... in the local politics of townships, while Melville finds the fullest expression of this artful circle in a giant pod of whales, the fullest realization of a democratic community in all of his work. With this image of radical “cetocracy,” Moby-Dick figures forth a sovereignty that is aesthetic, egalitarian...

...This chapter argues that the terror of Moby-Dick dramatizes the logical paradoxes of a meta-dialectical method. It introduces a study of the influence of Melville’s close friend, George Adler, a proponent of Hegelian metaphysics and a chronic paranoiac, upon Moby-Dick. And it shows how the multiple...