What do Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Edward Said have in common? It cannot be Marxism (Marcuse was sympathetic; Solzhenitsyn was hostile). It cannot be attitudes toward Israel (Arendt was ambivalent; Said was hostile). It cannot be the bonds of friendship, much less of common political goals, or even American citizenship. Solzhenitsyn, while living in Vermont, never became naturalized; Said, born in Jerusalem, inherited US citizenship from his father. So why this particular quartet? Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, who teaches English at Carnegie Mellon University, discerns a shared status in the fate of exile itself, which enabled these thinkers to examine American public culture from the bifocals of both insider and outsider.

She reads the four authors not only broadly as intellectuals but also quite specifically as “immigrants,” whose texts exhibit both strangeness and familiarity in the context of their new lives in the United States. That angle enables Ritivoi to claim that exile offered special “insight” (5), even as the combination of “detachment and involvement” (2) injected something fresh and even audacious into civic life. In Americanizing themselves, she insists, they stretched the boundaries of what once passed for political debate, and made foreignness itself a source of radical perception as well as an invitation for the native-born to examine more skeptically their own democratic assumptions about America. The willingness of this quartet, Ritivoi claims, to intervene in the circulation of political ideas constituted a plea to belong to the community, a solicitation for inclusion in “political membership” (252), even as the force of these writers’ criticism challenged the openness of the polity to perspectives that might otherwise have been consigned to oblivion. Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn and Said converted the torment of displacement into the authority of awareness of how much the United States needed to acknowledge the value of self-reflection. Through persuasion and polemic, through treatise and jeremiad, the subjects of Ritivoi's book yearned to make American political culture more sophisticated and more cosmopolitan.

In advancing such a case, Intimate Strangers is deeply flawed, however, because nothing but the biographical fact of geographical displacement seems to provide any thematic coherence. Perhaps the author might have made more of the shadow of totalitarianism. Arendt and Marcuse had fled the Third Reich, and Solzhenitsyn was expelled by a regime that was slowly emerging from Stalinist tyranny. But here the anomaly is Edward Said (who was by far the youngest in this group). His family moved to Egypt from a fledgling democratic regime, Israel, and he was educated in a New England prep school, and then at Princeton and Harvard. The other three were entirely educated in their homelands. Because Said's parents were neither physically threatened nor politically persecuted, his exile was a choice, a cosmopolitan condition that he eloquently explored in the title essay of his collection Reflections on Exile (2000). Said was also the only member of this quartet whose formal training was in literary theory and criticism, though Arendt and Marcuse, who were trained in philosophy, also analyzed fiction, and Solzhenitsyn, who was trained in the sciences, famously wrote it.

Yet the four authors subscribed to no common ideas or values, nor did their differences stimulate critical engagement with one another. Instead Ritivoi falls back on the claim that the American intelligentsia dismissed her four protagonists as “misguided or irrelevant” (252), precisely because of their foreign birth. They were even denied, she asserts, the “right to formulate” their own “political ideas” (251). “The foreigners’ discourse,” she adds, “activated a narcissistic impulse that makes one impervious, if not allergic, to criticism” (29). In support of her claim, Ritivoi offers no evidence. Indeed, given the numerous honors pelted on all but the incorrigibly radical Marcuse, her assertion makes no sense. Is it remotely plausible that home-grown intellectuals would be of one mind in rejecting the opinions of four such diverse thinkers, and especially that foreign origins would be so decisively held against them? The chauvinists are never identified, though the disparagement of these refugee writers is integral to the thesis of Intimate Strangers.

Normally a short review should not register complaints about typographical and factual errors. But here an exception must be made, because the carelessness of Intimate Strangers is truly annoying. Names are frequently and sometimes consistently misspelled, so that readers of this book encounter Walter “Lacquer,” “William” Rahv, “Georg Lichtenstein” (presumably George Lichtheim), and “Bernard” (not Benedict) Anderson. The Office of Strategic Services is rendered as the Office of Strategic Information (121). Franklin D. Roosevelt is confused with his cousin Theodore (26). George F. Kennan is misidentified as a “U.S. State Secretary” (166), though he never held the office of Secretary of State, the rank that Ritivoi seems to have meant. She even mangles the titles of works that these intimate strangers wrote, which is why she comes up with Arendt's “Reflections on Little Rock, Arkansas,” Marcuse's Essays on Liberation, or Solzhenitsyn's Letters to Soviet Leaders. One-Dimensional Man (which she dates five years before it was published) famously ends with a credo of Walter Benjamin's. Rather than checking that final page, Ritivoi seems to have depended on her memory, because the meaning is drastically altered to “hope is only for those who are hopeless” (146). She believes that Marcuse coined the phrase “affluent society” rather than John Kenneth Galbraith (148). She labels Hans J. Morgenthau of the University of Chicago a “professional politician” (233), and her reference to “the Catholic philosopher Ronald Niebuhr” (224) raises doubts as to the reliability of a book devoted to “American political discourse.” It is quite unsettling to see such sloppiness in a book published by such a reputable academic press. And why were these issues not spotted during the process of peer review and copy-editing? This volume confers no credit upon Columbia University Press.