If what Heidegger calls the Western "metaphysics of presence" is amply on display in American ideology and representation, the problem of how to find a vocabulary for politics after metaphysics' collapse is an urgent concern of American political thinkers and is approached by them in distinctively American ways, often by responding to their own theories as allegories. The postmodern dilemma of the loss of absolutes is thus able, here, to assume something like the status of a national myth -- America's perennial identity crisis in the absence of a tradition that reliably establishes the legitimacy of its founding.

After examining the mid-Atlantic sermons of John Winthrop, the spiritual founding father, I reflect on the authority of the Constitution and the Federalist. I then explore questions of representation in Cold War ideology, focusing on the language of David Easton and similar liberal "behavioralists," as well as on Cold War cinema and the coverage of international affairs by American journalists. The metaphysics of presence is manifest in a variety of ways in these discourses. Further discussions are inspired by Hannah Arendt's recasting of political theory in a narrative framework. Here I consider two starkly contrasting postwar literary figures -- William S. Burroughs and James Merrill -- both of whom have a troubled relationship to the political but register nonetheless an urgent need to articulate its dangers and opportunities. Merrill's unraveling of the distinction between the serious and the fictive, coupled with Arendt's attempt in On Revolution to reclaim fictional devices for political reflection, suggest powerful modes of practicing political theory "after" metaphysics.