Stephen Ingle

Politics and Literature: Means and Ends in Koestler

The fruitfulness of imaginative literature as source material for the student of politics has been a subject for much debate over recent years, though the impact of literature on the teaching of politics remains limited. This paper addresses by means of an example (that of the relationship between means and ends) some of the fundamental problems involved in the relationship and some of the advantages which imaginative literature might bring to our understanding of political issue and concepts. Following introductory comments about the relationship between politics and literature in general we consider the treatment of means and ends in political theory, especially Machiavellis claim that when the ‘act accuses, the result excuses’. Finally and substantively we consider the treatment of the means/end theme in Arthur Koestlers Darkness at Noon and The Gladiators and conclude with some general comments about the relationship between the study of politics and imaginative literature.

Electoral reform in New Zealand: The implications for Westminster systems

In 1993 New Zealanders decided in a referendum to change their electoral system from the traditional first‐past‐the‐post model associated with the Westminster system to a German‐style additional member system known as mixed‐member proportional (MMP) which is very likely to lead away from the present two‐party politics towards multi‐party politics. After a brief consideration of the historical development of the New Zealand adversarial system this paper seeks to analyse in detail the pressures which led to the reform of New Zealands first‐past‐the‐post electoral system, a rare event in any polity and made the rarer in New Zealands case by the fact that these pressures originated and built up mainly among ordinary New Zealanders and not amongst the political elite. It attempts to show how these pressures eventually obliged reluctant parliamentary leaders to act and it follows the progress of the ill‐tempered campaign for reform. It then goes on to discuss the likely consequences of reform for the New Zeal...

Narrative and Politics

Shelley may have been thinking wishfully when he declared poets to be the unacknowledged legislators of the world, Solzhenitsyn exaggerating when he identified writers as the official opposition in despotic states, but both took for granted the importance to politics of narrative in the form of imaginative literature. Why is it, then, that narrative forms novels, drama, poetry, film play so little part in the formal study of politics?1 True, there is a growing body of scholars working in the area where politics and imaginative literature overlap but few institutions of higher education include this area within their teaching programme. Students of literature, on the other hand, usually take into consideration the political context within which writers work and also, when relevant, the ideological disposition of those writers. Students of politics, however, particularly in the English-speaking countries, have on the whole felt little impulsion to explore the world of narrative to enrich their understanding of politics. Yet there are at least two areas where a prima facie case could be advanced for such an exploration, namely the manner in which writers might enrich the knowledge and understanding of political issues through their function as mass communicators, and the light they might shed through their literary analysis upon the nature of ideologies.

The Power of Narrative

‘So this is the little lady who made this big war!’ said President Abraham Lincoln when introduced to the author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her Uncle Tom’s Cabin had reached a massive readership, including those who normally read very little. It sold more than 300,000 copies in the USA in the year 1852–3; in the English-speaking world only the Bible exceeded it in sales at that time. The book, said Frederick Douglas, the black anti-slavery campaigner, ‘lit a million campfires in the front of the embattled hosts of slavery’.1 Lincoln was exaggerating for effect, Douglas too engaging in hyperbole, but it cannot seriously be contended that Beecher Stowe’s book was anything other than highly influential in helping to create the kind of public opinion that enabled Lincoln to change the Civil War from a constitutional dispute to a moral crusade, to sustain the struggle and thus finally to win it.

The New Jerusalem

‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia’, said Oscar Wilde memorably, ‘is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.’1 Wilde was not using the word utopia in its classical sense; dreams of a classical utopia had ceased to exercise imaginations long before. Classical utopia had represented, in Judith Schklar’s words, an ‘expression of the craftsman’s desire for perfection and permanence’2 and was not so much emblematic of faith in the future as of contempt for the present. For St Thomas More, for example, the utopian enterprise was concerned to contrast the crudeness and dissolution of contemporary Europe with the unity and virtue of classical antiquity. To heighten the contrast between the indicative and the normative, More gave no indication of how utopia was to be arrived at.3

Narrative and the Sword

When considering what was to be done with or for the poor, imaginative writers did not exclude the possibility of the poor doing something, urgently and vigorously, for themselves, with or without the help of a sympathetic elite. They examined the legitimacy of and the prospects for proletarian revolution, depicted the events of such revolutions and considered their consequences. Indeed there was hardly a socialist who did not believe in the likelihood of revolution of some kind, though they were divided, as in most things, on the legitimacy of violent revolution.

Postscript: The Implosion of Values

Socialism in Britain developed as an intellectual critique of nineteenthcentury capitalism. As we have seen, it possessed an ethical dimension, which was rooted in basic Judaeo-Christian values, and a scientific dimension, which attacks capitalism’s perceived inefficiencies and inhumanities. Some socialists sought a revolutionary transformation of society and others a more gradual and controlled change. Many had a clear idea of the kind of society they believed would replace capitalism. The Labour government of 1945–50, described by one knowledgeable American critic as presiding over a collectivist state,1 represented the apogee of scientific – and some would argue ethical – socialist achievement. But for the next half-century Labour governments won the right to manage ‘socialism’ for only a decade or so. In fact from the late 1950s onwards Labour itself, or at any rate its leaders, sought to retreat from ‘socialism’ and finally, under the leadership of Tony Blair, they managed it.

Narrative and the Law

Much is made of the distinction between evolution and (violent) revolution in political discourse. Those who opt for what Shaw apologetically described as ‘the slow, sordid, cowardly path to justice’,1 the piecemeal accretion over the years of legislative and behavioural change leading to a more socially and economically just society, imagine that they are copying the ways of nature. What better imprimatur could there be for a programme of political change? Indeed President of the European Commission Romano Prodi used exactly the analogy of nature’s slow, steady but ineluctable evolution when accounting for the development of the Commission and its powers.2

The Terrible Stone Face

After eighteen months without work, with his family slowly starving, Frank Cavilla cut the throats of his wife and four children with a pocketknife. Jack London unearthed this gruesome fact when researching for his sociological exploration of the lives of the poor in East London which found expression in The People of the Abyss.1 London was one of a number of writers who might loosely be called social (ist) realists who sought through largely descriptive works showing the evil consequences of capitalism, as they saw them, to gain sympathy for the plight of the poor from a largely middleclass readership and audience. For some these descriptions were a basis for social, political or even ideological analysis, but this was not always so. In any case it is primarily the formal descriptions that we shall be considering in this chapter: we shall be concerned primarily, that is to say, with description rather than prescription.