But of course the greatest, most terrific thing, for his present purposes, is “Star Wars” itself, the seven feature films (so far) which, for all their individual flaws, are “cooler, and more awesome” than “Star Trek,” their nearest rival. And that’s not all. “In all of human history,” Mr. Sunstein writes in his introduction, “there has never been a phenomenon like ‘Star Wars.’” “‘Star Wars’ is bipartisan and all-American.” “‘Star Wars’ unifies people.”

Image Cass R. Sunstein Credit... Phil Farnsworth

It’s hard to determine whether he’s preaching to the choir or howling into the void. His intended audience includes “people who like ‘Star Wars,’ people who love ‘Star Wars,’ and people who neither like nor love ‘Star Wars,’” but this kind of universalism has its pitfalls. One is overreach. It is hard even for the most concise (or profligate) thinker to find something cogent to say about (to cite Mr. Sunstein’s own preliminary and partial list) “the nature of human attachment, whether timing is everything … how boys need their mothers, the workings of the creative imagination, the fall of Communism, the Arab Spring” and a half-dozen other issues.

This is a very short book, and it treats its themes in a glib, haphazard fashion. In the episode called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at ‘Star Wars’” — a compendium of outlandish and interesting interpretations of the movies — Mr. Sunstein muses on the nature of conspiracy theories, riffing in the space of a few paragraphs on Lee Harvey Oswald, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and “The Bible Code” to no evident purpose.

“Don’t Argue,” he teasingly cautions the reader at one point, having offered a (perfectly defensible if also profoundly mistaken) ranking of the seven “Star Wars” movies. But the reader may wish that Mr. Sunstein argued more, or at least more pointedly. Instead, he asks condescending questions (“What do Martin Luther King Jr. and Luke Skywalker have in common?”) to which he supplies answers that sometimes manage to be shallow, tautological and confusing at the same time:

“Martin Luther King Jr. was a rebel, unquestionably a Skywalker, with a little Han and more than a little Obi-Wan. He sought fundamental change, but he well knew the power of the intergenerational link.”

Not all of Mr. Sunstein’s attempts to hold “Star Wars” up as a mirror to society are so flabby. The book improves toward the end, as he gravitates toward the kinds of questions he has been thinking about for much of his career. He looks at how the narrative structure that George Lucas initially envisioned changed over time and finds an enlightening analogy with the ways the Supreme Court has found new meanings in the Constitution. He is perceptive about the way “Star Wars” dramatizes how rebellions take shape and how democracies tumble into dictatorship.