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Books

America The Philosophical by Carlin Romano

Peter Caws argues that America The Philosophical is a misnomer (at best).

There’s a patriotic song all Americans know called ‘America the Beautiful’. It celebrates spacious skies and purple mountains, self-sacrificial heroes and dreams of alabaster cities. It was written a century ago by Katharine Lee Bates after she had seen the view from the Rockies. One newspaper reviewer said, “we intend no derogation to Miss Katharine Lee Bates when we say that she is a good minor poet” (New York Times, 24th March, 1912).

We know that Carlin Romano was thinking about ‘America the Beautiful’ when he wrote America the Philosophical, because he concludes his introductory chapter with its final words, after advancing the view that “America in the early twenty-first century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, nineteenth century Germany or any other place one can name over the past three millennia” (p.

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