This issue of The Review of Politics is dedicated to the memory of Wilson Carey McWilliams, a long-time member of our Advisory Board and enthusiastic supporter of the study of politics through literature. He was one of the founding members of the organized section on “Politics and Literature” established by the American Political Science Association in 1993. His essay on “Divine Right: Mark Twain's Joan of Arc” is posthumously published here for the first time with the permission of his literary executor, Nancy McWilliams.

Most readers have not agreed with Mark Twain in liking Joan of Arc best of all his novels, particularly because his hand is almost invisible in it. He presents the story as a translation by “Jean Francois Alden” of the remembrances of “Sieur Louis de Conte.” He did not think readers would take a work by “Mark Twain” seriously. Only the initials S. L. C. indicate the connection between the actual and the presumed author. Twain considered Joan to be “the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” She was a woman—and a general. She genuinely believed that she was acting on the basis of commands from God. In relating her story, Twain nevertheless shows that nothing human, and certainly no government and no ruler, is entitled to divine honors or right.

This paper seeks to illuminate magnanimity by examining Shakespeare's Coriolanus in light of Aristotle's account of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. I contend that contemplation of Coriolanus's similarity to Aristotle's magnanimous man allows us to harmonize two apparently discordant elements of the magnanimous man's character: his seriousness about the good, on the one hand, and his apparently status-oriented intolerance of insult, on the other. Nevertheless, Coriolanus falls short of Aristotle's standard; reflection on his defects reveals that genuine magnanimity requires prudence and a philosophic detachment from the city's moral convictions that Shakespeare's hero lacks.

Traditionally, the epic focused on the heroic deeds of great public figures, but the Romantics remade the genre into something more personal, making the poet himself the hero of their epics. The Romantic disillusionment with politics, flowing from the failure of the French Revolution, lies behind their revaluation of heroism. The turn to nature, which the Romantics present as immediate, turns out to be mediated by their political experience. Wordsworth's The Prelude and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are good examples of the Romantic transformation of the epic and provide a case study in the relation of politics and literature, specifically the politics of literary form.

This essay argues for Walt Whitman's significance to contemporary democratic theory, neither as a theorist of moral or aesthetic individualism nor as a theorist of communitarian nationalism, but as a theorist of the democratic sublime. Whitman's account of “aesthetic democracy” emphasizes the affective and autopoetic dimensions of political life. For Whitman, popular attachment to democracy requires an aesthetic component, and he aimed to enact the required reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic, world-making power. Through his poetic translation of the vox populi, Whitman hoped to engender a robustly transformative democratic politics. He found the resources for political regeneration in the poetics of everyday citizenship, in the democratic potentials of ordinary life.

Isaac Bashevis Singer's posthumously published novel Shadows on the Hudson contains his deepest, most sustained reflections on the moral and religious character of modernity. Using America as his paradigm, Singer argues that modern religious skepticism has destroyed the moral authority of the Ten Commandments. This depletion of moral capital has led to the growth of a powerful “underworld” culture that fosters the idolatrous worship of material well-being, reason, and Eros. Singer believes that ultra-orthodox Judaism is the only religion now able to check this evil in principle. Yet he fears that this religion can do little more in our post-biblical world than to highlight modernity's moral flaws. Thus, he offers an uncommonly bleak prognosis for the future unless modern poets can create a new religion that better meets the needs of our time.

Following the tradition of social contract theories of the early modern age, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, renewed the notion of the “original position,” that is, a set of behavioral assumptions from which general principles of justice are deduced. José Saramago's novel Blindness enriches Rawls's normative theory by adding behavioral assumptions that help clarify some of the problems raised by the theory's critics and enhance its application to social and political settings.