Imagining the real : essays on politics, ideology, and literature

Has conservatism an essence? Many would answer yes. Its enemies will typically identify it as cynicism, nostalgia, reaction, inertia, privilege, inequality, injustice, authoritarianism, selfishness and more besides. Its friends will offer an alternative list: order, freedom, stability, pragmatism, accommodation to inevitable change, equality before the law, the securing of deserts and entitlements, patriotism, rights, duties, scepticism, pietas. Whichever side we consult, it is obvious that, intellectually speaking, and compared with its rivals socialism and liberalism, conservatism is a mess. At best it might be a family-resemblance term, covering a constellation of diverse, tangentially-related attitudes possessing no single common feature. Nevertheless, some intelligent conservatives (and there have been some, despite Mill's jibe about the `stupid party') have made a virtue out of that very fact. If life is similarly a tissue of paradoxes, and if it is a merit in politics to be in touch with it, then conservatism may have something to be said for it after all. I say `after all', because conservatism, unlike its rivals (and particularly socialism), has no salvationary appeal. It confers no automatic moral status on the believer. It may be doubted, indeed, whether it includes anything that could truly be seen as an indispensable object, still less an article, of belief. Enter Dr Ta Ènnsjo È, for whom conservatism does have an essence,\* and one to which, as a member of the Swedish Communist Party, he claims to subscribe. He protests that this is no mere `post-modernist' joke (p. viii). One might have disbelieved him, were it not that, throughout the dissolution of the Soviet empire, the defenders of the established \* Torbjo Ènnsjo Èrn Ta È, Conservatism for Our Time (London: Routledge 1990 Ranging from politics and philosophy to literature, Imagining the Real is Palgrave's second selection of Robert Grant's essays. Like its predecessor, The Politics of Sex and Other Essays, only in more formal, academic style, it contrasts our abstract theoretical imaginings about the human world with the real imaginative insights provided by art and everyday experience. It questions, variously, the relevance of game theory and sociobiology to politics; the supposed intrinsic values of liberal freedom, cultural change, and democratic action; both Kantian and instrumental defences of honesty; and the claims of Marxism, deconstruction and 'Theory' generally to be non-ideological. More positively, it celebrates three imaginative writers, all highly intellectual, yet for whom practice and its fictional equivalents are still the ultimate test of theory: Shakespeare, Beckett, and the 1930s novelist L.H. Myers. Imagining the Real also contains hitherto undocumented observations by F.R. Leavis and L.P. Hartley; a new interpretation of homo economicus; a sociological explanation of the vogue for 'Theory'; and an anti-voguish theory of fiction as being a quite literal speech act, namely an open-ended invitation to imagine Throughout its ten related essays, Imagining the Real contrasts our abstract imaginings about the human world with the imaginative insights provided by art and experience. It questions, variously, the relevance of game theory and sociobiology to politics; the supposed intrinsic values of liberal freedom, cultural change, and democratic action; and the claims of Marxism, deconstruction and 'Theory' generally to be non-ideological. More positively, it reinterprets fiction as a specific invitation to imagine, and celebrates Shakespeare, L.H. Myers and Beckett as truly critical, because truly imaginative, exponents of ideas. Front Matter....Pages i-xvi The Politics of Equilibrium....Pages 1-24 Freedom for What?....Pages 25-36 Must New Worlds Also Be Good?....Pages 37-53 Honesty, Honour and Trust....Pages 54-65 The Ideology of Deconstruction....Pages 66-87 Fetishizing the Unseen....Pages 88-102 Thinking Degree Zero....Pages 103-122 Fiction, Meaning and Utterance....Pages 123-136 The Case of L.H. Myers....Pages 137-161 Providence, Authority and the Moral Life in The Tempest....Pages 162-187 Back Matter....Pages 188-248