The Common Reader

Last week, the day after the 300th anniversary of the publication of Gulliver’s Travels, I sat down with my colleague Shruti Rajagopalan to discuss Swift’s great novel. Shruti is an economist with a law degree, so her delight in the Travels is accompanied by a respect for Swift’s ability to think like an economist. We talked about progress, “improvement”, Adam Smith, watches, rationalism and EA, Game Theory, slavery, Ireland, whether Swift is a proto-libertarian, and more, including why Shruti doesn’t love Middlemarch. Shruti also kept passing me passages to read aloud. This was a lot of fun for me. Many thanks to Shruti!


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Obviously, this is mostly about the literacy crisis, whether we understand it properly, whether it is happening in Spain, whether the PISA data supports James’ thesis, and so on. I began by asking James Marriott how things might work out for the best…
OLIVER: So the book is about the reading crisis and the risk it poses to liberal democracy. I want you to tell me, what is the most likely optimistic outcome? You might think that the odds of everything going well are very low, but if we do scrape through, what will it look like?
MARRIOTT: That’s such a good question, and nobody has ever asked me that question before. Seeking optimism from me is a unique idea. I think the most likely optimistic outcome, as I think so often in history, is stagnation and more of the same, and things don’t change.
We also talked about AI as a transmission of liberal democracy, a means of distributing James’ own work, and things like that. At the end, we had some fun about literary critics and Shakespeare which is much more civilized that arguing about the literacy crisis.
MARRIOTT: Yes, I’m keen to read The Winter’s Tale, and I’ve got it, actually. It came in my little set.
OLIVER: I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, and then you can read Northrop Frye’s book about it.
MARRIOTT: Yes.
OLIVER: Which would be James Marriott–coded.
MARRIOTT: Yes, good. I am very biased towards things that are James Marriott–coded.
The Frye book I had in mind was A Natural Perspective. James is also going to read A.C. Bradley and we might record another podcast about that. Bradley being one of the greats.
Transcript
HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to James Marriott. James is a Times columnist, a Substacker—he writes Cultural Capital—and he has a new book called The New Dark Ages. James, welcome.
JAMES MARRIOTT: Thanks very much for having me.
The Reading Crisis
OLIVER: So the book is about the reading crisis and the risk it poses to liberal democracy. I want you to tell me, what is the most likely optimistic outcome? You might think that the odds of everything going well are very low, but if we do scrape through, what will it look like?
MARRIOTT: That’s such a good question, and nobody has ever asked me that question before. Seeking optimism from me is a unique idea. I think the most likely optimistic outcome, as I think so often in history, is stagnation and more of the same, and things don’t change. And I guess I think there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic.
I think societies have a remarkable capacity to go on stagnating or declining slowly and imperceptibly for a very long time, and often much longer than we think. I know that’s pretty tepid optimism. Probably in the general scheme of the sort of takes that I offer, that is quite optimistic. But yes, I always think that stagnation and drifting and can-kicking are underrated forces in history.
OLIVER: Are we not going to stagnate at quite a high level?
MARRIOTT: Yes.
OLIVER: So is the pessimism sort of misplaced, in the sense that even a relatively bad outcome for us would be really quite good by the standards of human history?
MARRIOTT: Yes, of course. Although, I mean, the standards of human history are an appallingly low bar. And I think any of us asked to try to eke out an existence in pre-industrial modernity would view that with more horror than a prison sentence or being sent to almost any country in the modern world. To live in a sort of pre-industrial, pre-democratic state would be pretty terrible, so that’s a low bar.
That said, I think the main lesson from history is that—and I guess this is one of the points that is in the background of the book—is that we are living extraordinarily anomalous lives. To live in a literate and democratic culture is overwhelmingly not the norm through the entirety of human history. And I think sometimes humans have an extraordinary capacity for complacency, and the thing that comes back to me more and more, the more history I read, is how unusual and how fragile the modern world is.
We are not the norm. This is weird. And that’s a cause in some ways for great optimism, and if things do stagnate, they’ll stagnate with living standards that most of our ancestors would have viewed as almost miraculous. But I think an awareness of how anomalous it is to live in a literate and democratic society can be quite, I don’t know, maybe chastening isn’t the word, but salutary perhaps.
The Impact of AI
OLIVER: Now, AI is bringing a huge amount of writing into the world. Some of it’s slop, but some of it’s going to be quite good, and it’s going to get better. Is there a future in which the overall balance is quite different but is either sufficient to sustain democracy or produce something, you know, better?
MARRIOTT: Yes, I thought there’s an interesting point that you made in your piece. I’ve seen Dan Williams make the same argument, that the biases of—I guess is what you’re referring to, that we know the biases of artificial intelligence machines are basically Enlightenment liberal. AI is basically a centrist dad when you quiz it about politics.
Yes, I think that’s definitely a cause for optimism. I think that talking to AI through text about politics is probably a minority experience of artificial intelligence. I think most people’s political exposure to AI is much more likely to be image-based and is much more likely to be seeing slop memes on TikTok or Twitter or something like that.
And I think if you are using AI to write questions to ask it about policy, you’re probably in a very small minority. If you are seeing, I don’t know, racist AI-generated memes on Twitter or TikTok, you’re probably much closer to what the majority experience of the political implications of AI are. So that would be my take.
I don’t discount the fact that AI is often more reliable in its political takes than a lot of newspapers. I think that’s just a minority experience of AI for politics.
OLIVER: But the AI is going to be integrated into all sorts of things: in corporate life, in politics directly, in newspapers, and it’s going to be the major transmission mechanism to get the old liberal Enlightenment view from the old world into the new world. So could it be, in a way, a replacement for print culture?
MARRIOTT: Good question.
OLIVER: Obviously, a very imperfect substitute and very different thing, and the overall balance of good and bad will change significantly. But it might just be the thing that gets print into the future.
MARRIOTT: Maybe, but I guess my feeling would be that this move from a literate culture to a visual one has been in train for a long time now. And I think we worry a lot about AI writing, and we worry about university students getting AI to write their essays, and we view this deluge of artificially generated text as a major story of AI.
And I guess I would just come back to the previous point, which is that I think a lot of people’s major interactions with AI are probably more likely to be visual than they are to be text-based. And also, anybody trying to monetize AI for commercial purposes will find themselves susceptible to exactly the same commercial impulses that social media is susceptible to, that newspapers are susceptible to.
So although AI, if you talk to it as an individual user, may give you a sort of wet centrist dad on the one hand, on the other, “maybe we should be fiscally responsible” sort of answer. I think AI, as utilized by companies seeking to make a profit from it, will probably be drawn into the general direction of discourse that I think is now more than half a century old, which is more tribal, more emotional, more extreme. That would be my view.
OLIVER: Okay, so imagine, though, that we create a sort of James Marriott AI, and it takes all of you, all of your writing, all of your ideas, and it makes a little James Marriott avatar. And it puts you on TikTok or wherever it is that people are going to be, and you are part of this visual, video-based world. Is there not a sort of sense in which the playing field can be…


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Philip Hensher and I discussed the history of the novel in Britain from Defoe to Hollinghurst. Philip is remarkably well-read and happy to share his real opinions. He can go from Swift to Fitzgerald on the turn of a pin, isn’t shy about holding his ground, and has some very firm views. People who read novels are protected against becoming violent. Ideas are not important in most novels. Walter Scott isn’t very good. Arnold Bennett is a top 20 novelist. Rachel Cusk has the best chance of being read in 100 years. That sort of thing. Here’s one exchange where we disagreed about what a novel is.
HENSHER: Oh, Henry, Henry, how can you kill a book like that? How can you—
OLIVER: Look, you can’t have Jane Austen without the Enlightenment, and you can’t have George Eliot without the secularization of Jesus, and you can’t have Tolstoy without all the slightly incredible things that he believed.
HENSHER: No, let’s not talk about Tolstoy.
OLIVER: No, but the list goes on, right? Henry James even, who is often called a man of no ideas, he’s an incredibly good liberal. He might be the best novelist about the liberal idea that one person should not be allowed to dominate over another, in private conditions rather than just government. These ideas are, in a way, they’re the thing that distinguish those writers. Jane Austen knows how to observe and how to present because she’s thinking about what it means underneath.
HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know about that.
OLIVER: I don’t even think you can have Middlemarch without John Stuart Mill’s political economy, in a way.
HENSHER: Yes, that’s probably true. But George Eliot’s an unusual sort of novelist.
Jane Austen, I mean, how do we know what did she—what did Jane Austen think about slavery in the boldest and most extreme form? I think we can deduce that she thought that people involved in the slave trade or who came near it, like Mrs. Elton, were not at all the sort of people that she would altogether like to hang out with. I think the same is true of Sir Thomas Bertram, and the weakness of his imagination is somehow tied in with the fact that he has a plantation where he doesn’t really think about the people that it affects.
But already we’re into speculation. I don’t know what we can really deduce about Jane Austen’s idea, because she’s such a polyphonic novelist that we don’t find an idea being put forward without being able to find a character who’s saying the exact opposite. And sometimes one side of the argument is eventually dismissed, but not always, I think.
I said this at the conference we had a discussion with. I think that when you boil a novel down to its absolute irreducible essentials, I think what you have is not a proposal or a view of society or anything like that. It’s Charles Pooter painting his bath red, or the moment in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son when the son irrevocably falls out with his mother by telling her that he doesn’t want to have sugar in his tea anymore.
From the very beginning, novelists have said, “What I’m writing about, I’m writing about nothing, and this is the virtue of what I’m doing. I’m writing about the utter triviality of everyday life.” And that, for me, is the enchantment.
OLIVER: Well, some novelists have said that.
HENSHER: A lot.
OLIVER: Samuel Richardson didn’t say that. Samuel Richardson’s quite an important exception.
HENSHER: No, but people said it about Richardson.
OLIVER: I don’t think we—yes, but we can’t believe it.
HENSHER: People definitely said—no, I think we can.
OLIVER: Pamela is a novel of ideas.
HENSHER: Well, it’s a novel that contains some ideas.
OLIVER: Yes.
Transcript
HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Philip Hensher. Philip is a British novelist. He’s written books like The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, The Emperor Waltz, and now he’s got a new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, and you can see it there. It looks very pretty with Alice in Wonderland on the front.
Philip, hello.
PHILIP HENSHER: Hello, Henry.
Novels Are for Everyone
OLIVER: Now, to begin with, tell me about your grandmothers.
HENSHER: Oh, okay. Yes, well, I finished the book because—I kept my story out of it, largely. I thought that I should go back to a time when everybody read novels. It wasn’t a specialist interest as it seems to be turning into. And I thought I would talk about my two grandmothers, both of whom left school when they were 14. They worked in very ordinary and hard jobs in factories all their lives, and they were passionate readers of novels.
My paternal grandmother loved Dickens. She had a complete set of Dickens, which, I’ve discovered after some research, was issued as an offer by the Daily Express sometime in the 1930s. I’ve still got it, actually. I’m going to go and get a sample volume. It’s terribly cheaply produced.
OLIVER: Oh, I’ve got that set. That’s great, yes.
HENSHER: Yes. The publisher is otherwise only noted as a printer. The typeface is absolutely tiny.
OLIVER: It’s painful.
HENSHER: It’s painful to read. But she had it. She loved Dickens.
My maternal grandmother, I don’t have any of her books, I’m afraid. I would say that she loved stories of family lives, of people interacting with each other. She loved Catherine Cookson, a now slightly forgotten popular novelist of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. But she read an enormous amount. I mean, she must have read one or two novels a week, every week of her life.
I think that the thing that has disappeared since my grandmothers’ generation is the idea that everybody can read novels. They speak to everybody. They explore every part of life, potentially.
What seems to be happening now, and I greatly regret it, is that it’s passing into the property of expensively educated people, people who have gone to private schools, perhaps, have certainly gone to university. And the sort of reader like my grandmother, who read Bleak House with a lot of pleasure, seems to be disappearing.
So that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book, to make the case for how wonderfully enjoyable novels are. They’re not a duty, or they shouldn’t be a duty. They should just be founded in pleasure, however complex that pleasure might be. And I wanted to finish the book by citing my two grandmothers, who were such great readers.
OLIVER: And as well as inheriting that reading culture from them, you got a lot of that at your school, didn’t you?
HENSHER: Yes, I suppose I did. I think that it’s hard for me to say because I was in at the beginning of a sort of curriculum change, where there was an idea that we ought to give the kids things that are relevant or are going to appeal to their social concerns. So, I mean, this is going back to the very early 1980s. My set novel for A-level was The Grapes of Wrath, a classic tale of victimhood, really. Classic approved message.
And the thing was, I think what started me off as a passionate reader of novels was a sort of rebellious turn away from that sort of thing. I read Jane Austen off my own bat. I read a lot of Dickens before I left school—things that we weren’t taught at all. And that’s always been the sort of reader that I am, saying, “Oh, we’re not supposed to be reading this,” you know? “It’s not on the curriculum.”
Parliament and Thatcher
OLIVER: What was it like working in the House of Commons?
HENSHER: It was fine. [laughter] It was a very unusual experience. I don’t think it was a job that most people would’ve known existed. When people said to me, “Well, what do you actually do?” I used to say, “Well, you know the guys with wigs who sit in front of the Speaker? They’re my bosses.” And it was a strange, ritualistic experience, and you were physically in the middle of all these political dramas.
When I started work, I started work in the House of Commons the beginning of September—this is September 1990. And six weeks later, there was all the drama of Mrs. Thatcher being thrown out, which I saw physically very close up. I didn’t have anything to do with it. You weren’t aware of what really w…


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What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver’s Travels. As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy.
TRANSCRIPT
HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz. Zena is a tutor at St. John’s College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought. She runs the Catherine Project. She’s famous on Twitter. We don’t know how she does it all. Zena, welcome.
ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It’s great to be here.
OLIVER: And we’re talking about Gulliver’s Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it’s a book that you love.
HITZ: A book that I’ve loved for a long time.
First Encounter with Gulliver’s Travels
OLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it?
HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John’s called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.”
So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides, Plato’s Timaeus, selections from Aristotle’s Physics, Gulliver’s Travels. After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy’s Almagest, geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver’s Travels after reading selections from Hooke’s Micrographia, so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo’s Starry Messenger, which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter.
So then we read Gulliver’s Travels. We also read Emma and Flannery O’Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we’d throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn’t actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true.
At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver’s Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don’t work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to—Gulliver’s Travels is still one of the best books about that because it’s in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account.
Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he’s a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn’t see. And I think it’s not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it’s a very humane book. It’s social criticism, but from a point of view of a very deep humanity. So I’ve always loved the book for these reasons since then.
I came back to it more recently because it is part of the curriculum at St. John’s. So when I came back to teach there, I began to reread it. The other experience I had was that I wrote a long essay on it when I was an undergraduate. So those are my—I’m not any kind of expert. My knowledge of the historical context of the book is limited. It’s not zero, but it’s limited. But I have always loved it as an account of human understanding and its failures and the way that might impact how we live and how happy we can be.
The Houyhnhnm Problem
OLIVER: Have you changed how you think about it as you’ve taught it?
HITZ: I have not really changed the way I think about it. It gets more—like all of these books, the more you read them, the more comes out of them, the more details come up. Hilarious. The more jokes you get, the more . . .
I think the one more recent insight I had was, I hadn’t understood the full horror of the Houyhnhnms in the last book until relatively recently. I think that took me some time to really take on. It’s one of the cases where Gulliver’s misperceptions are a bit harder to see, and I think many readers just assume that Swift is endorsing the praise of the Houyhnhnms in some sense or other.
OLIVER: There are some very serious critics in the past who have called them Swift’s ideal beings. Which at this point in history seems unthinkable, but it has been a belief among serious readers.
HITZ: Yes, yes. And also common among students. Yes, it’s absolutely one of the wrongest opinions you could have about anything, I think.
OLIVER: Why does Swift allow us to make that mistake? Are we bad readers out of the context, or has he made too good a job of his diversions and concealments and ironies?
HITZ: That’s a great question, and I’ll just take a stab at it. I think that he has hit on a mode of misperception which is very deep to us, and it’s something that we’re much more guilty of. We could imagine that if we were in a place where everyone was small or everyone was large, we might make mistakes like Gulliver makes. But we all live, I think, in communities that are a bit like the Houyhnhnms. And so we are all very subject to these kinds of deceptions, and I think that’s how he gets us.
That’s not to really excuse the bad readings because, you know, Gulliver does leave the land of the Houyhnhnms with a boat made out of human skin, which should—I think that moment should make you realize, if you haven’t yet, that something is very seriously wrong with Gulliver. Gulliver has been kind of destroyed as a person by his travels, and especially by this last trip. But if you pass over that little detail, maybe you think, “Oh, wow, he found some very simple beings.”
OLIVER: Well, there’s also the great council where they debate the genocide of the Yahoos.
HITZ: [laughs] Yes.
OLIVER: And it directly contradicts several things Gulliver has come to believe about the Houyhnhnms, about the Yahoos, and about himself. And he’s completely unaware of these contradictions and so in awe of the Houyhnhnms that he doesn’t quite understand, I think, that he’s accounting a genocide.
HITZ: That’s right. That’s right.
OLIVER: Even though he uses a phrase from Genesis that’s very unmistakable. It’s a sort of remarkable moment of—particularly to us, having had the 20th century. I think that’s why Swift came back into favor in a way, because people used to say, Swift’s unbearable view of human nature . . .
This is a great bit in Boswell’s Life of Johnson where, when they’re traveling through Scotland, they’re with a lady, and she says to Johnson, “Is any man naturally good?” And Johnson says, “No, no more than a wolf.” And Boswell says, “Well, sir, what about ladies?” And Johnson says, “God, no, absolutely not.” And this woman says, “Oh my God, this is worse than Swift,” utterly horrific view of human nature.
But of course, we can actually say, did he go far enough? [laughter] I mean, Swift clearly understands something very real and deep. The council of genocide is horrifyingly familiar to us. And I think that’s much to Swift’s credit that he can see that, and to show that Gulliver would blind himself to it. And people still blind themselves to it, right?
HITZ: That’s right. And I wonder—you would know more about this than me because it is a bit of a historical question, but my understanding is that quite a lot of the savagery, the worst parts of rule over men that we see in Gulliver’s Travels are pictures of Ireland in the 17th, 18th centuries. …


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My colleague Oliver Traldi recently published an essay called ‘Jane Austen’s Virtuous Liberalism’. It’s a very nice discussion of the ways in which Austen understand the challenges of character formation.
Virtue, as Austen sees it, faces two tough challenges. First, people whose characters are not yet formed must see how to be virtuous rather than vicious. Then, the virtuous must somehow find a way to succeed in their struggles against the vicious without adopting vicious means.
In this episode, Oliver and I discussed Austen’s ideas of virtue, what that has to do with liberalism, the relationship between philosophy and literature more broadly, as well as poetry and ideas about the Great Books. We also talked about the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice. Yes, we both liked it. Here is why Oliver thinks Jane Austen is so popular among philosophers.
TRALDI: And so I do think that even though she’s not making arguments, she’s not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.
And I think it’s part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who’s a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers’ Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”
OLIVER: And it’s a long list.
TRALDI: And I think it’s a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it’s not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.
And here is an extract about Austen, Smith, and the wonderfully fertile period at the end of the eighteen century.
TRALDI: But yes, I think it’s obvious—without knowing the background, I’m sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they’re both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.
OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.
TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there’s this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—
OLIVER: It’s a great time.
TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.
OLIVER: You’ve also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It’s a very, very fertile—explorations.
TRALDI: Yes, yes. There’s all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.
OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—
TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.
OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.
TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.
OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?
TRALDI: “A lot” might be—
This was my favourite bit.
TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it’s one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can’t really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”
OLIVER: There’s a discussion in one of Hayek’s papers, which is—it’s a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it’s not so much that I’m trying to get information about the thing you’re trying to sell me, but I’m really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there’s a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they’re all working on that problem together.
TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it’s often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else’s character?
OLIVER: Exactly.
TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?
OLIVER: And if you’re too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.
TRALDI: Yes.
OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it’s really, really hard.
TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else’s character?
Oliver is an analytical, political philosopher. You can find out more about his work here. Here he is on Twitter. His Substack is orting. You can watch the episode on YouTube here.
Transcript
HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Oliver Traldi. Oliver is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo in Ohio. He is my colleague on the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mercatus Center, and he’s written a book about political beliefs as well as many other articles for magazines, online.
He’s got a Substack. He’s maybe the most prominent political and epistemological young philosopher of his generation. [laughter] But most importantly for us, he is interested in Jane Austen and the idea of virtue. Oliver, welcome.
OLIVER TRALDI: Thank you so much for having me.
Reading Austen as a Philosopher
OLIVER: Let’s just start—before we get to this article you’ve written, tell me about being a philosopher but reading Jane Austen, because she’s often read and commented on by people who are not philosophers or who are only philosophers by acquaintance or whatever.
TRALDI: Right.
OLIVER: Is it different reading as a philosopher, do you think?
TRALDI: I think yes and no. One thing as a philosopher, there are—contemporary philosophy, we have very exacting standards of rigor and clarity. And when we look for a theory, we want something that’s been improved by hundreds of people and thousands of journal articles.
And so, if you were to simply extract a theory of virtue from a novel and say, “Does this—is this the end-all, be-all of moral thinking?” obviously you’re going to be disappointed. So I think as a philosopher, you have to look for other types of things, other types of sensitivities rather than logical sensitivity.
You have to say, how sensitive is the author to the different types of situations where people’s virtue can be exhibited or challenged? Or how sensitive is the author to the different types of pressures that a character’s convictions can be put under, or the different sorts of compromises that they might have to make, or the different sorts of people who might not be virtuous who they might have to interact with and sort of, you know, contract with or avoid? And what are going to be the impacts of different kinds of choices in those situations?
So the novelists, I think, tend—if they do it well, a novelist who’s interested in morality will understand living morally probably better than a philosopher, while maybe not understanding, say, arguments about whether morality supervenes on reality or vice versa, or what grounds morality, or different theories of meta-ethics or whatever.
OLIVER: I mean, there are obviously some novelists who do have a better appreciation of those things than others, we should say.
TRALDI: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. And as I wrote in my article, I do think Austen in particular had an appreciation fo…


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