Through its focussed engagement with the print culture of the early American nation, Republic of Intellect does a rare and remarkable thing in American literary studies: it actually takes the American Revolution very seriously as a locus of intellectual and literary development. Across the discipline the political importance of the event, on a global or national scale, has almost always taken precedence over individual relationships with thought and culture. The result of this has been an entire generation whose ideas have been lost to larger historical currents. Waterman attempts to bring these figures back by showing how American intellectuals outside of a limited notion of the post-Revolutionary public sphere negotiated the complex and often confused nature of American culture after the political break with Britain.

The strength of Bryan Waterman's book lies primarily in the way that the author demonstrates that most eighteenth-century of sentiments: a profound and sustained sympathy with his subjects' literary and political aims in addition to a critic's acknowledgement of their failings. The author's readings of the Friendly Club's work as a response to popular conspiracy theories, the incipient feminist movement and the birth of the American theatre are balanced by an almost fraternal love for the minds of his subjects. Consequently, Republic of Intellect is a strange beast whose only compatriot may be Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. It is at once a genuine attempt to situate the Friendly Club (William Dunlap, Charles Brockden Brown, Elihu Hubbard Smith et al.) within traditions of federalist and antifederalist American literary culture through close reading and historicism and a biographical exercise based in the journals of Elihu Hubbard Smith. What results is a picture of the post-Revolutionary era that shows how what politicians portrayed as a triumph on behalf of notions of liberty and egalitarianism also simultaneously constituted a crisis of faith for certain young intellectuals whose commitment to many European ideas occasionally placed them in a dangerous adversarial position. I see Waterman's book as one of genuine quality and rarity, because it truly understands the vital and contradictory spaces that are generated when young men really think about the world they are to inherit.