Does political culture influence the apprehension of beauty? If so, how is beauty perceived in nations founded on liberal political thought? Can beauty in the United States ever be appreciated as an end in itself, or is it destined to have a social, moral, or political purpose? These are some of the questions that Timothy J. Lukes poses in his smart and theoretically rigorous book, Politics and Beauty in America. A political economist by training, a professor of political science at Santa Clara University with a deep interest in political philosophy and gender studies, Lukes is a learned and capable guide through various theorizations of politics and aesthetics. In recent years, American studies has increasingly focussed on intersectionality, but Lukes's study exhibits the parallel value of interdisciplinarity by investigating “the vulnerability of American beauty to utility” from the liberal philosophy of John Locke to the paintings of Jackson Pollock (xi).

Lukes argues that the conditions of liberal society have resulted in a pragmatic approach to aesthetics in which multiple generations of American thinkers and innovators have seen beauty as mechanized and utilitarian. Developing an extended analogy by comparing the myth of Psyche and Venus to the fable of the Beauty and the Beast, he distinguishes between beauty that is discovered and beauty that is adapted. In the former he sees a passionate, transcendent pleasure, while in the latter he detects the belief that beauty “reflects, reinforces, and enhances the liberal survival paradigm” (xiv). Americans value beauty, Lukes contends, when it seems to master nature and suggests human cultivation and improvement.

The book displays an astonishing range, and Lukes moves as easily between Plato, Lord Shaftesbury, and Louis Agassiz as he does between Sara Baartman (“the Hottentot Venus”), Jenny Lind, and Edward Hopper. Amid dozens of examples, he pays particular attention to how liberal conceptions of beauty appear in P. T. Barnum's display of female beauty, in John Muir's conception of the wilderness, and in Harley Earl's design of the 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air. This “three-element inventory of American beauty” is the center of his analysis (120).

Lukes provides far-reaching (albeit somewhat arbitrary) examples, but he makes a good case that each of these innovators draws from a central conception of beauty. His discussion of Earl Harley sheds important light on the gender dynamics involved in Harley's Chevrolet design team and its mechanization of beauty. His discussion of the naturalist John Muir is especially noteworthy in arguing that Muir did not prize the wilderness as a refuge from the liberal order (as previous scholars assumed). Instead, Muir valued the wilderness as a place where “the accoutrements of success in the liberal survival habitat can be exploited for an aesthetic, and not a material, reward” (151). In Lukes's analysis, Muir promotes a “wilderness experience” that “depends upon commercial and scientific progress” rather than resists it (132).

Some will find Lukes's interpretations revelatory. Others will find them unconvincing, for at times his impressive range leads to some contorted thinking. His claim, for example, that “Barnum promotes Locke's cultivation over Shaftesbury's and Cuvier's refinement as the essence of female beauty” in America seems misleading at best. When he states that Barnum's display of Joice Heth (as George Washington's 160-year-old nurse) and the FeeJee Mermaid “are important influences regarding the concept of female beauty in America,” we encounter an idea that may sit well in critical theory but buckles under the weight of historical experience (105). The sense that Politics and Beauty in America is an ingenious academic exercise is enhanced by Lukes's decision to discuss everyone from Plato to Henry Adams in the present tense, as if the historical context of these thinkers were less significant than their role in the author's analysis.

Lukes's discussion is most enlightening when he patiently roots himself in the details of his material, such as the interview that French philosopher Jacques Derrida conducted with jazz musician Ornette Coleman, the revolutionary saxophonist who insisted that his musical compositions be seen in aesthetic terms rather than the exigencies of race and identity. What Lukes sees in Coleman is the possibility for the discovered, transcendent beauty that the liberal order has largely rejected.

Timothy Lukes's Politics and Beauty in America is a stimulating contribution to the social framework of aesthetics in the United States and a timely reminder of the benefits of interdisciplinary research and thinking.