Utopian Fiction: Recovering the Political Science of the Imagination Paper for the MWPSA Annual Meeting Thursday,

April 2, 2009 I. Introduction This paper is a meditation on the relationship between poetry and knowledge. In it I plan to lay the groundwork for two claims. My first claim is that the imagination plays an important role in human cognition, and therefore that the imagination and works of the imagination can provide legitimate material and even a method for scientific inquiry. My second claim is that the imagination plays an important role in human behavior, and therefore is an important object of scientific inquiry for political scientists. Insofar as contemporary political scientists have ignored the imagination in both of these respects, their account of political life is radically incomplete. I will proceed in three parts. First, I will provide context for my claims through a brief historical account of the relationship between the imagination and political science. Second, I will consider more carefully the claim that the imagination and works of the imagination can provide a method of scientific knowledge. Finally, I will defend the claim that the imagination is a constituent part of human agency especially as it relates to political action, and therefore is therefore an important object of scientific study. Throughout the paper I will use the word "poetry" to denote imaginative literature generally, but the reader should keep in mind that my primary interest here is utopian fiction, which I regard as the most approximately scientific literary genre, at least with respect to politics. By utopian fiction I mean literature which makes the question of the

2 best political order central to its plot, whether that question is treated earnestly, ironically, or even negatively (as in dystopian fiction). My larger purpose in all of this is to provide the methodological groundwork for a larger scientific study of utopian fiction within the discipline of political science. That is, to defend a conviction that both political science and the "city in speech" seek to "hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature,"1 and to render the "highest possible justice to the visible universe."2

II. A Brief History of Political Science and the Imagination The claim that politics, political science, and the imagination are intimately related likely will appear as implausible to contemporary political scientists who have been trained in behaviorist methodology, as it will appear contemptible to contemporary poets seduced by the charms of Romanticism. But to political scientists and poets of an earlier age the connection was clear. Plato's Republic might be regarded as the first book of political science, and if my claims above are true we should not be surprised to discover that it is also the first work of utopian fiction. That is, not only does it involve a rational inquiry into the nature of political life, it does so in the form of a dramatic dialogue which relies upon the construction of an imagined city in speech as its central methodological device.3 Further, that rational inquiry into the nature of politics reveals

1 2

Hamlet, 3.1.18-19. Flannery O'Connnor describing Joseph Conrad's understanding of art, in "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) 80. 3 See The Republic of Plato, 2nd ed., trans. Allan Bloom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991) 368c-369b.

3 the imagination itself as a central or constituent feature of political life.4 Thus Plato's Republic exemplifies the two claims I have made about the imagination above. From the beginning, therefore, political sciencewithout neglecting empirical analysisrelied upon the imagination and poetry for its successful completion. This fact is evident not only in the political works of Plato and Aristotle, but also in the principle political works of the Roman (e.g. Ciceros DeRepublica) and medieval periods (e.g. Augustines City of God and Aquinass De Regno). It was also clear to the man who first introduced the word Utopia to the world in 1516, St. Thomas More. Utopia consists of a contraction of the Greek adjective ou and noun topos, which cleverly suggests an intimate connection between most happy place (eutopia) and no place (outopia). The full title of Mores work, On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia, as well as the multiple references to Platos Republic throughout, show the influence of the classical tradition of political science on Mores project. As he was working on Utopia Thomas More did not know that just three years earlier (1513) the entire classical tradition of political science had been subjected to a trenchant critique by a man named Niccolo Machiavelli in a short work entitled The Prince. (He did not know because the work would not be published until 1532.)5 The critical passage of this little work occurs in the opening paragraph of Book XV:
4

The Republic of course contains some of the most memorable images in all of literature, including the city in speech, the allegory of the cave, and the myth of Er. 5 More was not completely unaware of the Machiavellian alternative. In the very same year that Machiavelli completed The Prince More was beginning The History of King Richard III, a masterly study of the inner workings of politics when governed by the effectual truth. One can only speculate on the reasons why More never finished The History, but the fact that he completed Utopia during this same time period suggests the possibility that Utopia expresses his more complete or comprehensive understanding of the problem.

4 But since it is my intention to write a useful thing for him who understands, it seemed to me more profitable to go behind to the effectual truth of the thing, than to the imagination thereof. And many have imagined republics and principates that have never been seen or known to be in truth; because there is such a distance between how one lives and how one should live that he who lets go that which is done for that which ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation for a man who wishes to profess the good in everything needs must fall among so many who are not good.6 By contrasting the useful, the profitable and the effectual truth with the imagination thereof, Machiavelli was not simply taking on the world of poetry and art, he was attacking the entire metaphysical superstructure and anthropology which animated the medieval world, constituted its comprehensive vision of the whole, and provided the foundations for its understanding of justice. In so doing, he helped lay new foundations for the Enlightenment and modern natural science, which in turn helped spawn the technological, political, and oftentimes bloody revolutions which have characterized the modern world.7 It is no coincidence that science fiction begins after Machiavelli.8 If Plato invented utopian fiction, Machiavelli invented Utopian-ism, the secular humanist

Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Leo Paul S. de Alvarez (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1989), 93. Italics mine. 7 For more on Machiavelli as the founder of modern political science see Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959). See also Strausss essay What is Political Philosophy in What is Political Philosophy and Other Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959): 9-55. 8 Francis Bacons New Atlantis, first published in 1627, might be considered the first and prototypical work of science fiction. Despite their differences, Machiavellis influence on Bacons thought beyond question. See Robert K. Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), especially pp. 59-83.

5 aspiration to build heaven on earth.9 How a political science which sought to make political life more humane by lowering its ends resulted in the most novel and brutal forms of ideological and totalitarian tyranny is a question meriting deep meditation. But Machiavelli was also committing a brilliant legerdemain, for he knew all too well the effectiveness of the imagination thereof, which he effectively used to his advantage both in The Prince and elsewhere.10 He understood that imagined republics and principates (i.e. utopias) are an outgrowth of human nature itself, that to attack utopias is, to use the words of Frank Manuel, about as meaningful as to denounce dreaming.11 By associating imagination with ineffectuality Machiavelli hoped through his own poetic discourse to create a new imagined republic based upon the complete domination of an indifferent if not hostile nature, thus laying a new (imaginative) foundation for justice and politics. The role of the imagination in political science has perdured, then, in a truncated form, but it has been disguised by sleight of hand even from its own practitioners, under scientific sounding names like Positivism, Empiricism and Behaviorism. These "isms," despite their pretensions to a superior insight into the nature of things, cannot in the end escape the fact that they involve imaginative constructs for understanding reality, rather than a direct encounter with reality itself.12 The result of this concealment of the
9

This distinction between the utopian imagination or utopian thought more generally, and "utopianism," is also made by Irving Kristol in Kristol, "Utopianism: Ancient and Modern," Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995) 184-199. 10 In addition to Machiaavelli's own concern for imitation and appearance in The Prince itself (especially the hyperbolic Book XXVI), consider Machiavelli's own drama, especially The Mandragola and Clizia. 11 Frank E. Manuel, Toward a Psychological History of Utopias, in Frank E. Manuel, ed. Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.: 1966), 95. 12 For a brief but excellent treatment of why objectivity does not necessarily mean "true" or "real," see the Appendix to Leon Kass, "Science, Religion, and the Human Future,"

6 imaginative ground of politics and science by modern science has been a culture deeply divided between a science without poetry (i.e. Scientism) on the one hand, and a poetry without intellect (i.e. Romanticism) on the other, and nothing but confusion to bridge the gap.

III. Poetry and Science I have suggested above that poetry, by which I mean here imaginative literature, and especially utopian fiction, can provide genuinely scientific knowledge. I should make clear that in making this claim I have no intention of dissolving the distinction between poetry and science, or of exhausting their essential meanings. In intention, form, content and effect science and poetry are distinct and valuable pursuits, with their own unique set of standards, purposes, and expectations. Nevertheless, distinct things often exist in a complementary way, and sometimes even converge, as the juxtaposition of night and day meet in the gloaming. It is this twilight area between science and poetry that I wish to explore here, if only to articulate more clearly what is, and is not, both proper and particular to each. Since the time of Machiavelli the tendency of both poets and scientists has been to emphasize not only the distinction between them, but their absolute separation. John Henry Newman expresses a conventional opinion: Poetryis always the antagonist to science. As science makes progress in any subject matter, poetry recedes from it. The two cannot stand together; they belong respectively to two modes of viewing things, which are contradictory to each other. Reason investigates, analyzes, numbers, weighs, measures, ascertains, Commentary (April 2007): 47-48.

7 locates the objects of contemplation, and thus gains a scientific knowledge of them. Science results in a system which is a complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with systems. The aim of science is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them; that is (to use a familiar term), to master them.[Poetry] demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feetPoetry does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, love.13 According to Newman, science and poetry are not merely distinct, they are two antagonistic modes of viewing things that are "contradictory to one another." The mode of science addresses reason, while the mode of poetry addresses "the imagination and affections." This account reflects the Machiavellian dichotomy of reason and imagination outlined above, and which I am challenging in this paper. It is true that science, whether in its classical or modern form, always refers to universal knowledge. Scientific knowledge always looks beyond particular things to general classifications, patterns of behavior, and relations. It seeks to reduce the manifold of reality into the unified form of general propositions or formulae, whether grammatical or mathematical. Knowledge of particulars is only scientific insofar as it involves the identification of a particular object within a universal pattern or category. According to this notion, the more intimate knowledge of concrete objects in their irreducible
13

John Henry Newman, The Mission of St. Benedict," Historical Sketches, vol. 2, by John Henry Cardinal Newman (London: Longmans, Green, 1912) 253. I thank James Taylor for bringing this passage to my attention in Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998) 35-36.

8 complexity, say a mother's knowledge of her child from his particular habits right down to the precise location of a mole, whatever else one might call it, is not scientific knowledge. It would be tempting at this point to declare that poetry always involves this intimate knowledge of concrete irreducible particulars, while science always leaves these particulars for universal and common features across and above objects, and leave it at that, but this would in fact misrepresent what both science and poetry, on a deeper level, do.14 We might begin with Aristotle's account of poetry in his Poetics. There he argues that one principle cause of poetry is the pleasure of learning which comes from imitation.15 Moreover, this learning involves not just particular objects, but also universal knowledge. For this reason, Aristotle argues that "Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars."16 We find this philosophical or universal quality in the images of Plato's Republic, which are addressed not just to the imagination but also the reason. The purpose of these images is to disclose, and not merely to illustrate, the universal features of the subject of inquiry. The governing image of the dialogue, for example, is not an imitation of a particular, concrete, historical city; it is rather the fruition of an argument inquiring into the necessary and universal features shared by every city, features which might at some level be reduced to propositions and empirically tested. Originally intended to provide a microscopic view into the interior
14

For a thoughtful treatment of twentieth century debates over the universal and the particular in poetry, see the introduction of Glen Arbery to Christ and Apollo. The author of this book, William Lynch, locates the correct understanding in the notion of analogy. 15 Aristotle, The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, trans. Ingram Bywater (NY: The Modern Library, 1954) 1448b5-20. 16 Ibid., 1451b5-10.

9 qualities of individual human action, it ends up providing a telescopic view of political life as such. This cognitive aspect of the imagination explains Socrates' professed greed for images.17 His iconophilia is a reflection of his scientific impulse, his desire "to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them." One immediate objection to this account might be that science is the study of empirical reality, not images. However, the objection is not decisive. First of all, science, and especially modern science, does not study empirical reality but only some feature of empirical reality. Political scientists, economists, sociologists and psychologists all study human beings, but each is interested in a different aspect of human behavior, and while each might be considered genuinely scientific, each relies upon slightly different methodologies. Moreover, these differing methodologies often involve experiments which seek to study some particular feature of human behavior by isolating it through the creation of a tightly controlled environment. The results of these experiments can hardly be called the study of reality in the fullest sense. Leon Kass expresses this artificial or conventional aspect of science well: The so-called "empirical" science of nature is, as actually experienced, a highly contrived encounter with apparatus, measuring devices, pointer readings, and numbers; nature in its ordinary course and as humanly experienced is virtually never encountered directly.18 In this respect the scientific method is not strictly speaking empirical. It always involves looking at nature through some lens which abstracts or isolates some feature of empirical reality, whether it acknowledges this fact or not. The scientific method is in
17 18

The Republic, 488a. Kass, 47.

10 some sense then a work of art, and thus in some sense a work of imagination. If science involves images and poetry involves reason, then we might expect to find some suggestive parallels between the scientific method and utopian fiction. Like science, utopia fiction places its subject in an artificial and controlled environment. Like science, utopian fiction is motivated by hypotheses about how nature will respond under certain hypothetical conditions. Like science, utopian fiction offers predictions about human behavior which, at least in theory, are able to be tested.19 In utopian fiction the hypothetical conditions include the range of variables that are necessarily of political concern, from the governing political structure through religion, education and economics right into the soil of sexuality, marriage and child-rearing. It is true that the theoretical models of utopian fiction are often highly idealized, but so are many other sciences, especially those based in mathematics. Mechanical physics, for example, is every bit as Platonic as the city in speech. Just as the Pythagorean theorem is true only for the ideal or imagined right triangle of speech, and fails in every existing triangle in the empirical world, so too the laws of the mechanics are true only under idealized conditions, and do not obtain with exactitude in the empirical world. In other words, the discrepancy between the ideal and the real which pervades even the "hardest" of the physical sciences cannot escape the uses of imagination that I have been attempting to describe.

19

Of course the concern with experimentation is an important feature of modern science, but does Aristotle not have something like experimentation in mind when he declares in The Poetics that "It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity"? Aristotle's Poetics, trans. Francis Fergusson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961) 69 (Chapter IX).

11 There are of course important differences between science and poetry that should be explored, such as competing notions of objectivity, the role of experimental testing, and the universality of mathematics over against the diversity of utopias. But my main point here is that in both science and poetry, the issue is not whether to include or exclude the imagination from scientific inquiry, but what imaginative lens or filter is best for accessing the subject of scientific study. That decision turns, at least in part, on the nature of the object one wishes to understand. For political science one such object is the utopian imagination, which makes political life both possible and necessary. Central to the utopian imagination is the human concern with justice, as well as the intermediate constitutional and rhetorical devices that make justice possible or impossible to achieve. Whence comes this proclivity in human beings to imagine better or perfect regimes? How does this proclivity effect human behavior and political life more generally? Here especially the study of utopian fiction seems most promising.

IV. Politics and the Imagination Not only can the imagination provide genuinely scientific knowledge about political life, it also plays a critical role in human behavior, and thus political behavior as well. It is safe to say the nature and scope of the imagination remains a mystery to scientists as well as humanists. While psychoanalysis and neurology have expanded somewhat our understanding of the imagination they have not reached anything near a consensus on what exactly the imagination is and how it functions. Plausible and alternative theories of the nature and scope of the imagination compete as much now as

12 they ever have.20 Nevertheless, that imagination and desire are closely related is as clear to all great artists as it is to anyone who works in the marketing and advertising industries. It was also clear to the first political scientists. Both Plato and Aristotle devote considerable attention to the education of the imagination in their treatment of political life, based on the conviction that the stories and music children hear will go a long way towards determining their character - i.e. their feelings, attitudes and actions later in life. On the surface Plato's proposals sound a lot like behavioral conditioning, but a careful reading shows at least two clear differences. First, Plato's insists that the poetry used in this education be measured by what is true. Not just any poetry will do.21 Second, Plato claims that the purpose of the education in poetry is not simply to control the behavior of human beings the good of the city, but to prepare them "to grasp reasonable speech" when the time comes for them to assume the responsibilities of citizenship.22 Without a proper education of the imagination through music and poetry, Plato argues, the later education of the mind is not only useless, it can actually become dangerous.23 Liberal individualism involves certain assumptions about the autonomy of desire and choice, but if the imagination truly has the influence on human behavior that Plato and Aristotle describe, then it necessarily becomes an issue for politics, for it raises important issues of power and responsibility. If imagination governs desire, then who governs imagination? Must a viable and just political order be concerned with the imagination of its citizens? Whereas these issues of imagination, power and responsibility
20

For an outstanding overview of studies on the imagination, see Eva T. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991). 21 Plato's Republic 377a. 22 Plato's Republic 402a. 23 Plato's Republic 527 539c.

13 are often ignored in the field of political science, they are at the heart the great works of utopian fiction, not only in the classical works (Plato, More, etc.), but also in contemporary ones. Consider for example the influence of Shakespeare on John the Savage in Brave New World, or Oceania's attempt to purge imagination and memory from human experience in 1984. Of course, one of the most important desires involving the imagination is the desire for justice, important because it is the political desire par excellence.24 Implicit in every practical dispute about justice, whether over taxes, marriage, education or war, is some notion of a best regime. Thus the utopian imagination seems to be coeval with the human concern for justice. Unfortunately, though perhaps understandably, the fact has been clouded by an impoverished vocabulary. To call someone utopian especially in the bloody aftermath of the twentieth century is not ordinarily a compliment, for it implies a double perversion, first of intellect in failing to see things as they are, and second of ambition in seeking to recreate the world according to that false notion of reality. And yet the most common alternative, "realism," hardly seems preferable, given its endorsement of status quo complacency and the practice of realpolitik. Indeed, more often than not alleged "realist" theories give way to the most fanciful utopias of all, whether in the form of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan or in the rational anarchism of Murray Rothbard. Utopian visions which are false to the order of reality, to the truthful acceptance of the human condition, to mans genuine sense of values and to common morality are
24

What does the desire for justice mean for the methodological assumptions of rational choice theory? The desire for justice, insofar as it involves motives which include the interests or goods of an opposite party and not merely oneself ("giving to each what is his own" is one traditional definition), certainly attenuates the explanatory and predictive value of positivist or economic models of political behavior. See James M. Buchanan, The Calculus of Consent (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999) 16-18.

14 capable of inspiring actions which are unspeakably tyrannical and cruel, as evidenced by the various totalitarian Utopian-isms of the twentieth century, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism.25 Yet, as Leo Strauss has written, "The utopia in the strict sense describes the simply good social order. As such it merely makes explicit what is implied in every attempt at social improvement."26 For better or ill, then, imagined utopia will exist as long as politics exists. Utopia is, as Allan Bloom once wrote, "the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.27 Bloom's observation suggests a promising subject for political science. To repeat: What is the utopian imagination, and how does it relate to politics? How and why does the utopian imagination originate? Can we distinguish "false" from "true" utopias? If so, how? What criteria will we use, and what evidence will we examine?

V. Conclusion In this paper I have attempted to argue that the imagination can be a means to genuine scientific knowledge, and that the faculty of the imagination is an important subject of scientific study for political scientists. I have further argued that utopian fiction is a promising source for both sorts of inquiry. Whether any of this is really so can really

25

Aurel Kolnai, The Utopian Mind and Other Papers, ed. Francis Dunlop (London: Athlone Press, 1995), 8. Kolnais wholesale attack on utopianism, however, is like cutting off ones head to stop a nosebleed. Cutting off the human head, so to speak, is exactly what would be required to end utopianism. 26 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963; reprint, Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) 200 (page references are to reprint edition). 27 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) 67.

15 only be demonstrated in action, in a valid scientific examination of utopian fiction. But before doing this, one further distinction should be made. I have argued above that poetry offers universal knowledge. But whereas the universals of science are most valuable when they have been reduced, quantified, and measured, the universals of utopia fiction, though capable of scientific analysis, ultimately remain singular and irreducible. Moreover literary fiction is not merely descriptive. It tells a story, and so is characterized by dramatic action, plot, character development, etc. Utopian fiction thus differs from utopian thought, which consists of prosaic philosophical speculation on imagined regimes. By situating its utopian vision within plot conflicts actuated and resolved by concrete characters, utopian fiction can offer readers more nuanced, critical, and powerful perspectives on the essential meaning of utopianism, politics, and human nature. As such, perhaps utopian fiction has the capacity to do something higher than convey knowledge. And this is perhaps its greatest advantage, power, and threat, for what great poetry offers is not simply knowledge, but vision. That is, poetry not only reveals important aspects of human nature, it also becomes a part of experience itself. For this reason, the study of poetry can never be simply a subject of theoretical interest, for it touches upon the ways in which we imagine our selves and our lives together, and so make our way in the world. In other words, poetry is not only valuable as a cognitive exercise, it is also transformational. Managerial skill had little if anything to do with the effectiveness of Lincoln or Churchhill, poetry and the imagination a great deal. Neither person is imaginable without the lessons of Roman and English history, Aesop, the King James Bible, Shakespeare. As Allan Bloom once wrote, "poetry is the most powerful form of rhetoricin that it shapes

16 the men on whom the statesman's rhetoric can work."28 It is difficult to see how a political science which leaves out a scientific study of the utopian imagination can rightly be called scientific. Perhaps more importantly, it is difficult to see how a regime which fails to understand the workings of the utopian imagination can long remain free.

28

Alan Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics, 6.