American Epic: Philosophy, Power, and Impiety in Melville's Moby-Dick offers a study of Herman Melville's Captain Ahab as an “American Achilles” whose rebellion against nature and nature's God anticipates the rise of modern tyranny. Drawing on classical sources such as Homer and Shakespeare, and engaging American political thought from Tocqueville to Voegelin, the book argues that Melville prophetically exposes the dangers inherent in science, politics, and the will to power.
Melville's Ahab is a figure who seeks freedom through perfect power, rejecting natural limits, transcending humility, and refusing all moral restraint. Against this destructive impulse, Melville offers Ishmael as a counter-example: a figure who discovers meaning not through domination, but through wonder, community, and acceptance of his inherent human limitations. Samuel S. Postell situates Moby-Dick as the American epic precisely because it confronts the deepest tensions of liberty, authority, faith, and ambition. By providing a close textual reading of Moby-Dick alongside the essential themes of ancient epics, modern philosophy, and nineteenth-century political crises, this book shows why Melville should be considered one of America's most profound critics of tyranny and one of its most serious defenders of liberty.