Melville's Maritime Politics: Enlightenment at Sea offers a new account of the political thought of Herman Melville (1819-1891). Reading Melville in dialogue with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant, it shows how his works spoke back to the Founders' competing visions of America, as well as to the more immediate and pressing concerns of his own period. Tracing the ship of state metaphor throughout Melville's oeuvre, it charts the evolution of his views on the theory and practice of American democracy, beginning with the Romantic Federalism of Typee and Omoo and ending in the 'tragic pragmatism' of Battle-Pieces and Billy Budd, Sailor.

The book argues that Melville's vision of politics was shaped by the early Republican-Federalist debate, which sought to construe the meaning of the American Revolution in light of the French Revolution. Melville's works are frequently hostile towards the idea of a 'natural republic' (a polity based on 'virtue' and 'natural right' rather than 'sovereignty' or 'the rule of law'). This is nowhere more evident than in Moby-Dick, which dramatizes the shipwreck of the American Republic, a catastrophe wrought by Ahab's quest to slay the Leviathan (i.e. the State). Across six chapters, Mence presents Melville's political vision as one of "perpetual upkeep at sea": the ship of state must be sailed and repaired on the open ocean even as, to borrow from Moby-Dick, the "wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore."