Going for broke, historian Anthony Hutchison gambles that the grandest claims of intellectual force can be invoked to appreciate American novels that are deeply inflected with politics. Such fiction is often studied for its snickering ruminations on corruption – from Henry Adams's Democracy (1880) to such mid-twentieth-century romans-à-clef depicting gallus-snapping backroom boys as Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946), Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah (1956) and Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place (1961). Unlike classics of Continental political fiction, American novels are associated with deals more than ideals, with the problems of compromise rather than lethal struggles for power. But Hutchison, a specialist in the projection of ideas, wants to match mere novels – works usually eliciting aesthetic admiration – against the thought of Locke and Lincoln, Jefferson and Marx, and to ascertain how fiction can register the pressure of the republican imagination.

The half-dozen texts that Hutchison selects risk accusations of idiosyncrasy as well. Of the five novelists upon which Writing the Republic focusses, three are still alive. As the author of Burr and many other historical novels, Gore Vidal has been much admired for his virtuosity, learning and delight in demystification, but probably none of his novels, whether despite or because of their popularity, has achieved canonical status. Neither Russell Banks nor Philip Roth tend to write about politicians at all. The protagonist of Banks's Cloudsplitter, John Brown, could be categorized as a bloodthirsty pursuer of martyrdom, or even as a terrorist (though in a good cause). While Roth has published political satire (Our Gang) and counterfactual fantasy (The Plot against America), the trilogy that Hutchison analyzes (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain) foregrounds familial and domestic conflicts, played out with the political context more as broader setting or occasional instigation of the plot than as integral to it. When the New York Times asked Diana Trilling to name the important work of postwar fiction, she cited her husband's The Middle of the Journey. But so elevated a critical estimation is not widely shared.

Nevertheless Hutchison manages to make his gamble pay off, and the connections that he draws with the dilemmas of democratic politics are likely to be sufficiently insightful to satisfy both the student of literature and the historian of political beliefs. He succeeds in his intention to reveal “what is meant by liberalism and how it confronted and reconstituted itself in the face of competing ideological pressures” (xxii). The liberalism off which the novels play is itself transformed from a nineteenth-century version (Locke, Adam Smith) that overlaps and competes with republicanism and Transcendentalism.