This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system
that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately,
global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become
fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it
grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the
sense in which we do indeed live at history's end. But this end is
not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not
satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it. In this
situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that
literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to
political democracy. Literature's deep-seated conservative,
counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make
important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential
democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical
democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for
cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical
attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic
structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps
us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as
to understand how life might be lived both in and outside
democratic state capitalism. Drawing on political theory,
intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against
Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy,
of literary criticism's contribution to that ethos, and of the
history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a
range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E.
M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.
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