America's Agora of Ideas

Carlin Romano sees an America full of philosophers. Romano's America is not an enclave of anti-intellectual culture that eschews philosophy, but rather is fertile ground for the growth of a highly philosophical community of thinkers. Demonstrating this premise would be a daunting task for any contemporary writer. But add to this the further assertion that twenty-first-century America is the most philosophical culture in world history, and you have a thesis that would make even Francis Fukuyama blush.

But such is the project of Carlin Romano's ambitious new book, America the Philosophical. Romano, a critic-at-large for The Chronicle of Higher Education and long-time book critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, engages a broad subject in this long, though entertaining, and highly accessible book. The result is a kind of treasury of anecdotes and musings from Romano's many years of writing about the books and thinkers that occupy America's agora of ideas.

Scattered throughout the book is material from nearly two hundred interviews with figures, ranging from Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault to Phil Donahue and Hugh Hefner. Romano has had remarkable access to movers and shakers in America's marketplace of ideas, and excerpts from these discussions form the highlights of the book. The author relays scores of offbeat anecdotes from these conversations, which in themselves are reason enough to read the book. Revealing details such as Kenneth Burke's "poorly furnished, dilapidated apartment" with its "indoor thermometer, still factory sealed in its plastic and cardboard casing, hung from a nail on the wall" and the "bottles of vermouth and vodka" that "dotted the sink top" help the reader form a visual connection to the thinkers Romano is discussing—a connection that is often absent in more serious scholarship.

However, Romano often shares details about philosophers' personal lives at the expense of engaging their work and contributions. For example, we learn of Martha Nussbaum's relationships with Amartya Sen and Cass Sunstein, as well as Romano's opinion that Kwame Anthony Appiah is "like Alain Locke, gay but not politically crusaderish on the subject." Such details give the book more of a gossipy, tabloid feel than a philosophical one, especially when they drag on for pages, as in the case of Martin Heidegger's relationship with Hannah Arendt. Rather than trying to figure out whether Arendt was the woman in Heidegger's life, these pages would have been more productively used discussing Arendt's philosophical contribution to America the philosophical.

The author never shies away from sharing his sharp opinions—and he has quite a collection. Romano sums up Robert Nozick's position thus: "Ethics, apparently, had been founded in a classroom with a piece of chalk." Of Noam Chomsky's political philosophy, Romano posits, "He simply lacked supportable truths most of the time."

The philosophical hero of the book is Richard Rorty. Romano's thirty-page chapter on him far outweighs his discussions of any other single thinker aside from Isocrates and John Rawls. In Rorty, Romano sees the contemporary epitome of "philosophy as an ever-expanding practice of persuasion, rather than a cut-and-dried discipline that hunts down eternal verities and comes pushpinned for media (or internal) consumption," and in Isocrates, a figure that supports a way of looking at philosophy that never caught on in the Western intellectual tradition. In contrast to Rorty and Isocarates, Rawls is presented as symptomatic of the failure of analytic philosophy because his widely known theory of justice has not faired well in the twenty-first century.

Romano clearly has an issue with the American Philosophical Association and seemingly almost all of its nearly 11,000 members. For him, the philosophical work of APA members is not the right type of "philosophy," particularly when viewed from the lens of Rorty and Isocrates's respective notions of philosophy. Nevertheless, it is one thing to tout a more expansive view of philosophy as persuasion, and conclude that by this notion, there is more to American philosophy than the...