At first glance, Why Moralize upon It? looks like a traditional exploration of American political thought through some of its great fictional stories. And to some degree, it is. This slim volume includes analyses of famous works—Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men—whose general import in American political thought is largely unquestioned. But as is appropriate for an author who foregrounds the complexity of political judgment, in this volume Brian Danoff takes what is familiar to many students of American politics and complicates it, both with new interpretations and new objects of study, infusing welcome energy into the study of American political fiction.

Danoff's central argument is that American novelists and filmmakers have done some of the nation's most profound thinking about democratic leadership—and have helped elevate their readers’ and viewers’ thinking about the same—because of the moral complexity of their works. “Because these works have an ambiguous, nuanced, and tragic outlook,” writes Danoff, “they can help train the citizen-reader to think through the moral complexities of the political issues on which a democratic citizenry must render judgment” (1).

In Danoff's hands, this becomes not just a general theoretic claim but a pressing political lesson. Danoff makes a powerful case that in this moment of deadening political polarization, great political fictions are needed more than ever: to remind us that it is not so simple to divide our world into “good guys” and “bad guys,” that no single leader or ideological platform will ever have all the answers to all our questions or the solutions to all our problems, and that we are all flawed beings who do best when we approach others, even those with whom we disagree, with generosity and humility.

Danoff makes quietly brilliant choices in the works he focuses on in this book. His first chapter, on Benito Cereno and the 2013 film Captain Phillips, pairs two fictional retellings of actual nautical events. While the “real” accounts of each event basically cast the (white) Americans as great heroes having great adventures and winning great victories in a world of dark (and largely dark-skinned) forces, the fictional retellings make things more morally ambiguous. They subtly raise questions for their audiences about the United States’ role in the world, questions about racial hierarchy and economic inequity, but also questions about the moral blindness that inheres in any simple heroes-versus-villains story. (This includes stories that would demonize the white captains and heroicize the black mutineers/pirates in interpreting these events.) Danoff allows us to see that the strength of both fictional stories lies in their essentially tragic outlook: the awareness that most of the choices we have to make in life are not between an easily separable good and evil, but in a mess of competing and legitimate moral claims made by actors who—like us—are creatures both of virtue and of vice.

In reminding us that difficult moral reckoning and complex moral interpretation are at the core of the ideal of citizenship, Danoff then builds a theory of democratic leadership from Ellison's Invisible Man—a book, Danoff notes, that opens with a line from Benito Cereno. Danoff does two wonderful things with Invisible Man: First, he puts the too often neglected female character Mary Rambo at the center of things, arguing that she is the political exemplar of the book. Second, Danoff argues that Invisible Man builds a theory of democratic leadership negatively, careful to avoid the kind of moral and political oversimplification that Melville decried and that most of Ellison's characters find so attractive. Ellison thus underscores the ways in which, though democratic life thrives in an appreciation of moral complexity, democratic citizens find ourselves ever tempted to engage in moral simplification. Thus, a central task of democratic leadership is to insist on complex moral reckoning and conversation, and a central task of democratic education is to cultivate the same.

Danoff's subsequent chapters, on All the King's Men and Graham Greene's The Quiet American, further expand on the ways in which novelists and filmmakers serve those purposes of democratic leadership and education. He shows, for instance, the ways in which Penn Warren—in his own life, a friend of Ellison—echoes the worry of Invisible Man that democratic citizens can be tempted by the simplifications of fanaticism, but also by the simplifications of apathy. That is: once we become aware of the moral complexity of political judgment, we might simply throw up our hands “and refrain from making any judgments at all,” courting the kind of relativism or apathy that in practice are almost indistinct in their enervations (86). Danoff shows how Penn Warren tries to help his readers tack between the dangerous poles of fanaticism and apathy. We must recognize that political decisions are difficult and bound to be imperfect. But that does not mean that we should avoid “taking sides” or making decisions; in the end, that is our task as citizens and leaders. And it certainly does not mean that we should take sides so totally that we refuse to acknowledge the wisdom to be found outside ourselves.

In this new and urgent book, then, Danoff brings us back to the old and enduring ideal of partisanship, captured in its first four letters: the idea that in taking sides, we recognize that we are only part of a greater story, a story with legitimate perspectives and claims that we are likely to understand incompletely at best. It thus is incumbent upon us to tend carefully to the stories of others, and to deliberate with and through them without losing sight of the core democratic principles that represent the flawed American nation at its best. Why Moralize upon It? is, like the novels and movies it celebrates, an exemplar of democratic education.