Literature and the Political Imagination

Andrea T. Baumeister, John Horton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134794461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume shows how modern political theory can be enriched through an engagement with works of literature. It uses the resources of literature to explore issues such as nationalism, liberal philosophy, utopiansim, narrative and the role of theory in political thought.
A variety of approaches are adopted and the aim is to show some of the many and diverse ways in which literature may enrich political theorising, as well as considering some of the problems to which this may give rise. The theorists discussed include Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. There are literary references from Greek tradegy, Jonathan Swift, Brian Moore, Elizabeth Bowen and contemporary feminist utopian fiction.
All the contributors have a long-standing interest in the relations between literature and moral and political thought. They are concerned not to be restricted by conventional academic boundaries and are not united by any party-line or uniformity of intellectual commitments. This volume will be of great interest to all students engaged in the study of politics and literature.

1 Literature, philosophy and political theory

John Horton and Andrea T. Baumeister

The twentieth century has seen a pervasive furtherance of the division of labour, as much in intellectual life as in processes of industrial production. As the world of learning has expanded, both in terms of what there is to know and the number of people directly engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, the tendency towards increased specialisation has been relentless. Typically, scholars and researchers have narrowed their focus, not merely to one discipline or field of enquiry, nor even to one sub-field, but to one specific topic within a closely circumscribed area of enquiry.

It would be foolish to suggest that such developments are entirely negative. This division of labour and specialisation is inseparable from the extraordinary growth of human knowledge which has made such an indispensable contribution to material progress. This is especially obvious in the physical sciences and in those sciences that seek to give practical application to this knowledge. Yet, for all its apparent benefits, such specialisation is a mixed blessing. Even within the physical sciences it has been argued that it promotes a technocratic and inhuman culture in which the human dimensions of scientific activity and the place of science and technology within a wider social context are obscured and lost from sight.¹ However, whether or not this is true of the physical sciences, it is with respect to the humanities and social enquiry that the effects of specialisation may seem to be especially damaging. These forms of enquiry have as their subject our own self-understanding, and it is here that the sense of fragmentation resulting from specialisation is most troubling. While our lives have many diverse aspects and we fulfil many roles, we also understand ourselves as possessing some kind of unity. And it is this sense of unity that is neglected, even undermined, by cognitive specialisation.

Moreover, the tendency towards increased specialisation has been accompanied by another phenomenon also having its origins in the seventeenth century but proceeding apace for much of the twentieth. This is the extraordinary intellectual and cultural prestige of the physical sciences. These have been widely perceived as the model or pinnacle for all forms of knowledge. Hence, any claim to knowledge, any enquiry purporting to objectivity or truth, must seek to be ‘scientific’. At its most extreme, this has led to suspicion of all claims that cannot be validated through scientific enquiry. Thus, for example, the logical positivists dismissed moral values and aesthetic judgements as mere expressions of emotion or subjective preference.² While logical positivism has largely fallen from favour, it is only one instance of a much more widespread and diffuse process which has led to the epistemological privileging of the physical sciences. The view that science is the exclusive repository of genuine knowledge, that reality is simply whatever science shows to be the case, is commonplace; and to describe a way of proceeding as ‘unscientific’ is invariably to condemn it. If other fields of intellectual endeavour are legitimately to claim to produce knowledge then they too must be put on a scientific footing. While methods of enquiry to some extent need to be adapted to particular fields, ‘scientific method’ is the only route to genuine knowledge of the world.³

These two developments, the increasing specialisation of intellectual enquiry and the belief that science provides the model for all such enquiries, have for most of this century had a crucial role in shaping the intellectual culture of the West, perhaps especially the English-speaking part of it. In the first part of what follows we shall sketch very briefly how these developments have affected philosophy, political theory and literature and literary criticism. All these forms of intellectual activity have been challenged to develop a distinct and logically defensible identity. We discuss how each has responded to this challenge and how the result has been a marked trend towards reinforcing disciplinary boundaries. Inevitably, these observations will be very general and schematic. In the second part we say a little, also in general terms, about challenges to this trend. More particularly, we look at some of the criticisms that have been made of contemporary political philosophy and how a rapprochement between literature and philosophy might help to revivify political theory. Finally, we discuss a number of specific areas, which are explored in greater detail in the chapters that constitute the substance of this book, in which the conjunction of the political, the literary and the philosophical promises to be fruitful and stimulating. These topics are suggestive rather than exhaustive, but they are indicative of at least some of the ways in which political theory and philosophy can be deepened and enriched through an engagement with imaginative literature.⁴

We should make it clear that, along with the contributors, our direction of approach is that of political theorists or philosophers. Hence, our concern is with what and how imaginative literature might contribute to political theorising, and not with whether, for example, greater philosophical or political awareness should inform literature or literary criticism.⁵ Nor are we concerned with the philosophy of literature or literary criticism as branches of aesthetics.⁶ All of these are of course legitimate areas of interest, but they are not topics we address other than incidentally. Since, however, it is our view that contemporary political philosophy is largely shaped by the contours of the discipline of philosophy more generally, we begin with a brief consideration of the state of modern philosophy.

Philosophy

Philosophy has been no more immune from the influences described earlier than any other branch of enquiry. Twentieth-century philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world, has become an increasingly professionalised and technical subject. Its central concerns are logic and epistemology, and the associated areas of the philosophies of language and mind. In the process it has become increasingly divorced from the wider humanistic and literary cultures. Of course, there are many exceptions to this claim, but as a generalisation it is true.⁷ While the roots of the modern conception of philosophy certainly go back to the Cartesian revolution, which can be seen as a nodal point in the emergence of modernity, still as late as the nineteenth century philosophers typically wrote for and expected to be read by the educated public.⁸ They did not understand their subject in the kind of specialised and professionalised way which has become the norm in the twentieth century. What distinguishes twentieth-century philosophy is its technical sophistication, a highly abstract form of argumentative rigour, and the fact that it is entirely the province of academics, rarely even pretending to address a wider audience. A good deal of modern philosophy would be completely unintelligible to even the best educated of lay persons if they had never formally studied philosophy in a university.⁹

One almost inevitable consequence of this changed self-conception of philosophy has been the down-grading of both political philosophy and aesthetics. Branches of philosophy which it is difficult to make conform to such a technical and logically rigorous understanding of the subject have been marginalised and viewed as the ‘soft’ side of philosophy. Although the fortunes of political philosophy have revived since the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971,¹⁰ a work itself clearly influenced by some of the developments we have described, it remains the case that both political philosophy and aesthetics have been peripheral to the development of Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century. Moreover, it is not merely that these sub-fields have been relatively neglected, it is that the whole conception of philosophy, as essentially abstract and ahistorical, makes the inclusion of arguments which are necessarily to some degree contingent and historically specific appear suspect.

In so far as political philosophy has continued to be practised it too has often shown similar aspirations to a conception of rigour associated with abstraction and universality. Although he is perhaps unusual in the explicitness with which he articulates such a view, the work of Alan Gewirth provides a good example of such an approach.¹¹ Gewirth seeks to provide a logically compelling argument for morality in the form of a structure of moral rights; an argument which can be denied, he claims, only on pain of self-contradiction. While few have been persuaded by Gewirth’s arguments,¹² and few have been quite so bold in their claims, the commitment to providing rationally compelling arguments, or arguments which at least no reasonable person could reject, lies at the heart of much recent political philosophy.¹³ Yet, somewhat paradoxically, such a commitment has coincided in the contemporary world with extensive disagreement among philosophers about the persuasiveness of any particular principles, arguments or theories. In short, while the aspiration of political philosophy is towards convergence on rational principles of political morality, no such convergence is evident in a world in which fundamental disagreement proliferates. This tension between aspiration and achievement is a matter to which we shall return later.

For the moment, however, we observe how philosophy generally has become an increasingly technical and professionalised activity; and how political philosophy, in so far as it has sought to validate its credentials as philosophy, has tried to adopt a similar form. Unsurprisingly, political philosophy has not been able to match the levels of analytical and formal rigour attained in the ‘central’ areas of philosophy, yet it is widely accepted that these are the appropriate canons to which it should seek to conform. In consequence, much political philosophy seems to have become increasingly detached from concrete political experience, and often the distinctively political has been submerged within an abstract, universal and ahistorical moralism. Political philosophy is made entirely subservient to moral philosophy; it appears as a series of moral desiderata, perhaps in the form of a theory of justice or some other statement of moral principles or rules, often only dimly connected to the political world we inhabit. In a sense, of course, this drive towards the ideal and the abstract has always been inherent in the philosophical approach to politics, but it has been greatly exacerbated by developments in modern philosophy. Moreover, as we shall see in the next section, the more ‘open’ or ‘relaxed’ conceptions of political philosophy which have coexisted with more rigorous conceptions, sometimes referred to as political theory, have struggled to maintain their academic and intellectual respectability.

Political Theory

The identity of political theory has always been rather uncertain and shadowy. It has included forms of thinking and writing about politics which are indistinguishable from political philosophy and there has, as a result, been a constant tendency to assimilate political theory in its entirety within political philosophy. Yet political theory has also encompassed ways of thinking about politics which, although conducted at a high level of generality, have a substantial empirical dimension, drawing on what we often now think of as history, sociology and political science. This has made any complete assimilation of political theory and philosophy problematic. Thinkers like Machiavelli, Burke, Paine and Adam Smith have a significant place in political theory which they do not have in the history of philosophy. Certainly, political theory is too ‘impure’, insufficiently abstract and universal, to be comfortably incorporated within the dominant twentieth-century conception of what philosophy ought to be.¹⁴

However, if it is the empirical aspects of political theory that have led to doubts about its status as genuine philosophy, it is the persistence of philosophical features which has led to political theory being squeezed, so to speak, from the opposite direction. The aspiration to create a genuinely empirical science of politics during the middle of this century led to dissatisfaction with political theory as too philosophical and insufficiently scientific. It was objected that political theory comprised too much a priori sociology and armchair empiricism rather than engaging in a disciplined enquiry into the way in which politics works. Thus, the ideal of an exclusively empirical theory of politics emerged as an alternative to the philosophical approach, political theory as traditionally understood being neither fish nor fowl and hence irremediably confused.¹⁵

Thus, by the second half of the twentieth century, political theory is viewed with some suspicion by both philosophers and social scientists as lacking the rigour for a proper form of intellectual enquiry. When the various components of this hybrid are distinguished and separated out there seems to be no significant role for political theory. Conceptual issues and normative questions, in so far as they are capable of being subject to rational enquiry, are the province of philosophy; though most philosophers in fact view with dismay the messiness of political philosophy. Empirical explanations of political events and processes are properly the province of political science; though in truth the scientific credential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Literature, philosophy and political theory
• 2. Taking the narrative turn: What the novel has to offer political theory
• 3. ‘What of soul was left, I wonder?’: The narrative self in political philosophy
• 4. Life, literature and ethical theory: Martha Nussbaum on the role of the literary imagination in ethical thought
• 5. Modes of political imagining
• 6. Literature and moral choice
• 7. The aloofness of liberal politics1: Can imaginative literature furnish a private space?
• 8. ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead…’: Reflections on patriotic poetry and liberal principles1
• 9. The idea of a national literature
• 10. The anti-imperialism of George Orwell
• 11. Contemporary feminist Utopianism: Practising Utopia on Utopia
• Index