In Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville,[1] Michael Paul Rogin attempts to show how Melville’s artistic efforts were a vehicle for expressing opinions on the political issues that preoccupied nineteenth-century America. In Rogin’s view, the most important issues were capitalism, imperialism, and slavery, and the appropriate response to them at the time would have been a radical one. It is from this perspective that he judges the adequacy of Melville’s politics and art. Rogin is a professor of political science at Berkeley. He has previously written on intellectuals and the phenomenon of McCarthyism and on the subjugation of the American Indian during the Jacksonian period. He now tries his hand at literary criticism as a means of writing a revisionist political history of nineteenth-century America.

There is no reason why a political scientist should not undertake such a project. It is a welcome relief from the sort of literary criticism that renounces the world, as though it did not exist, and behaves as if “texts” are all that really matter. At least Rogin recognizes that there is some kind of connection between literature and the world around us. In recent years critics as politically different as Gerald Graff and Edward Said have argued that contemporary criticism actively cultivates irrelevance precisely to the extent that it regards reality as simply one more convention, or “fiction.” Rogin’s book is one attempt to redress that complaint and to write criticism that just might matter to some