208p. $65.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.
Democracy's Literature is the most recent foray by
political philosophers to save literature from itself, or at least to save
good books from Departments of English. At the same time, as coeditor
Joseph Romance suggests in the conclusion to his own essay, such an
undertaking throws a lifeline to narrow-minded political scientists,
urging them—if I may paraphrase Flannery O'Connor—to meet
political perplexities with an examination of conscience rather than an
examination of statistics. And it is this political examination of
conscience that literature will often facilitate.