Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination : Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce
Author(s): Patrick McGee
Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.
Review(s):
“This is a wonderfully wide-ranging book, as the title suggests … McGee [provides] astonishing perceptions about Blake’s poem and his images. This is true of the Hugo and Joyce chapters, too. This book defies categories and would not seem to fit into a specific course of study, until you realize that it offers a course of study all its own. I would happily sit with a group of graduate students, or indeed advanced undergraduates, and work through these ideas. The results might very well be life-changing.” –Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
“Reading a really fine critical study should be a process of having your expectations dashed … Patrick McGee’s Political Monsters displaced a number of my deeply-rooted beliefs, and the book is of such scope and intellectual power that it competes with the highest level of criticism … An astonishing accomplishment.” – James Joyce Literary Supplement
ISBN: 9781501341236