It is possible to approach America the Christopher Columbus way. With a primitive ability to navigate the Atlantic Ocean, he simply relied upon dead reckoning, sticking to a line of latitude and almost bumping into it by accident. He never made it to the North American mainland. Had he done so, he would have confronted the physical reality: America as an unavoidable obstacle on the way to somewhere else. There is, however, another America. It exists in the more complex realm of ideas and requires an altogether more scientific approach to discovery in order to understand the system of beliefs that informs its historical and contemporary political debates. Michael Foley's richly textured and subtly nuanced analysis is more than equal to this challenge, dissecting the American credo with forensic skill and perceptive insight.

For Foley, the United States is a “compound republic” which has “a little understood ability to engage in deep conflicts over political ideas, while at the same time reducing adversarial positions to legitimate derivatives of American history and development” (12). These derivatives are extracted from the matrix of the nation's credo, which Foley distils into nine distinctive elements: freedom, the individual, wealth, democracy, the rule of law, equality, morality, progress and order. The interactions between these elemental ideas are then discussed as they are pressed into the service of six composites of American political thought: capitalism, pluralism, liberalism, conservatism, populism and nationalism. Although these admixtures are “derived from the segmented foundation of the matrix,” Foley points out that they “should not be conceived of as genetically integrated thoroughbreds, but more as a set of constantly mutating hybrids” (415), imparting a dynamism to American politics and allowing ideas to be fashioned and refashioned as they are applied to contemporary issues and concerns.

In contrast to Louis Hartz's still influential interpretation of American thought as limited by and constricted within a dominant liberal tradition, Foley argues that the inventiveness which allows the compounds to be reinvigorated through fresh interpretations of their foundational elements is suggestive of a vibrant political culture that is too eclectic to be monolithic. Indeed, “while Hartz's holistic conception of America's foundational ideas is an attractive proposition, the argument in this analysis is that the Hartzian presumption is ill-founded at the conceptual, cognitive, and practical level” (432). While the sometimes overlooked critique of exceptionalism that can be teased from Hartz's exposition in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) retains its contemporary relevance, Foley's work is a welcome reminder of the need not only to recognize the ideological imperatives that underpinned many such studies of American political ideas during the Cold War, but also to re-evaluate the paradigms on which they were based.

Nowadays, as Foley observes, “America's foundational ideas and organizing principles represent the cornerstone of its claims to being a source of global legitimacy and an inspirational exemplar of modernity” (459–60). Yet such claims are staked on overseas political terrain which has proven both hostile and resistant to them. If it is true that “as America's global position becomes more consolidated, its self-declared role as an exemplar of democratic potential becomes increasingly exposed to critical assessment” (467), then it is of paramount importance that within and beyond the United States there is a continuing debate surrounding its system of beliefs. Only then can the nation begin to engage in rational dialogue with, rather than pre-emptive strikes against, those who recoil from its credo.

Columbus's inability to determine his precise position in the world led him to a Bahamian landfall – exactly where is still disputed – in what he thought was part of Asia. His transatlantic voyage nevertheless would become a foundational myth in America's historical credo. Subsequently, the United States has represented itself to the world not simply as a geographic entity but also as an archetype of enduring democratic ideals. Michael Foley's cartography of the nation's political beliefs investigates the implications of such a conviction. Ideas matter. They mould political attitudes and ways of thinking about issues, shaping policy preferences, informing choices and precipitating actions. This book, expansive, erudite and provocative, is a major contribution to the study of their place in US politics. Students will find it a challenging read, but it will reward their persistent effort. It deserves to join those works which have become the standard texts within the disciplines of both political thought and American studies.