Fiction as Political Theory: Joseph Conrad's ‘heart of Darkness’

Do novelists have something to say about politics? By raising the question in such a starkly rhetorical way it is tempting to respond, ‘Yes, of course, novelists (at least some of them) do have something to say on a wide variety of subjects which traditionally fall under the rubric of political thought’. One could quickly give examples: Tolstoy's devastating critique of military leadership in War and Peace, George Orwell's penetrating analysis of the reality of totalitarianism in 1984 and Jean Paul Sartre's portrait of a whole society in a state of imminent collapse in Le Sursis. With a little time for reflection it would surely not be difficult to expand this list to several hundred titles. But if the novelist is credited with having political thoughts or ideas it is rather odd to find so little systematic analysis and interpretation of those ideas by political scientists.² Why is this the case? For some political scientists perhaps the reason lies in their explicit acceptance of models of explanation which approximate those of the physical sciences. They wish to constrict their range of inquiry into politics in the interest of developing better models for explaining and predicting political phenomena. There is no need to quarrel with this perfectly sound approach, except where it leads its proponents into a dogmatic rejection of other modes of inquiry.