Political Education for Dark Times

For decades, books and films on Harry Potter and his friends have dominated our early education in politics.[1] Harry Potter’s friends include tweens, teens, and adults the world over. At this writing, Harry’s books have sold more than half-a-billion copies. These rival or exceed the sales for Dr. Seuss, Stephen King, and Louis L’Amour — among my favorites, because all brim with implicit political theory.[2] In its first quarter-century, the Potter franchise of books, films, toys, parks, regalia, and such has enjoyed tens of billions of dollars in sales. Hence Potter books position themselves well to teach politics to people at early stages in life, when lessons can be highly influential and enduring. This seems intended by author J. K. Rowling, for politics are central also to her later novels for adults. But make no mistake: many of Harry’s readers are adults, and the Potter books mark Rowling as one of the few writers whose signal works appeal greatly to children and adults.

This political education is more historical and institutional than might be implied by the existentialist politics of death, identity, and maturation that also permeate the Potter series. It’s more diverse and detailed than fantasy’s generic politics of power. It’s also more personal and practical than many theories of politics aspire to be. The book at hand highlights some of what we can join Harry and his friends in learning about politics and personal action in our times.

In the Potter series, Rowling uses the flexibility of ingenious fantasy inventions to weave engaging episodes full of provocative politics. These are politics that a reader can expect to face in coming years, because they are persistent politics already with us. Especially impressive are the specific, practical defenses against debilitating politics that the Potter books explore. Often these defenses appear as spells, potions, and other magical devices. They get suggestive names, instructive explanations, and enticing demonstrations. Together they provide smart, memorable introductions to many of the politics that we currently practice.

Places for Politics

What precisely are the politics in the Potter series? Answering in a single sentence is a hazardous exercise. Potter politics are so varied that the whole of this book manages only initial characterizations, which surely remain partial and debatable. As a political theorist, I’ve learned from the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Gunnell not to essentialize or homogenize our politics into “the political” as a singular, timeless, universal sector of action.[3] Nonetheless we need a good place to start. Let it be the overarching form of the Potter books as a popular genre.

Taken in parts, the Potter series includes two epic quests, one epic odyssey, several detective tales, a war story, the sort of political horror story we call a dystopia, several other horror stories, and a time-travel tale. But overall, it’s a fantasy that features magic and many turns into horror. Thus we may read it as “dark fantasy.” This attunes Potter politics to the generic fascination of popular fantasy with power and performance. In general, we may say, Potter politics are projects of power and performance as arts of community. The Potter books portray ours as dark times in important part because fascist and authoritarian-unto-totalitarian politics corrupt defensible practices of power and community. To resist these perversions, Harry and his friends learn potent politics of care, ecology, liberation, love, joy, perfection, and folly.

So where exactly are these politics in the Potter saga? Often they keep company with its literary virtues. By the standards of best-sellers, the Potter characters, creatures, and settings are vivid, inventive, and teeming symbolically with politics. They evoke developments and choices that shape our situations for action. Potter scenes and plots contribute too. Even Potter naming and wordplay snap with political implications. Overall the Potter saga pursues four main angles on our politics—exploring them as ideologies, movements, philosophies, and especially styles.

Political ideologies appear primarily in details about Potter institutions. These include the many offices in the Ministry of Magic, Gringotts Bank, Azkaban Prison, international codes and conventions, St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, the Daily Prophet and The Quibbler, as well as wizard games and schools, especially the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Thus the liberal regime of Hogwarts School under Albus Dumbledore interacts with the conservative unto authoritarian regimes of the Ministry of Magic under Cornelius Fudge and Rufus Scrimgeour. Then fascist Death Eaters under Lord Voldemort puppeteer the Ministry, turning it toward totalitarianism resisted by the republican Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore’s Army of rebellious students at Hogwarts, and Potterwatch as a pirate-radio station. The Potter series can be read to recommend “republican” and “liberal” politics, yet in European, lower-case senses rather than American meanings associated with the Republican and Democratic Parties.

Among fantasies accessible to children, Potter novels are nearly unique in giving specific attention to an imaginary national government that closely resembles current state institutions in advanced-industrial societies. This Ministry of Magic is crucial for Potter events and politics. Yet politics beyond the Ministry are ideological too. Hogwarts enacts liberalism. St. Mungo’s Hospital and the Knight Bus provide socialist services. Azkaban Prison is an authoritarian jail. Even so, the Potter saga decenters state institutions to highlight cultural and personal politics in everyday lives. Accordingly it attends most to our political movements, styles, and philosophies.

In Pottery, political movements appear more in characters and creatures than institutions. Potter books show Hermione Granger as a feminist and house-elves as housewives to dramatize tensions between movements for women’s liberation and some of their would-be beneficiaries. The magical animals and animated plants embody several variants of environmentalism. These enable Potter books to personalize green politics without stripping nonhuman creatures of radical otherness. Acromantulas, centaurs, dementors, giants, goblins, leprechauns, merpeople, trolls, veela, and the like spotlight our specism. Muggles (non-magical humans), squibs (non-magical offsprings of mages), pure-bloods, half-bloods, plus such staples of horror as ghosts, ghouls, vampires, and zombies help the Potter books examine nativism and racism. (On the other hand, Potter takes on nationalism rely more on such institutions as sports, schools, and newspapers.) Populism gets satirized and theorized through the self-celebration of Gilderoy Lockhart in the second book, the cleansing of doxies from a virulently elitist Black House in the fifth volume, and the momentary removal of garden gnomes from an eminently populist Burrow of Weasleys in the sixth book. Likewise anarchism receives a smart spin from “foolish” agents of chaos such as the Weasley twins, Fred and George, as well as Peeves, the poltergeist at Hogwarts School.

A signal strength of the Potter books is discerning attention to personal styles of political action. Modern ideologies and postmodern movements typically appear partly in conventions of individual performance: postures, gestures, habits, phrases, standards, choices, assumptions, associates, manners, demeanors, tastes, questions, sensibilities, etc. There are distinctive styles of liberal action, socialist behavior, and conservative conduct. Nationalist and populist styles have been prominent in election campaigns even when nationalist and populist policies have not. At times, environmentalists and feminists promote changes in laws less vigorously than changes in lifestyles: recycle, share childcare, curb litter, trade household chores, eat local food, and so on. Thus politics that readily form ideologies or movements for us also form personal styles of performance as well, and these styles are frequently where politics surface in our ordinary lives. Harry Potter is particularly attuned to politics in our characteristic modes of everyday conduct.

Since the onset of the modern state, political theory has neglected most styles in favor of ideologies and movements. Nor has it shown much interest in other forms of political action, such as stances and stands, utopias and dystopias, or epics and satires.[4] This is unhappy because many kinds of politics prominent in our times have yet to be ideologized effectively, if at all. Current styles such as bureaucratism, conformism, elitism, idealism, ironism, patronism, perfectionism, existentialism, realism, and republicanism evidence little drive or aptitude for ideological formulations; and seldom do these styles seek to inform self-conscious movements. Yet citizens in electronic democracies have far more opportunities to observe and participate in personal styles than in public policies, government elections, international organizations, or the other forms of politics that dominate political science and political theory.[5] A glory of the Potter novels is their examination of the properties and possibilities of political styles neglected by our news and scholarship, especially political styles in the everyday lives of teens and young adults.

Engaging these many aspects of current politics, the Potter novels nonetheless manage as well to engage many philosophical topics important for politics. The first two books contribute to epistemic debates of naturalism versus conventionalism and objectivism versus perspectivism. Later books ponder dynamics of time and tradition. The Potter novels address complications of violence, remorse, and forgiveness. Issues of identity, memory, prediction, and truth suffuse the Potter saga. So do long-standing perplexities of death, freedom, love, and responsibility.

Regular readers, let alone litterateurs and theorists, might assume that there are general, in-principle, almost automatic advantages of novels over movie versions when probing politics. This isn’t my experience. Plenty of novels far surpass the movies made from them, but the reverse is true too.[6] With Harry Potter, the novels are the key resources for political analysis. Politics in the Potter books are enormously more developed, diverse, and instructive than politics in the Potter films, skillful as those might be in comparison to other films mainly for children and teens. Even at two-plus hours a film, along with an extra film to include plot convolutions of the last novel, the movies (must) omit so many scenes and subplots that the politics suffer markedly.

Symbols for Politics

It’s easy for even the best of commentators to skate past political intricacies of the Potter volumes. Reading more for characters and stories, Harry’s fans are apt to pick up only at times on the myriad institutions, principles, styles, strategies, and symbols that give the Potter saga a political drive categorically beyond most other fantasies, especially for young people. Critics of cinema and literature are more schooled in assessing aspects other than politics. Thus books and essays to date target aesthetic, moral, and mythic dimensions of Harry Potter.[7] Their specific political analysis is peripheral, and they translate into other registers most of the political details.

The many other projects of the Potter series are plenty adventurous in themselves. They justify comparing Potter themes to similar concerns in longer-standing classics for people young and old. These moves can be highly instructive, and so they get ample attention from scholars. I enjoy such works just as much as the next Potter enthusiast. What sets the Potter volumes apart, though, is their intense scrutiny of politics in our world. Potter books emphasize the government institutions, political styles, campaign strategies, public policies, media machinations, tactical gambits, world-historical events, and everyday complications that comprise political practices in our lives. These topics and motifs merit careful consideration to see what Harry and his friends can be learning about politics that keep emerging in our times, dark and difficult as they may be.

Some of the Potter politics are overt, literal, and eminently historical. For example, the Potter books allude several times to the Salem witch trials at the end of the seventeenth century in North America. Lately the Pottermore website and the film prequels on Fantastic Beasts that begin with Newt Scamander in the United States are developing aspects of this link in detail.

More of the Potter politics are allegorical. They provide simple, somewhat regimented, but still figural links between Potter particulars and historical specifics. By allegory, a Potter detail signals an individual event, person, institution, invention, or other element familiar from politics recently in the headlines or from politics in an earlier period. Thus the Potter backstory invites us to see Gellert Grindelwald—who’s eventually defeated by his former friend Albus Dumbledore in a Continental confrontation in 1945—as a riff on Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Potter prequels on Fantastic Beasts elaborate on this, casting Johnny Depp as a trickster version of der Führer. Such allegorical politics of historical characters and occurrences inform some commentaries on how the Potter books teach history, international relations, and the like.

To be specific or potent, however, political symbolism need not be “allegorical” in this strict sense, with the one-to-one equations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.[8] There Napoleon the pig just is Josef Stalin, and him only. Snowball the pig simply is Leon Trotsky, exclusively. And their uprising on the Animal Farm symbolically is the Russian Revolution that begets the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. J. R. R. Tolkien’s political connections are seldom like that, and neither are Rowling’s. Their ties to historical politics are looser but also richer: not the one-to-one of strict allegory but the many-to-many links of symbolism in a larger sense.[9]

Multiple, flexible connections let each symbolic particular ramify in many directions. In the Potter series, Rowling pursues far more detailed politics of pressing importance in the present than do any works of literature I know aimed principally at children, tweens, or teens. (I say a little more on this in the conclusion.) Rowling uses the flexibility of ingenious fantasy inventions to weave an engaging story full of diverse and provocative politics. These are politics that her readers can expect to face in coming years, because they are politics already with us.

Among the many earlier books on Pottery, Bethany Barratt’s about The Politics of Harry Potter is the most salient for this one. Barratt predicates her analysis on a primacy of authority for politics, treating authority as legitimate power in a general sense not differentiated by kinds of politics or theories.[10] On this basis, she considers what Potter events and institutions suggest for several concerns of current politics. Prominent among these are justice and punishment; racism, resistance, tolerance, and human rights; plus war, terrorism, intelligence, and the garrison state. For college instruction, the Barratt book fits a topical course that introduces students to headline politics; and it helps a lot. Here I’ve been writing to complement the Barratt approach by examining the overarching arguments and theories that emerge for politics in Harry Potter.

Some Potter commentaries focus on treatments of historical events such as witch trials or world wars.[11] Here the interest is less in the methods of historical investigation or explanation by Harry and his friends—let alone the acuity of any historical allegories in Pottery—than in the kinds and accounts of politics that take shape for situations relevant to Harry and company in action. Other analyses address philosophical issues of ontology, epistemology, language, or meta-ethics in Harry Potter.[12] Such questions arise at times in this book; but the concerns here are mainly practical, more directed to political action. Still other works assess how Harry Potter relates to individual fields in the social and natural sciences, with specific kinds of Potter politics making good platforms for scholarly collections.[13] I’ve learned from these varied reflections on Harry Potter, and I hope that there come to be many more. Nonetheless the sheer wealth of politics in Pottery helps explain the surprisingly scant overlap of earlier takes on the Potter saga with this present sketch of its political education for Harry and his friends.

The concern here is for politics of the Potter series rather than politics of J. K. Rowling. As a global celebrity, sometime activist, and subject of many interviews, Rowling as a political figure attracts lots of controversy.[14] Fairness to Rowling, her critics, and her supporters requires more than occasional comments to address the resulting debates—let alone relate them to Potter texts. But detailed attention to Rowling’s personal politics would hijack or at least distract from the current project of spotting politics in the Potter books themselves. Much the same holds for the fascinating dynamics of Potter fandom, which are generating their own body of scholarship.[15] Instead the analysis at hand features the politics taught in Potter books to Harry and his friends.

Stories for Politics

Yet to appreciate Potter politics adequately is not just to notice or analyze them; it’s to learn from them—for action in politics. At times, this means reading as though Rowling were theorizing politics. But more often, it means treating Pottery as a political mythos: a network of recurrent characters, settings, and events. Myths are symbolic stories, where the details mean more than they say literally. Why take myths as theories, or treat stories as politics? Why not study political realities directly, in themselves? Aside from histories and documentaries, some people dismiss stories, films, and fiction as not-fact, with politics imaginary rather than real. If Rowling knows about politics, shouldn’t we prefer reports or interviews to fantasies from her? And isn’t it especially dubious to learn politics from fantasies in important part for children?[16]

Both theorists and storytellers describe and pattern our world. Political theorists advance reasons and evidence to explain political patterns, while storytellers use settings and characters to evoke political actions. Of course, stories could offer ideas and evidence that combine logically into theories; and some children’s literature can address “adult politics” in detail. Published for children by L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz is a fantasy take on American populism late in the nineteenth century.[17] Unlike Rowling, Baum wrote in the Animal Farm mode of allegory, with one-to-one mapping of story elements to historical figures. And Baum’s take on populist politics suits satirical sniping better than theoretical insight. Rowling’s evocation of our politics yields both. The insight stems mainly from her inventive attention to complicated characters. They act impressively in diverse situations, to reach beyond policy to ideology and other kinds of politics.

Yet most important, I argue, are the many specific, practical defenses against debilitating politics that Rowling has her characters explore in the Potter books. Often advanced as spells, potions, and further magical artifacts, the defenses come with playful, suggestive names plus instructive demonstrations or explanations. To assess their complicated symbolism for politics can fill a book like this one, and its purpose is to spark an initial appreciation of their insight. Most Potter politics emerge in extensive networks of symbols that evoke political ideologies, movements, styles, and philosophies. My argument is that these politics contest and complement each other to provide a political education for action in our times of darkness and difficulty. That’s why the pages at hand sketch several overarching patterns of Potter politics.

Pottery focuses the argument’s first part. Its chapters evoke how Harry’s world is ours and suffers dark times. They explain how our times are dark in urgently political ways. They explore how Potter magic features dark arts and defenses against them. Then they introduce the Potter confrontation between two branches of perfectionist politics that stem from Potter magic, with Harry’s politics successfully opposing the politics of Voldemort and the Death Eaters.

Polity organizes the argument’s second part. Each of its chapters analyzes three kinds of politics prominent in the Potter books. The ideologies are fascism, authoritarianism, liberalism, conservatism, and socialism. The movements include populism, nationalism, environmentalism, feminism, totalitarianism, and anarchism. And the styles are idealism, realism, conventionalism, conformism, existentialism, perspectivism, and republicanism. Chapters in this second set end with detailed attention to dark challenges and magical performances. Then the conclusion briefly addresses how exploring Pottery encourages personal platforms for political action in dark times.

I advance this argument through analysis of narrative and political structures of the Potter books, through exploration of their symbolism, and through attention to many examples. There’s no way for the current examination or evidence to be exhaustive. Often I demonstrate patterns across several Potter books; and whenever possible, I probe Potter characters, creatures, devices, and performances in detail. Always the hope is to draw readers into their own considerations of Pottery implications for politics. Please feel encouraged to explore further cases and questions.

Many books on Potter politics differ in priorities from this one. They use Potter episodes to teach vividly what the authors take us to know already. Sometimes they test Potter elements against the current consensus in an academic field. What’s the twentieth-century history behind what Rowling says about Gellert Grindelwald and Albus Dumbledore? (Of course, the Fantastic Beasts films offer more on this.) What’s the psychology in how the Dursleys raise Harry with hostility and deprivation? How do hoary myths surface in the Potter story? How do Hermione’s efforts to free house-elves compare to antislavery campaigns? The idea is that the Potter works are student-friendly resources for instruction, because they’re age-appropriate fiction that puts important facts, concepts, and such into engaging characters, witty dialogue, and memorable events. So they do, and that’s fine as far as it goes; but Potter politics develop our theories too.

From Potter books, we can learn politics that we don’t already know. Thus we can do political theory by parsing Potter books, just as we can by analyzing Shakespeare plays, Homer poems, Dickens novels, or Locke treatises. What we learn can sometimes surpass anything that the author intended to include. Making good novels (or movies) focuses on creating characters, settings, and events more than articulating politics. Hence the overriding dynamics of narrative, drama, cinema, or poesis provide many particulars apart from any intended politics; then these details can evoke political implications beyond any plans or previous knowledge of the author.

Can, not must. To tell if Potter details actually do make patterns that augment our takes on politics, we need to probe them. Here I explain how the Potter series contributes in five ways. It enriches our accounts of ideologies and movements by detailing how they surface in everyday action of individuals. It clarifies some prominent politics better than before. It shows the current significance of some movements and styles neglected in recent theorizing. It spotlights several forms of political action neglected in recent theorizing. And it attunes our ideas about politics to our needs to face dark times.[18] So I sketch some contributions of each kind, hoping to spur more exploration of Potter insights for political action. As Albus Dumbledore urges Harry—and us as his friends, “let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure” (VI.56).[19]

Notes

[1]     See Anthony Gierzynski with Kathryn Eddy, Harry Potter and the Millennials (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 1-2.

[2]     On Stephen King, see John S. Nelson, “Horror, Crisis, and Control: Tales of Facing Evils,” The Politics of Horror, ed. Damien K. Picariello (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 17-31. On Louis L’Amour, see John S. Nelson, Cowboy Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 13-203.

[3]     See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, third edition, 1958). Also see John G. Gunnell, Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1979); John G. Gunnell, Between Philosophy and Politics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); John G. Gunnell, The Orders of Discourse (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). And see John S. Nelson, ed., Tradition, Interpretation, and Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

[4]     See John S. Nelson, Tropes of Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 205-30; John S. Nelson, Politics in Popular Movies (Boulder: Paradigm, 2015), 18-104.

[5]     See John S. Nelson, Popular Cinema as Political Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1-16; Nelson, Politics in Popular Movies, 173-88.

[6]     Contact (1997), Fight Club (1999), Forrest Gump (1994), Interview with the Vampire (1994), The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), The Prestige (2006), Wag the Dog (1997), and many other movies are more potent and intelligent in their politics than are their literary inspirations, notwithstanding the literary and political merits of the novels. A different kind of comparison is clear in Charlie Wilson’s War (2007): the focused politics of the film are subtler and smarter than the greater scope and complexity of politics in the long tome (of investigative journalism) that informs it. See Carl Sagan, Contact (New York: Pocket, 1985); Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: Henry Holt, 1996); Winston Groom, Forrest Gump (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (New York: Ballantine, 1976); John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (New York: Ballantine, 1974); Christopher Priest, The Prestige (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1995); Larry Beinhart, American Hero (New York: Ballantine, 1993); George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War (New York: Grove Press, 2003).

[7]     See Giselle Liza Anatol, ed., Reading Harry Potter (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Giselle Liza Anatol, ed., Reading Harry Potter Again (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009); Christopher E. Bell, ed., Wizards vs. Muggles (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016); John Granger, Unlocking Harry Potter (Wayne, PA: Zossima Press, 2007); Suman Gupta, Re-Reading Harry Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, second edition, 2009); Elizabeth E. Heilman, ed., Harry Potter’s World (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003); Travis Prinzi, Harry Potter & Imagination (Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2008); Lana A. Whited, ed., The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002, 2004).

[8]     See George Orwell, Animal Farm (New York: New American Library, 1946).

[9]     Unfortunately some literary commentators confuse the matter by equating allegory with any sort of symbolism. Then there need not be a strict regimen of each literal detail corresponding to one and only one figure as referent. This is akin to the confusions introduced by literary theorists who equate representation with any old kind of figuration or symbolism—rather than respect it as re-presentation: one specific trope among many with other dynamics.

[10]   See Bethany Barratt, The Politics of Harry Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5 and 9-25.

[11]   See Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann, eds., Harry Potter and International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Nancy R. Reagin, ed., Harry Potter and History (New York: Wiley, 2011).

[12]   See John Granger, Harry Potter’s Bookshelf (New York: Berkley Books, 2009); Travis Prinzi, ed., Hog’s Head Conversations (Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2009); Colin Manlove, The Order of Harry Potter (Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2010).

[13]   See Neil Mulholland, The Psychology of Harry Potter (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2006); Jean Sims, ed., The Sociology of Harry Potter (Hamden, CT: Zossima Press, 2012); Mark Brake, Science of Harry Potter (New York: Racehorse Publishing, 2017).

[14]   See Cynthia Hallett and Peggy J. Huey, eds., J. K. Rowling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

[15]   See Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008); Valerie Estelle Frankel, Harry Potter, Still Recruiting (Hamden, CT: Zossima Press, 2012); Lisa Brenner, ed., Playing Harry Potter (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015); Christopher E. Bell, ed., From Here to Hogwarts (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016); Amanda Firestone and Leisa A. Clark, eds., Harry Potter and Convergence Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018); Valerie Estelle Frankel, Fan Phenomena: Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

[16]   On learning politics from myths, literary fictions, and popular entertainments, see Nelson, Popular Cinema as Political Theory, 164-6.

[17]   See L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (New York: HarperCollins, 1899); The Wizard of Oz (1939); Henry M. Littlefield, “The Wizard of Oz,” (n.d.): http://www.amphigory.com/oz.htm.

[18]   See Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968); Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age, trans. J. S. Whale (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973); Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1975); Jean Kellogg, Dark Prophets of Hope (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1975); L. S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976); Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004); Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Henry Holt, 2014); Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

[19]   See J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter (New York: Scholastic Press, in seven volumes). I reference these parenthetically in the text with Roman numerals for each book and Arabic numerals for pages: I. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 1997; II. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1999; III. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 1999; IV. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000; V. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2003; VI. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2005; VII. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2007. But let me use hereafter the British title of the first book (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), while allowing me American rather than British spellings (defense rather than defence) and words (specialty not speciality).

This excerpt is from Defenses Against the Dark Arts: The Political Education of Harry Potter (Lexington, 2021).

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