RECONSTRUCTING AMERICA: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought.

By James W. Ceaser. Yale Univ. Press. 292 pp. $30

"Men admired as profound philosophers," Alexander Hamilton observed in The Federalist, "have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America—that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere." Ceaser, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, traces anti-American thought from those 18th-century philosophers, including the Count de Buffon and Cornelius de Pauw, to the 19th-century French racialist Arthur de Gobineau, the German intellectual Oswald Spengler, and, finally, the postmodern theorists Martin Heidegger, Alexander Kojéve, and Jean Baudrillard.

These America haters, Ceaser argues, rely on nonpolitical theories of causation, often fatalistic and biological (though not always racialist) ones, leaving little room for the machinery of democracy. By contrast, traditional political science—exemplified for the author by The Federalist and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—eschews determinism and stresses moral and ethical choices based on the empirical study of politics. The author leaves no doubt where his sympathies lie: "It is time to take [America] back from the literary critics, philosophers, and selfstyled postmodern thinkers who have made the very name ‘America’ a symbol for that which is grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, deforming, rootless, uncultured, and—always in quotation marks—‘free.’"

Gracefully written and provocative as it is, Ceaser’s volume falls short of reclaiming America from its critics. The author dismisses critiques of the nation as selfevidently preposterous, undeserving of serious analysis. Instead of refuting anti-American ideas, he disparages their intellectual parentage and moves on. Ceaser also ignores the critical thought of writers such as Richard Weaver and Albert Jay Nock, who do not fit easily into his thesis. Still, it is difficult to dispute his contention that the United States is better served by thinkers who aim to understand its political machinery than by those who deride the nation as a vast, homogenizing Disneyland.

—Solomon L. Wisenberg