8 - Irony, Disguise and Deceit: What Literature Teaches us about Politics

Summary

Here is the problem: the texts studied by historians of political thought are almost invariably systematic and discursive; they are rarely poems or plays or novels, and who could blame historians for such a choice. The careful unfolding of political thought is rarely the business of playwrights, poets or novelists, and who could blame them for failures of analytic rigour or argumentative transparency as they make their specialized, interested, often polemical, at times uncertain, ironic, and rarely even-handed interventions into political systems – that is of course not their job. There seems then a gap difficult to bridge between interests and texts – on the one side, historians who are anxious to get on with their business and go to places where they can work efficiently and without the distractions of figuration, uncertainty or irony; and on the other, students of literature who feel an obligation to explicate the political ideas that so often erupt in their texts with a sense of their genealogy, force and currency, their status and character in the masterpieces of political thought, but for whom those masterpieces are rarely objects of devotion. The recognition of this gap is no great insight into disciplinary divides, but our own moment of heightened interdisciplinarity and an awareness of the early-modern implication of politics in aesthetics suggest the importance of probing such divides and of considering the ways in which reading literature enhances our understanding of politics.