What Can Political Science Learn from Literature?

Since the behavioral revolution in the 1960s, political science has increasingly defined itself as the empirical, quantifiable study of politics.[2] Modeled after the natural sciences, behavioralism is the attempt to purge political science of its subjective elements and produce knowledge that can be derived only from external objects that conform to the scientific method.[3] Knowledge is restricted to phenomena that are suitable to the scientific method because this process is viewed as objective, valid, and universal, whereas speculation outside this method is dismissed as illegitimate because it is unscientific. For the behavioralist, the horizon of knowledge has been restricted to the method and not to the man.

Since the behavioral revolution, a prodigious expansion of scientific studies in political science has yielded, in the words of Eric Voegelin, “the fantastic accumulation of irrelevant knowledge through huge ‘research projects’ whose most interesting feature is the quantifiable expense that has gone into their production.”[4] Because the behavioralist has subordinate theoretical relevance to the scientific method, the political scientist accumulates knowledge  without any criteria of significance, producing a series of soulless studies with no interesting insights (e.g., congressional staffers showcase their legislative skills in order to obtain employment as lobbyists).[5] Instead of adopting a theoretical position to pursue political inquiry, the behavioralist pursues projects in which the data can conform only to the methodology.

But the accumulation of facts is relevant only if they contribute to the study of theoretical and normative meaning. Because of the pluralistic nature of reality, different objects require different methods of inquiry, as Aristotle had observed.[6] This insight has been recognized in the discipline with waves of backlash against behavioralism, starting with the post-behavioral revolution of the 1970s and, most recently, the Perestroika movement of the 2000s.[7] Although behavioralism still dominates the discipline, there exists today a tolerance for a diversity of approaches to the study of political science, including the study of literature.[8]

This article examines what the discipline of political science can learn from the study of literature—that is, how literature contributes to our understanding of politics—and why it remains essential to a discipline still characterized by behavioralism. In this article I first trace genealogically how literature emerged as a source of legitimate knowledge, contrary to what philosophers have claimed. I then show how literature can specifically contribute to knowledge in political science today. In my account, I define literature broadly as a form of fictional storytelling and the expression of emotions that resist rational analysis, a category that includes art, film, poetry, aesthetics, cultural studies, criticism, and theory.[9] By seeing what political science can learn from literature, political scientists will, one hopes, be able to restore theoretical and normative relevance to their empirical projects, restoring the soul to their studies of political phenomena.

Contrary to the Philosophers

Although there are works that combine both features of literature and philosophy—such as the Platonic dialogues, Thomas More’s Utopia, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings—the contestation over what constitutes a legitimate source of knowledge has traditionally been binary: either literature or philosophy. Since Socrates, philosophers, as well as and political philosophers and theorists, have claimed reason should guide inquiry in the world, believing literature to be incapable of and inadequate in doing so. In this section, I trace the trajectory of literature as a source of legitimate knowledge from its initial subordination to philosophical reason to its eventual equal authoritative status. Such an account provides the necessary theoretical backdrop for showing what political science can learn from literature.

The Greek, Roman, and medieval philosophers subordinated and censored literature to philosophical reason because they considered literature a secondary account of reality and believed it morally corrupted citizens with its tales of the gods and heroes. Socrates in the Republic initially expelled the poets from his city only to have certain ones remain as long as they served his political objectives of cultivating righteousness, wisdom, and excellence in the citizenry.[10] Aristotle also censored the poets in their claims and forms of expression.[11] This wariness of literature— recognizing its power to persuade peoplealso condemning it for its false stories and immoral teachings—continued with the Roman and medieval philosophers. Augustine severely criticized poetry (as well as philosophy) as being opposed to Christian truth, whereas Thomas Aquinas tolerated literature as long as it was regulated and subordinate to Christian revelation.[12]

During the modern period, literature was rehabilitated as a legitimate source of knowledge. Immanuel Kant claimed poetry was a product of human genius that moved people from a world of nature to a world of poetry, thereby allowing humans to access the phenomenal world through their moral feelings.[13] Wilhelm Dilthey believed only literature could express the reality where finite existence and the eternal world intersected.[14] Nietzsche was critical of philosophy, as well as theology and science, in its ability to both analyze reality and educate human beings because of their “artificiality,” their removal from reality. For Nietzsche, only literature could provide the inspiration for people to assert their life-affirming instincts in the hope of a future of “great and beautiful souls.”[15]

The revitalization of literature as a source of legitimate knowledge was sustained in the twentieth century by the likes of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Joerg Gadamer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Derrida. Heidegger claimed that poetry was the most purely spoken language because it illuminated reality as it truly existed, wiping away the layers of artificiality that nonpoetic language had imposed on the world.[16] Influenced by Heidegger, Gadamer developed a philosophy of hermeneutics where reality was to be read like literature or a text. According to this theory, the interpreter and the text formed a “common horizon” where interpretation can transpire.[17] However, this should not be equated to discovering an objective meaning in the text; rather, it more likely resembled a dialogue between the interpreter and the text where knowledge can be tentatively hypothesized but never actually proven.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two major literary approaches emerged: critical theory, associated with Benjamin and Adorno; and postmodernism, linked with Saussure and Derrida. Critical theorists claimed that art had a critical role in a society of mass culture, though they were divided as to whether it could play a political role in.[18] By contrast, postmodern philosophers were more sanguine about the role literature could play in politics, believing the text could be a source of knowledge for political change. The postmodern critic was to look for inconsistencies, ambiguities, and contradictions in the text to demonstrate that philosophical claims are based not on ontological truth but on arbitrary power relations.[19]

Saussure, for example, developed a theory of semiotics—the study of language as signs reflecting social life—where the sign, that which communicates meaning, was arbitrarily assigned to the signified, the meaning of the sign itself.[20] With this gap between the sign and the signified, the postmodern critic can uncover paradoxes in the text to free it from the interpretations of authorial intent or reader’s response. Derrida extended this analysis by arguing that a definitive meaning of sign was always “deferred,” although people believed otherwise and therefore created structures of power and violence.[21] These structures needed to be undermined by “deconstructing” texts, pointing toward new, possible social arrangements than the ones currently in existence.

Since the Enlightenment, the rehabilitation of literature has made it a legitimate source of knowledge to rival philosophy, theology, and science. From an initial position of censorship and subordination to a revival of equal status, to philosophical reason, literature has been viewed by modern and postmodern philosophers as being more in touch with reality than the “artificiality” of science (e.g., Nietzsche, Heidegger). Literature also had access to an unquantifiable reality (e.g., Kant, Dilthey), thereby allowing people to “read” or interpret the world as if it were a text (e.g., Gadamer, Saussure) and point to ways to reorganize society in a more just and humane way (e.g., Derrida, Benjamin, and Adorno).

The Literary Turn

The discipline of political science has only recently been self-conscious of looking at literature as a source of political knowledge. This “literary turn” in the discipline has led to the creation of the Politics, Literature, and Film section in the American Political Science Association in 1993, with political scientists, mostly political theorists and philosophers, writing about the use and value of literature to understand politics. However, political scientists have written about the value of literature to political science before the formalization of the Politics, Literature, and Film section.

An example is an exchange in the 1960 American Political Science Review between the political theorist Allan Bloom and literary scholar Sigurd Burckhardt about the value of Bloom’s and Harry V. Jaffa’s interpretations of Shakespeare plays.[22] According to Burckhardt, both Bloom and Jaffa were not literary scholars and therefore lacked an explicit methodology to interpret Shakespeare. In rebuttal, Bloom stated his assumptions and methodology for Burkhardt: (1) a number of authors in literature used their art to educate people into their political responsibility; (2) as the “architectonic science,” political philosophy was uniquely situated to examine literature because it investigated “the whole man in relation to the order of the whole”; (3) therefore, political philosophers were able to reproduce the authors’ teachings of political philosophy from their texts.[23] The underlying assumption here for Bloom was that certain phenomena and values, like human nature and natural rights, were transhistorical, thereby allowing the political philosopher to decipher and convey universal teachings from literature regardless of the period when it was written.

Bloom was a student of Leo Strauss, who had written about the difference between philosophy and literature.[24] In his analysis of Strauss’s interpretation of Plato’s Symposium, Matthew Sharpe outlined the key components of Strauss’s understanding of this relationship between philosophy and literature.[25] According to Sharpe, Strauss defended philosophy as meaningfully different from and superior to literature both as an intellectual practice and as a means of education. But at the same time, philosophers presented their arguments in a rhetorical or literary frame because of the need to protect themselves from public This could be seen in Strauss’s own writing with his failure to coherently explain how the good was superior to the beautiful in Plato’s Symposium. Instead of claiming Strauss failed at his task, Sharpe argued that Strauss was engaged in a rhetorical or literary representation of his philosophy to avoid persecution.

More recently, Catherine Zuckert continued the Straussian approach to the study of literature for political knowledge. According to Zuckert, great literary works have not only challenged the assumptions of the regime but also showed the effects of the regime on character formation, such as the effects community standards of right and wrong have on the individual.[27] Unlike Bloom, Zuckert did not identify the author’s views as shown through any character or the narrator. The only thing political philosophers can attribute to the author, she posited, is the overall organization of the work. To discover what the author had thought, political philosophers must treat literature as an intentionally designed whole object. Furthermore, their task is to ascertain how the work of literature as a whole is related to the political regime.

Voegelin also shared with Strauss and his students their belief that literature was a type of political philosophy that could reveal political knowledge. In the 1971 issue of the Southern Review, Voegelin’s article “On Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw” was published as an example of literature as political philosophy.[28] As a political philosopher, Voegelin believed he needed the spiritual insights of all individuals engaged in the search for the truth, including poets, dramatists, and novelists. In his approach to analyzing literature, Voegelin outlined his methodology as follows: (1) the critic must first give precedence to the text itself; (2) the critic must assume that the author knew what he or she was doing and that the parts of the text work together as a singular entity; (3) the critic must rely on an interpretative terminology consistent with the language symbols of the source; and (4) the critic must develop a system of interpretation that is an analytical, rational continuation of the author’s work, from compactness to differentiation.[29]

Whereas Bloom, Zuckert, and Voegelin argued that literature could teach political scientists about politics, Martha Nussbaum explicated their assumption that “certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately characteristic of the narrative artist.”[30] That is, certain texts, among them literature, are indispensable to a philosophical inquiry into ethics, morality, and By engaging in literature, the reader can aim for the “perceptive equilibrium,” “in which concrete perceptions hang beautifully together” so that the reader can response to new situations in life with openness and generosity.[32] These moral capacities, such as empathy and sympathy, are developed by reading literature and enable people to practice a type of virtue that ethics and democratic practice have required for human flourishing.[33]

Richard Rorty also made a similar to appeal about the value of literature: literature better identifies and evokes sympathy of human suffering than abstract and dry philosophical treatises.[34] Rorty specifically pointed out two ways literature can assist people in developing their moral capacity: by exposing social practices and institutions that create misery, suffering, and injustice in others (e.g., Les Misérables); and by highlighting the moral blind spots in certain people and their capacity for cruelty (e.g., Lolita). Rorty also cited the novels of Charles Dickens as an example of how literature can epitomize the ideals of humanity, solidarity, and tolerance: Dickens’s works “were a more powerful impetus to social reform than the collected works of all the British social theorists of his day.”[35] For Rorty and Nussbaum, literature helps citizens develop the capacity for sympathy and empathy for others, leading to values of solidarity and tolerance, which are required for democratic self-governance.

Another argument made for the study of literature in the social sciences is an ideological one: namely, that literature is better able to reveal in a concrete and meaningful way the ideological and power structures that pervade society. Edward Said, for example, incorporated Western literature in his analysis (e.g., The Persians) to support his theory of Orientalism.[36] Terry Eagleton adopted a Marxist account in his literary theory, claiming that theory is necessarily political, which suggests that all literature is also political or ideological.[37] Judith Butler and Eileen Hunt Botting have used literature in support of their gender and feminist ideological studies.[38] Regardless of the ideological perspective, this group of thinkers believed that literature portrays ideological biases and power in society better than abstract and detached social science methodology.

Interestingly, the Cambridge school of political theory has not viewed literature as a resource in its project to study the history of political thought.[39] According to B. F. Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, political philosophers should recover the historical, intellectual, and linguistic context of political texts in order to reconstruct what individual writers were thinking and doing at the time they wrote. This in turn requires scholars to examine lesser-known works so as to contextualize more prominent ones. By placing the text in its original context as much as possible, the political philosopher would be able to decipher its original purpose (i.e., whether to support, discredit, or legitimize certain ideas of the time). Given this approach to text, there is no reason why the Cambridge school should not incorporate literature (when appropriate) into its analysis of political theory texts. This is an avenue of research that remains available for future scholars.

Thus, the literary turn in political science has produced numerous schools and approaches to incorporate literature into political analysis. Strauss saw literature as form of protection against public persecution, while Bloom, Zuckert, and Voegelin viewed literature as a type of political text manifested in a different form. Nussbaum and Rorty pointed out the unique features of literature, in its concreteness and detail, that have the capacity to create empathy and sympathy in the reader. Finally, Said, Eagleton, Butler, and Botting argued that literature better portrays the ideological biases and power structure in society than social science methodology.

Lessons from Literature

Broadly put, some political scientists believe there are aspects of political reality that resist behavioralist methodology but nevertheless are important to study. Literature is one of those mediums that portrays those aspects of reality that behavioralism and even philosophy Literature accomplishes this feat not only by depicting the particularity, concreteness, and detail of a world but also by revealing the innermost thoughts, feelings, and irrationality of characters and the narrator. By contrast, social science methodology and philosophy are abstract, detached, and oriented only to externality, whether political behavior or formalized language. Literature provides a way to add the details and data the social sciences and philosophy miss. When we reflect on our own lives, we see that we are motived more often than not by tangible and concrete realities rather than abstract and theoretical ideas—and literature is able to capture that reality of motivation and meaning better than social science methodology and philosophy.

As noted by Nussbaum and Rorty, the study of literature also creates empathy in us by expanding our experience of the world vicariously and even allows us to imagine what future political problems and values may emerge.[41] By using their imagination, political scientists can expand their own horizon of what they think is possible and thereby prepare and predict what may transpire in the future.[42] Alternatively, political scientists can also employ their imagination by looking at literature to reconstruct past political problems and values to see whether previous methodologies  may have missed something.[43] In other words, literature expands both one’s temporal and spatial horizons, enabling political scientist to think about what may happen or has happened in political life.

If political scientists use literature to revisit the past and project the future, literature can also be treated as a case study to test certain theories and hypotheses.[44] This is particularly popular in the Literature and Law movement, where literature is treated as a type of case law.[45] Because literature is able to portray aspects of political reality to which  neither social science methodology nor philosophy has access, it is a unique database political scientists can use to test their theories and hypotheses. By doing so, political scientists may be forced to rethink how they should study political reality, given the limitations and deficiencies in certain methodologies the literature may reveal.

This reflection on certain social science and philosophical methodologies may lead political scientists back to theoretical and normative concerns in their empirical research, for literature by its very nature has a normative stance.[46] Unlike behavioralism, this normative position, whether in the author, narrator, or character, is explicit in literature and forces the reader to agree, reject, or react in some way in between. By encountering literature’s explicit normative perspective, behavioralists, as well as all political scientists, theorists, and philosophers, will be asked to reevaluate their own normative positions in their methodologies and claims.

Finally, literature illuminates how rhetoric, especially in stories, is employed to persuade us of certain normative ideas and politics.[47] The elements of literature—plot, narrator, character, dialogue, and action—are also elements of rhetoric that can be applied to analyses of political communication and socialization. And as a rhetorical device, literature can assist political scientists as teachers in the classroom, providing studies showing the effectiveness of literature in student

Literature consequently makes significant contributions to the discipline of political science. A summary of these contributions is as follows:

1. To study aspects of politics that behavioralist methodology fails to describe and analyze
2. To broaden our understanding of politics by expanding our experiences vicariously with another political reality and world
3. To imagine what past and future political problems, situations, and values may or have emerged
4. To serve as a case study to test political science theories and hypotheses
5. To have political scientists revisit the normative assumptions of their own methodologies and claims
6. To examine how literature, such as storytelling, is a form of political rhetoric to persuade people
7. To serve pedagogical purposes to teach politics more effectively to students

Furthermore, if we incorporate the findings from the “literary turn” in political science, we can add the following value that literature brings to political science:

1. To provide a type of protection from public persecution (Strauss)
2. To provide insight into political reality (Voegelin)
3. To educate people in questioning the nature and effect of one’s political regime (Zuckert)
4. To educate people in political responsibility (Bloom)
5. To create certain moral capacities in citizens to practice democratic governance (Nussbaum, Rorty)
6. To better identify ideological bias and power structures in society (Said, Eagleton, Butler, Botting)
7. To decipher the original purpose of a text during the time it was written (Skinner, Pocock)

Clearly there are more ways that literature can contribute to political scientists in their studies, but the aforementioned reasons are ones that have been consistently made. The continued study of literature as a source of knowledge for political scientists will, one hopes, uncover more reasons.

Conclusion

Imagine that in a remote city a few people contract a fever and then die. Medical authorities come to the conclusion that a plague is sweeping their town and approach the local authorities about their theory. Instead of listening to them, the town authorities dismiss them and are slow to accept that the situation is serious, quibbling over the appropriate action to take. At first, certain homes are quarantined and corpses and burials are strictly supervised. But soon the town’s emergency reserves are depleted. When the daily number of deaths jumps to thirty, the city is sealed and the outbreak of a plague is officially declared.

Did the local authorities respond correctly, or should have they heeded the medical authorities sooner? Was the breakdown in communication between medical and local authorities one of institutional dysfunction? What kind of emergency power can the local authorities invoke? How should governmental goods and services be distributed among the population? Will martial law need to be declared, or should citizens be able to resume their daily routines? How will the populace react to the quarantine, and how should they be persuaded that quarantine is in their best interest?

This scenario could describe the coronavirus in Wuhan, but it is actually taken from Camus’s The Plague.[49] Although behavioralist and other social science methodologies could answer some of these questions, their models cannot address important aspects of political reality, such as normative questions about justice, hope, resilience, and leadership. The abstract and detached nature of rational choice models or quantitative analysis can help analyze and predict certain public policies, but they fail to capture the detailed and relational quality of life in which human beings exist. By broadening understanding of experiences of what may happen, literature can deepen political scientists’ understanding of political reality.

In this way literature complements rather than replaces social science and philosophical analysis by providing a holistic account of political reality. The quantification and mathematization of human behavior reveal an important aspect of political reality, but so does the examination of individual thoughts, feelings, and motivations. The top-down approach of the social sciences and philosophy, starting from first premises and principles, needs the bottom-up approach of literature, with its particularities and concreteness, to fully flesh out what constitutes political life.

Only recently has literature reclaimed its place as an epistemological equal to philosophy and secured a place in the discipline of political science. But for it to sustain its hold, political scientists must show what they can learn from literature. My hope is that this article provides some preliminary reasons why political scientists should study literature, incorporating it into their methodologies and approaches. And for those who already employ literature in their studies, it is incumbent on them to discover new theories, methodologies, and reason to show their colleagues why literature matters to political science. To fail to do so is to exclude a rich resource from our study of politics and make us all the poorer political scientists for it.

Notes

[1] I want to thank the anonymous referees for their insightful and helpful suggestions for this article.

[2] John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Lee Trepanier, “The Relevance of Political Philosophy and Political Science,” in Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education, ed. Lee Trepanier (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 127–44.

[3] Richard J. Gelles and Heinz Eulau have collected a number of seminal papers espousing behavioralism in their Behavioralism in Political Science (New York: Routledge, 2017). For the philosophical presuppositions of behavioralism, see Eric Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 88–108.

[4] Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint, 94.

[5] A glance at the flagship journals in the discipline reveals this. See, e.g., Michael E. Shepherd and Hye Young You, “Exit Strategy: Career Concerns and Revolving Doors in Congress,” American Political Science Review 114, no. 1 (2020): 270–84.

[6] Aristotle, Ethics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, IA: Peripatetic Press, 1975), 1094b12–28.

[7] Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 4 (1969): 1051–61; Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); John S. Dryzek, “Revolutions without Enemies: Key Transformations in Political Science,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006): 487–92; Trepanier, “The Relevance of Political Philosophy and Political Science.”

[8] With respect to literature, the American Political Science Association has an organized section entitled “Politics, Literature, and Film,” which regularly sponsors panels at its annual conference, as do the other major regional conferences in political science. In addition, several academic articles and books have been published on the subject of politics, literature, and film. See the American Political Science Association, “Politics, Literature, and Film (Section 30),” n.d., https://www.apsanet.org/section30. Also see “Politics, Literature, & Film series,” n.d., Rowman & Littlefield, https://rowman.com/Action/SERIES/LEX/LEXPLF.

[9] I would like to thank Michael Promisel for bringing this point to my attention.

[10] Plato, Republic, 597e; 601a; 607b. Plato. The Republic, vol. 1, bks. 1–5, and vol 2, bks. 6–10, trans. William Preddy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

[11] Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 1451b–10.

[12] Augustine, The City of God, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7.10.27; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicia, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), 1.1.9ad1; 3.66, 4c.

[13] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 262–308, 326–27, 344–53.

[14] Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 197–205, 237; also see Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1:9; Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 99.

[16] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 72–76, 170.

[17] Hans-Joerg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel (New York: Crossroad, 1989).

[18] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

[19] I prefer the term postmodernism over deconstructionism, poststructuralism, and the other names of this literary movement because it is more encompassing in its subject matter than one finds in literary theory (e.g., architecture, technology, society) and because of its direct engagement with philosophy and politics. Lee Trepanier, “The Post Modern Subject: Response to Steven McGuire,” in Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern, ed. Steven F. McGuire and R. J. Snell (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 17–39.

[20] Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959); also see Harris Roy, Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the “Cours de linguistique Générale” (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1987).

[21] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), and Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978).

[22] Allan Bloom, “Cosmopolitan Man and the Political Community: An Interpretation of Othello,” American Political Science Review 54, no. 1 (1960): 130–57; Sigurd Burckhardt, “English Bards and APSR Reviewers,” American Political Science Review 54, no. 1 (1960): 158–66; Allan Bloom, “Political Philosophy and Poetry,” American Political Science Review 54, no. 2 (1960): 457–64; Sigurd Burckhardt, “Political Philosophy and Poetry: On Reading Ordinary Prose: A Reply to Allan Bloom,” American Political Science Review 54, no. 2 (1960): 465–70; Allan Bloom, “Political Philosophy and Poetry: A Restatement,” American Political Science Review 54, no. 2 (1960): 471–73.

[23] Bloom, “Political Philosophy and Poetry: A Restatement,” 471.

[24] David Janssen, “The Philosopher’s Ancient Clothes: Leo Strauss on Philosophy and Poetry,” in Modernity and What Has Been Lost: Considerations on the Legacy of Leo Strauss, ed. Pawel Armada and Arkadiusz Górnisiewicz (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), 53–72.

[25] Matthew Sharpe, “The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy: Leo Strauss on Plato’s ‘Symposium,’” Poetics Today 34, no. 4 (2013): 563–603.

[26] Also see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (New York: Free Press, 1952) and Socrates and Aristophanes; Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

[27] Catherine Zuckert, “On Reading Classic American Novelists as Political Thinkers,” Journal of Politics 43, no. 3 (1981): 683–706, and Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990).

[28] Eric Voegelin, “On Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol.12 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 134–71.

[29] Charles R. Embry, ed., Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

[30] Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 5; also see Simon Stow, “Reading Our Way to Democracy? Literature and Public Ethics,” Literature and Philosophy 30 (2006): 410–23.

[31] Ibid., 22–23.

[32] Ibid., 181.

[33] Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and the Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), and Cultivating the Humanities: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

[34] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); also see Barbara McGuinness, “Rorty, Literary Narrative, and Political Philosophy,” History of Human Sciences 10, no. 4 (1997): 29–44.

[35] Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 147.

[36] Edward Said, Orientialism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

[37] Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

[38] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Eileen Hunt Botting, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in “Frankenstein” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

[39] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and Intellectual History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

[40] James F. Davidson, “Political Science and Political Fiction,” American Political Science Review 55, no. 4 (1961): 851–60; Catherine Zuckert, “Why Political Scientists Want to Study Literature,” PS: Political Science & Politics 29, no. 3 (1995): 189–90; Werner J. Dannhauser, “Poetry vs. Philosophy”; Paul Cantor, “Literature and Politics: Understanding the Regime,” PS: Political Science & Politics 29, no. 3 (1995): 192–95; Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Stories and Political Life,” PS: Political Science & Politics 29, no. 3 (1995): 196–97; Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Poetry, Politics, and the Comic Spirit,” PS: Political Science & Politics 29, no. 3 (1995): 197–200.

[41] Blakely Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Kyle Scott, The Limits of Politics: Making the Case for Literature in Political Analysis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Michael Zuckert, “Catherine Zuckert on Politics and Literature,” Review of Politics 80, no. 2 (2018): 301–7.

[42] See, e.g., Kimberly Hurd Hale, The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); Nivedita Bagchi, Human Nature and Politics in Utopian and Anti-Utopian Fiction (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018); Lee Trepanier, “The Dystopian World,” VoegelinView, July 21, 2018, https://voegelinview.com/the-dystopian-world/; Calvert W. Jones and Celia Paris, “It’s the End of the World and They Know It: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes,” Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 4 (2018): 969–89; Steven J. Michels and Timothy McCranor, eds., Science Fiction and Political Philosophy: From Bacon to Black Mirror (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020).

[43] See, e.g., Lee Trepanier, “The Need for Renewal: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Conservatism,” Modern Age: A Quarterly Review 45, no. 4 (2003): 315–23; “Hawthorne’s Counterfeiting History in The Scarlet Letter,” Anamnesis, January 23, 2012,  http://anamnesisjournal.com/2012/01/lee-trepanier-2/; Sara MacDonald and Andrew Moore, eds., Mad Men: The Death and Redemption of American Democracy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); John S. Nelson, Cowboy Politics: Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns from “The Virginian” to “Unforgiven” and “Deadwood” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).

[44] See, e.g., K. Oatley, “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation,” Review of General Psychology 3 no. 2 (1999): 101–17; Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, “On the Origins of Narrative: Storyteller Bias as a Fitness-Enhancing Strategy,” Human Nature 7, no. 4 (1996): 403–25, and “Narrative Theory and Function: Why Evolution Matters,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 233–54; Devjani Roy and Richard Zeckhauser, “Ignorance: Lessons from the Laboratory of Literature,” Harvard Kennedy School(HKS) Faculty Research Workshop Series RWP13-039, October 2013,  https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/mrcbg_fwp_2013-11_Zeckhauser_ignorance.pdf. For an application of rational choice theory, see Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

[45] Richard Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 1 (1997): 1–27; “Against Ethical Criticism: Part Two,” Philosophy and Literature 22, no. 2 (1998): 394–412; Martha Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 22, no. 2 (1998): 343–65; Wayne C. Booth, “Why Banning Ethical Criticism Is a Serious Mistake,” Philosophy and Literature 22, no. 2 (1998): 366–93; Simon Stow, “Unbecoming Virulence: The Politics of the Ethical Criticism Debate,” Philosophy and Literature 24, no.1 (2000): 185–96. Also see the journals Law and Literature and Pólemos: Law and Literature Journal (Milton Park, Oxon, UK: Taylor & Francis),  https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rlal20/.VA9KF0vbnwI#.VA9vjmRdU_Q; Pólemos: Journal of Law, Literature, and Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter), https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/pol.

[46] Henry T. Edmondson III, The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000); Maureen Whitebrook, Identity, Narrative, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2001); Nöel Carroll, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 1 (2002): 3–26.

[47] Eileen John, “Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge: Philosophical Thought in Literary Context,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 4 (1998): 331–48; Alan H. Goldman, Philosophy & the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Erik Wolfgang Schmidt, “Crossing Over: Rauschenberg, Kafka, and the Boundaries of Imagination,” Aesthetic Investigations 1, no. 2 (2016): 214–26.

[48] Maureen Whitebrook, Reading Political Stories; Char R. Miller, “Drawing Out Theory: Art and the Teaching of Political Theory,” PS: Political Science & Politics 33, no. 2 (2000): 213–18; Anthony Gierzynski, Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press); Brian Danoff, Why Moralize upon It? Democratic Education through American Literature and Film (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019); Marlene Sokolon and Travis D. Smith, eds., Flattering the Demos: Fiction and Democratic Education (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018).

[49] Amy Qin, Steven Lee Myers, and Elaine Yu, “China Tightens Wuhan Lockdown in ‘Wartime’ Battle with Coronavirus,” New York Times, February 6, 2020,  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/world/asia/coronavirus-china-wuhan-quarantine.html; Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Modern Library, 1948).

This was originally published in The Political Science Reviewer.

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