In her first monograph, Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2014), Susan McWilliams Barndt explored the “idea of travel in political theory” (x). It was there that she “argue[d] that one of the greatest resources we have for understanding the ‘new world’ we inhabit may lie in one of the oldest themes in Western political theorizing: travel. Stories about travel and travelers have been a part of the history of Western political thought from its beginnings, dating back to the ancient Greek practice of theoria” (5) and the figure of the theoros (9–17). She has gone, in that book, from a vital investigation of a “new global era in need of global theorizing” for political thought—drawing from the “travel-story tradition”—to, in the present book, a distinctly American incarnation of the practice, namely, the road trip (2, 5). In the American context, the road trip most iconically means travel by car (or camper), but also takes us back to the founding era and the surprising emphasis on the political significance of roads and road building in The Federalist Papers (xviii), a significance that was ratified anew by President Eisenhower in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which paved the way for a “ribbon of highway” (W. Guthrie) as a radical form of social and political continuity “from sea to shining to sea.”

Fittingly, as part of the Politics, Literature, and Film series, McWilliams Barndt brings these three fields into conversation with one another through a steady practice of close analysis of specific works—from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to Kerouac's On the Road (1957) to Strayed's Wild (2012)—but also in the broader context of the American literary tradition, including Thoreau, Whitman, Northup, Twain, and more contemporary writers, such as John Howard Griffin, Hunter S. Thompson, and Erika Lopez. These readings are coupled with viewings, namely, of iconic representations of the road as seen in Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, and Into the Wild. The credo of the book arrives from Emerson, who wrote: “The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway” (“Experience,” 1844). Of course, McWilliams Barndt must undertake the work of analysis, but this duty has the kind of momentum and popular appeal befitting both her subject and her thesis.

McWilliams Barndt makes her central task to show how “stories of American road trips are an important form of American political thought” (xv). This premise is more controversial, and more welcome, than it may at first appear, since it promotes—indeed, exalts—a type of American vernacular expression, one that is often defined by a kind wordlessness or ineffability. Among the many motivated reasons for undertaking a road trip (e.g., as a countercultural act, or as a rite of passage, as an escape from “daily commutes and sanitized routines” [xi–xii]), there is the underlying process of driving long distances, of creating physical momentum as a literal condition for personal expression, or at least, the conjuring of states of mind (e.g., where driving with or without a specific destination is an act of imagination, of daring, and in turn, if we are lucky, of illumination).

Before the politics of the road trip can be revealed, though, it must first be seen as romance—in the Melvillean sense: “The American road trip is a great American romance, perhaps the great American romance” (xii). Pace Melville, though, we might have to say a romance of the twentieth century (and perhaps for a bit longer in our new millennium—since a rapidly dawning ecological crisis threatens to decimate the romance of the road). To speak of “romance,” then, means that before one can undertake a road trip, in this context, one must have an idea about it (just as the seafarers and whalers should have a literary vision of “the watery part of the world” before they alight from the dry dock). And ideas of the American road trip abound in the stories—literary, musical, and cinematic—that we create. Yet, for McWilliams Barndt, these stories are compendiums of insight into “the American imagination, … American self-understanding, and … American politics” (xii). And this grouping suggests why one of the most daring intellectual moves of her project can be gleaned in the modest conjunction “and” in her book's title, for it mobilizes a thought—namely, the recognition of an entangled intimacy between the American road trip and American political theory. How perfect that the American agitation—the privileging of “motion and idealize[d] mobility”—that translates so well into industrial productivity (capitalism) also finds its articulation in moving pictures (cinema) and moving bodies (walking, hitchhiking) and moving vehicles (a status of being perpetually “on the road”), which, in turn, so ably offer variations of imaginative productivity. The American road trip, then, is also “political philosophy in motion” (xviii).

Despite what may at first blush seem like a casual association, there is much to recommend the road trip as the enactment of American political theory and practice. McWilliams Barndt notes that while Tocqueville dwelt scornfully on an American impatience with traditional philosophical abstraction (and its customary sedentariness), Americans nevertheless “have serious questions and concerns that get expressed in other ways” (xvii), for example, in cinema and in songs, and, indeed, some “have argued that American political philosophy is at its most diverse and most developed in American fiction” (xvii); McWilliams Barndt is herself a contributor to the Melville volume in the series Political Companions to Great American Authors (2013).

Then to further the fecundity of the pair, there is the uncanny, almost unmatched, way in which the road is at once a shared, public space (and thus charged with political import [xx]) and a private space (where the walker, driver, the adventurer alights upon new territories of thought and emotion). As McWilliams Barndt underscores, “The American road may well be … the central site of shared experience and democratic recognition in the United States” (xxi). The road is generic, open to all (the free-way), and a site for community and common experience but also as easily put to use for private purposes, especially individualized projections of meaning (hence, again, the imaginative productivity of the road). Consequently, the road—where we meet the stranger and, as the case may be, ourselves—illustrates many salutary lessons about American diversity, otherness, and citizenship (xxi–xxii). The various figures we find, or are, on the road—the walker, the wagoneer, the driver, the hitchhiker, the hobo, the wanderer, the wonderer, the road tripper (solo, or with a friend, or with family), the camper in a van or someone that is part of a caravan, and so on—refract myriad meanings of this space in the service of public political expression and private political experimentation. Each of McWilliams Barndt's chapters adopts a representative figure and “pervasive type” (namely, the seeker, the walker, the laborer, the biker, and the pretender) (xxiii).

Admitting there are more stories of the road—and more figures to encounter in them—McWilliams Barndt offers a conclusion that invites our further investigations, and even provides a handy appendix (“Roads Not Taken”) featuring a list of books and films that lie beyond the purview of her project but may be taken up for ours. The open-endedness of the book, including the bounty of prospective case studies, offers its own political lesson: namely, that “all American road trips do not point towards the same Mecca,” but instead confirm “their ends are far more diffuse”—more adaptable, contestable, revisable, in short, American (xxvii). Those same words can be used to describe, in Plato's parlance no less, the experiment of democracy: like the dreamer in Bruce Springsteen's song “Born to Run”—one who is filled with a “restless energy” that heads in “no clear direction” and discovers a lived “condition in which there may be freedom, but there is no form” (86). The pleasure and the peril of the (open) road is its sheer, dizzying possibility—the same hallmark that animates the promise and problem of democracy. Whether we like it or not, we are, each and all, embarked on the road of the American political experiment. McWilliams Barndt's fine study of our shared highway proves a keen aid for gaining some orientation on this quintessentially American myth and matter-of-fact reality.