Freedom by the Book: Novels and the Future of Liberal Democracy

The essays in this special issue reveal an inflection point for liberalism as much as for democracy. After all, it is liberal democracy that we are generally referring to when we describe modern democracies in crisis. 1 The populist authoritarians who have met with electoral success can make a straightforward claim to demo-cratic—but not liberal—legitimacy. Whether they win majorities or not, they represent millions of voters who honestly wish to detain and deport migrants, to ignore an unfolding environmental disaster, or to restrict the rights of their fellow citizens. Such policies may be hateful, parochial

what it means to be human" (54). In other words, the liberalism of western liberal democracy comes laden with a set of assumptions about what constitutes the liberal subject, and these assumptions can be as exclusionary and as restrictive as the coercive political regimes that liberalism aims to unsettle. Many of the scholars in this collection, then, have aimed to reimagine the boundaries of the democratic subject-to move beyond the "Atlantic humanism" that provided both an animating force in the development of the novel and yet restricted the freedom of individuals to shape the course and meaning of their own lives.
In doing so, the scholars here give form and shape to what reactionary and conservative commentators have observed on the political Left in the US. In describing changes in how the left thinks about liberalism, writers such as Wesley Yang, Roger Berkowitz, and Ross Douthat have all suggested that a "successor ideology"-a postliberalism liberalism-has begun to take shape in journalism, politics, and academia. 3 For these writers, the successor ideology is fundamentally illiberal. It tempers freedom of speech with the recognition that some speech can be violence, for instance, and it privileges racial justice over a dream of color-blind meritocracy. These reactionary or conservative writers are correct that new ideas about how to make a better society are emerging-and emerging right here in this volume-but I think that they are wrong to describe such ideas as illiberal or to describe them as an ideology.
What emerges in these pages, at least, is not an ideology but a method. And the key to this method is the novel. Many of the scholars here suggest that by reading novels-and, in particular, by reading them well-we might extend the horizon of democratic possibility. Of course, many public discussions of political novels are facile and superficial, as Russ Castronovo maintains. And many recent novels resist hopeful predictions about a future of democratic possibility, as Sara Marcus observes. And yet the genre of the novel offers the possibility of a broader, deeper understanding of the liberal democratic subject in an era when both liberalism and democracy have proven insufficient and possibly unsustainable. Novels might help us to imagine what comes next.
The suggestion that novels will help us to imagine a more equal future-a liberal democracy beyond the limits of liberalism and democracy-is surprising. The anglophone novel emerged in the eighteenth century. And, as foundational and more recent scholars have observed, novels were not a democratic genre. 4 Reading them required education, money, and time-none of which the poor or even the laboring class had in abundance. Indeed, novels were not even always stand-alone books, and they were often read piecemeal and in the context of other literary genres (Stein 2). As Thomas Koenigs observes in this issue, novels did not even provide readers with the window onto the souls of others that they are frequently imagined to provide. Instead, they allowed eighteenth-and nineteenth-century readers to imagine fictional people in actionfalling in love or claiming to, making fortunes or losing them. In short, novels were a means of imagining others from the outside: not understanding their essential selves, their hearts or their souls, but imagining their bodies and their words. The novel reflected the flawed Atlantic humanism in which it took shape: it was bourgeois; it was only intermittently accessible. The novel provided the illusion of deep understanding but remained the product of people theorizing imperfectly about one another based upon observations.
The story of the novel gets worse when we consider its present state. A study from 2019 found that only 73% of people in the US read a book of any kind in the previous year ("Non-Book Readers"). An earlier study found that fewer than half of Americans had read a novel in the previous year, and it found that this group was made up disproportionately of university-educated women ("A Decade of Arts Engagement"). Novels are cheaper than they were in the past, and literacy is widespread, but such books still require time, education, and interest.
Yet the scholars here have returned to the novel as a means of imagining something beyond the flawed liberalism of a twentiethcentury liberal democracy. And I find myself in agreement with their collective suggestion that this deeply imperfect genre holds some promise for a more equal, and more democratic, future. Novels, I think, frequently delineate the substance of a free life in ways that other genres do not.

1
What does it mean to move beyond the novel? In many cases, the scholars here aim to describe novelistic modes or sensibilities or reading practices that do not wholly depend upon the conventions of anglophone fiction. Marcus, for instance, considers the "novel of democratic exhaustion," an emergent genre in which democratic renewal is and remains impossible. Yet such novels, Marcus suggests, "sharpen our desire for a different future. And they suggest that in seeking to narrate our way out of contemporary crises, we may need to imagine possibilities altogether beyond the bounds of US democracy" (373). In other words, such novels in their hopelessness press readers to imagine a future more democratic than democracy-a future beyond the Atlantic humanism that has shaped much political discourse. Carlos Alonso Nugent similarly finds in experimental fiction-in this case the fiction of Latinx writers-a means of finding "something other than the novel, something other than Latinidad, and something other than democracy" (228). The novel, in short, holds out some potential, but it is a potential that can only be realized through the reimagining of past, insufficient forms. If democracy as we know it has failed to secure for people free and dignified lives, then we must reimagine it. If the anglophone novel has failed as a literary genre, then we must reimagine it.
Such efforts to reimagine the novel broaden the scope of its subjects-and not just beyond its former racial boundaries. Caren Irr, for instance, notes that democracy has long had a problem with inclusivity-the borders of "we, the people" are fungible but are nonetheless borders. For Irr, then, the answer lies in the grammar of the stories we tell. "Because English grammar does not semantically clarify the degree of clusivity," Irr explains, "the phrase 'we, the people' can slide between an inclusive we (meaning all of us) and an exclusive one (us, but not you)" (277). Irr ultimately calls for a "we" that includes not merely people but all living creatures, a "new multispecies we" that can be imaginatively delineated in literature.
Others, meanwhile, hope to reanimate democracy by reanimating the political novel-a much-ignored or dismissed genre. As Michaela Bronstein writes, novel theory traditionally "treats as embarrassing-or, more dangerously, as relatively unimportantquestions about political action. The novels of politics can take us beyond these limitations" (147). Such novels, she continues, reveal the "tense dynamic between the winds of history and the scale of individual action or experience" (155). In short, such novels place their characters in history-allowing readers to see individual lives as more than merely individual lives. Castronovo likewise sees potential in the novel of politics, but it is a potential that can be stymied by bad reading. For Castronovo, one of the ironies of the present era is that many elite defenders of democracy-from famous journalists to political scientists-are looking to novels as a means of warning about threats to the democratic order. And these readers are reducing novels to mere plot, erasing the very things that the novel most enables-the interpretation of interpretation, the reflexive examination of storytelling itself. The political novel, Castronovo explains, enables us to see how narratives shape lives and how politics is a kind of narrative-but only if we read attentively.

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Collectively, these essays reveal something obvious and something less so. Obviously, liberal democracy is in trouble. It is in trouble not just because it has come under sustained assault on the Internet, in the halls of congresses and parliaments, and on the battlefield. Rather, it is in trouble because even those people who might be expected to support it are increasingly skeptical about its assumptions, exclusions, and limitations. Liberal democracy seems inadequate to the task of confronting long-term problems like climate change. It likewise seems inadequate to the task of considering whether and how to include under the rubric of liberal rights those who have previously been excluded-from racial or religious minorities to migrants and asylum seekers to nonhuman animals to ecological systems. The failures of liberal democracy are obvious.
Less obviously, the authors in this collection turn to novelssometimes old novels, sometimes new and experimental novels-to reimagine what a better liberal democracy might look like. This is not an obvious choice because novels began as a bourgeois, European genre and because they grew up alongside the very liberal democracy that has proven to be inadequate. Moreover, novels are in practice as limited as the liberal democracies they developed alongside. Few people read novels, and those readers are not representative of the societies in which the novels circulate ("A Decade of Arts Engagement").
Despite these limitations, I agree with many of the scholars here that the novel holds out some promise for thinking about a better kind of liberal democracy. Modern democracies, I believe, need literature. And literary works such as novels provide readers with more than mere examples of political risks-more than plot, as Castronovo explains in these pages. Instead, I am going to borrow from philosopher Martha Nussbaum and suggest that novels help readers to articulate for themselves the substance of a free life in three important ways. First, novels enable readers to think deeply about the relationship between incommensurate goods. 5 Should I get married? Should I volunteer to teach at a local prison? Should I adopt a child? Our lives are limited, and selecting one choice often forecloses another. Significantly, there is no outside system of value that can definitively determine what choices will culminate in a meaningful life. As free people, we make choices about the individual and collective direction of our lives. And, in deciding, we need the examples and stories of others. We need, in other words, stories about lives lived meaningfully or unmeaningfully, with dignity or without it. Moreover, these stories should encompass broader frames of value As free people, we make choices about the individual and collective direction of our lives. And, in deciding, we need the examples and stories of others. We need, in other words, stories about lives lived meaningfully or unmeaningfully, with dignity or without it. than they have in the past. As Nugent observes in these pages, an experimental fiction like the Lost Children Archive (2019) offers readers "something other than the novel" and "something other than democracy" (228). By stretching the rigid boundaries we have inherited-in particular the boundaries of democracy and of the novelwe can think beyond these inadequate forms. Even so, the fundamentally ethical act of using stories to think deeply about how to value incommensurate things remains vital in Nugent's analysis and in the flexible genre of the novel itself.
Second, novelistic storytelling accounts for the role of emotion in shaping values. In essence, reading and thinking deeply about such stories allows us to move beyond the merely rational accounting that shapes much political debate: Will Brexit cost or provide savings to the taxpayer? Do tax cuts promote economic growth? These questions (all answerable rationally, even if the answers provided by some political actors are not always correct) mask deeper conflicts that touch on the emotional lives of individuals. And people's lives are emotional-full of love, anger, boredom, hatred, grief, and joy-and we must account for the dimension and depth of these emotions if we are to think and act politically. Here Xine Yao highlights the role that novels play in mapping the complex, emotional dimensions of family relationships. Moving beyond the narrow politics of representation, Yao calls attention to a novel that illuminates the "embarrassing but tender filial" (110) engagements of characters and shows the complex motivations of novel writing itself. Sometimes people write novels just because they are "hard up" (99). In short, novels lead us to think about people not as rational automatons or mere representatives of a larger political community but as entangled, emotionally interconnected beings.
Finally, novels help us to process and react to the inevitability of change. 6 People get sick or lose their homes in floods. Sometimes they win the lottery. Many events unfold entirely or partly out of our control, and we must make decisions about how to adapt-to celebrate, to grieve, to take action, or to restrain ourselves. In recent years, scholars have attempted to understand the relation between human beings and the nonhuman things that shape human lives, going so far as to theorize a democracy of things. Nathan Wolff rejects this view. While human and material interactions shape the course of human lives, Wolff reserves the word "democracy" for "human efforts toward collective power and the equitable distribution of resources and well-being, stabilized and sustained via public institutions" (81). At issue here is not whether human and material interactions produce change. Of course they do. Human actions shape the material world. The material world, in turn, shapes human lives. The question, rather, is what we should do in a world that is partly but not wholly shaped by us. Novelistic stories enable us to think about our collective responsibility in such a world.
Sometimes, political observers are skeptical about the value of literature in politics. The political scientist David Runcimanquoted here by Castronovo-observes that the novel has "has no political power . . . [to] galvanize us into . . . action" (69). It is certainly true that literature does not typically send people to the barricades. Plus, reflecting through literature on one's own choices, one's own emotions, and one's own relationship to unexpected events will not make political change as it is conventionally understood. Such literary reflections nonetheless enable us to give substance to the free lives that are the essence of democracy. And, most importantly, novels offer a mode of storytelling that guides us in reshaping the boundaries of the possible. Liberal democracy might provide a framework for thinking about the future, but it has until now provided too narrow a conception of the collective good. By telling stories-about people, about nonhuman animals, about our relationships with the world and with each other-we can draw new horizons of possibility. I don't know yet what these horizons will look like, but I'm eager to read more.