Although it is unlikely that country legend Hank Williams ever encountered John Dewey's “Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us,” for Douglas Anderson their respective oeuvres represent equally concerted engagements with a peculiarly American dialectic. Dewey's address was first published in a booklet whose title included the phrase “the promise of America,” and it is this promise – real, imagined and lamented – which occupies Anderson in a volume of essays linked under the aegis of “philosophy Americana.” Other figures discussed range from Royce to Springsteen, and include lesser-recognized thinkers such as Henry Bugbee and Thomas Davidson.

Anderson aims to illuminate what is distinctive about American thought, and, relatedly, to demonstrate that American culture in all of its manifestations, popular and otherwise, can be seen as thoroughly permeated by a broadly “philosophical” mode of response to the world. In common with the art of teaching, he argues, the aesthetic and theoretical projects considered here share a melioristic outlook, and a desire to better the culture they inherit. Integral to this optimistic vision, though, is the acknowledgement of the persistent presence of failure and loss. Despite sharing ground with other major trends in contemporary American philosophy and writing (notably the work of Cavell), Anderson situates this tempered utopianism firmly in the contexts of pragmatism and post-pragmatism.

The book's stance is admirable, seeking to combat insularly professionalized constructions of philosophy and its significance, but in practice Anderson's holistic approach works best in the more straightforwardly philosophical chapters. The braver pieces, like those on Williams, Gram Parsons and Kerouac, lack an equivalent sophistication of interpretation. In part this is an effect of a kind of integrity – the non-scholarly “exhortation from the heart,” or subjective dimension of leading by example. However, Philosophy Americana's democratic didacticism, though clearly well intentioned, risks sentimentalism, literalism and the conflation of the actual American landscape with virtual borderlands and liminal spaces.

Literary criticism has long conceded the dangers courted by the identification of a unified American cultural trajectory from Puritanism to the present. Likewise, Anderson lists the potential pitfalls of his own attitude as romanticism, chauvinism and appealing to the naivety of youth. Whilst he is careful to point out the lacunae in the frontier/road/wilderness model, i.e. the experiences of women and non-white people, the problem may be more endemic than he is prepared to grant. It may then be wise not to strain the analogies too far, since this collection's focus is ultimately the idea of a new world, rather than its historical reality.