"America is not at any crossroads," Perry Anderson writes in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his 2015 guide to the rise and scholarly maintenance of the American imperium. Anderson is challenging Francis Fukuyama in particular, the end-of-history theorist who, in his view, fails to reckon with the "staggering accumulation of military bases round the world, or the grip of the United States on the Middle East, let alone symbiosis with Israel." For Fukuyama and other spinners of imperial-decline narratives, Anderson reserves no sympathy. Intellectual America, he concludes, "is just where it has always been, squaring the circle of philanthropy and empire to its own satisfaction."

When reading this bracing indictment, I find it disturbing and laughable that few complementary accounts exist in the realm of American cultural, aesthetic, or literary criticism (beyond the work of Fredric Jameson, who is, more or less, German). The notion that American literature might have an imperial bent—that it might be anything other than a string of lightly co-influential works of "imaginative power," and might itself reflect our national desire to dominate—is lost on its critics, both right and left.

But the possibility of an imperial literature wasn't always lost on our sly centrist critics, who helped to cultivate it across generations. Throughout the twentieth century, many of the foremost critics, like, say, Alfred Kazin, mocked and discarded the leftist social novelists of their time, favoring instead the cultists of a catch-all realism. In Kazin's view, the main obstruction to a strong national literature was an amorphous "naturalism," somehow a revival of the nineteenth-century variety, whose "despairs" boiled down to a tedious anxiety about the disintegration of collective promise. The virtue of realism was twofold: that it celebrated idiosyncrasy as a form of individualist liberation from social life, and that it came to "dominate American fiction," "[sweeping] at will over every sector of American life." Over time, the establishment of a Realist Imperium became retroactive proof of its imaginative superiority. On this basis, Kazin deigned to praise the "common talk" of writers like Sherwood Anderson and bestowed upon him the label of "realist," in recognition of the way the rural writer had "newly liberated" himself from the "village virus." Urged forth by "a fierce desire to assert [his] freedom," the literary realist becomes a reverse-Prometheus, stealing fire from the people for the entertainments of the critics on high by absconding from the village with its language. For Kazin, it hardly mattered whether the novelist in question actually went against the realist type—if, perhaps, she was unduly preoccupied with social roles, or if her politics leaned too far left—so long as she could be reshaped with critical force. In On Native Grounds, Edith Wharton is only allowed to be thought a penetrating writer of stratified cosmopolitan life "because she was bored with it." And Hemingway is extolled because he triumphed against "a society that served only to prey upon the individual." (This is presumably why he moved to Cuba.)

Today, if a novel is accepted into the American canon, it is as a masterpiece of individualism that subsumes material and social being into the spirit of a lone genius. If a social world is present in a novel of repute, our critics gobble it up and excrete it as imagination. In the early twenty-first century, realism has come to be synonymous, in the blinkered American critical consensus, with a curiously antisocial novel. It never occurs to critics that realism could only seem real because of the dilapidation of collective dreams. Nor do critics worry that the "social issues" presented in our novels rarely attain the complexity of cable television. Or that a novel genuinely concerned with social life (or even the social role of a single person) could itself, against this backdrop, be idiosyncratic. It's sad, in other words, that the novels of Jonathan Franzen register to most as sociopolitical literature. Freedom isn't a social novel on the level of Wharton. It's a decelerated twenty-four-hour news channel.

Kazin, at a time of crisis, helped ensure that later critics and novelists would operate under the aegis of individualist orthodoxy. As a coda to his project, you might consider the neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who, like Kazin, centered himself against radical parents. Passing as a cautious student of the left, or at least as a public intellectual who endorsed Scandinavian social democracy, Rorty nonetheless pulled European modernists like Proust into his imaginative orbit and turned them into liberal American ironists. In this sense, he became American literary philosophy's own Fukuyama. He hymned bourgeois virtues—