At least from the mid-nineteenth century on, American intellectuals, when claiming their country's cultural independence from Europe, referred to what distinguished them most clearly from their European rivals: a new political system with its ideals of social and political equality, of freedom of opinion and future-mindedness. Jefferson's statement that there should be a revolution every ten years or so corresponded to a collective self-perception that saw American democracy as a work-in-progress. The question how this democratic consciousness could be translated into a genuinely American literature informs Melville's insistence that the Declaration of Independence did make a difference, and it motivated, more than half a century later, artists and writers of the Alfred Stieglitz circle to create an art that would be modern as well as specifically American. The democratic impulse certainly was a shaping factor in Williams's poetic practice. It may also explain why Gertrude Stein, at times, described her textual strategies in terms of political democracy: one word, one vote – the modern dehierarchized text corresponding to a modern dehierarchized society.

The readiness to conjoin democracy and the arts in the United States (once high on the agenda of American studies) has massively declined during the last decades, since the “search for a democratic aesthetics” seemed very much aligned with an ideology of American exceptionalism that was increasingly rejected by a new generation of Americanists. To that extent, Alexander Leicht's study of democratic aesthetics in modern American art and literature runs against the grain of present-day American studies. He also pursues his “search” with the conviction of having (re)discovered a field of research that could be extended to other aesthetic media, other periods of literary and cultural history. It is, however, not the affinity between American art/literature and the idea of democracy as such that interests him. He is aware that books like Larzer Ziff's Literary Democracy (1981) already dealt with this (if mostly thematically and insufficiently grounded in political theory). Rather, he proposes a much tighter relation between theories of democracy and aesthetic practices (in painting, photography and poetry), so that art may be perceived as pursuing democratic theory through its aesthetic strategies and the individual artwork and its structure regarded as projecting, in metaphor, a concept of democratic society.

Although Leicht does not call himself a pragmatist, the idea that artistic, philosophical and social action are part of the mind's effort to give shape to its environment is a pragmatist one. And indeed, John Dewey's notion of “creative democracy” as a shared task resonates in the realm of American art and literature, so that there is almost no American artist or writer who has not, in recent years, been connected with that specifically American philosophical tradition that runs from Emerson via William James to John Dewey and beyond. Even though Leicht mentions Williams's appreciation of Dewey, he does not ground his search for a democratic aesthetics in pragmatist theory – perhaps because he felt that this would define the connection he looked for in too general terms. By tying – if only “metaphorically” – specific artistic and poetic strategies to the political theories of John Rawls and others, he hopes to reach a more analytically precise demonstration of their congruity.

After establishing his “theoretical framework” in an opening chapter that discusses in great detail several theories of democratic liberalism, he applies, in subsequent chapters of textual analysis, what he takes to be the basic principles of these theories (egalitarianism, pluralism, and open-endedness) to three prominent practitioners of a democratic aesthetics. Although all of his analyses are perceptive, well informed, detailed, and thus worth reading, they are nevertheless hampered by the author's determination to identify, let us say, the poetic strategies of William Carlos Williams as advancing – if only in metaphor – some form of political theory. In doing this, he ignores that the metaphorical link between democratic theory and poetic practice marks not only affinity but also distance: neither can these poetic practices be confined to their theoretical reference, nor can the aspects of democratic theory they are said to refer to (egalitarianism, pluralism, open-endedness) be exclusively tied to the specific poetic practices analyzed. Would Williams's poetic strategies make Wallace Stevens's distinctly different poetic practice nondemocratic? The house of democratic aesthetics, it seems to me, has many windows and the ways to enact democratic consciousness in literature and the arts are more varied than Alexander Leicht wants us to believe.