Liberalism Without the Imagination: Remarks on Politics and Culture

Let us say that you are the editor of a journal that has a fairly explicit political viewpoint, and you decide that along with articles on political and social issues you want to run some pieces on cultural subjects as well. You can, of course, run essays that criticize books and movies and cultural trends from the perspective of your journal’s politics; but let us say that you want to do more than this. You want to enlist literature and the arts in the cause of the political philosophy your journal seeks to promote.

Your motives are not at all mercenary, for you believe—it is, in fact, part of your politics to believe—that culture is not merely the ideological bubbles on the surface of the socioeconomic pot but an exp...