Jennifer Holly is a Classics and English student at Magdalen College, Oxford
For a young aspirant with dreams of the front bench, the decision of what to read at which university commanded one simple answer - PPE at Oxford. But “Modern Greats” has produced, of late, rather few of the sort. Even those reading the megalomaniacal mish-mash are now wincing at the endless questions about their yearning for positions much degraded in public esteem.
But now it’s English’s turn to screw its courage to the sticking place - and it might not fail. Burnham, at Cambridge, was trained on Leavis and his fear of a “technologico-Benthamite civilisation”. So, we await a premier awash with kindness, empathy, and fellow-feeling - the skills that, ostensibly, make an English degree worth it.
If literature makes you kinder, it’s no wonder that it should produce a poster boy of the left. It has become a well-worn adage and a stock critique of the right - sensitive young people are contorted in the woke factories of humanities departments. English, however, had surprisingly conservative beginnings. Its establishment as a subject worth studying came from the Newbolt Report of 1921, which set literature as a new-age alternative to religion in the fight against vagrancy and anarchy. English, then, from its birth, has been an instrument of ideology. And leftism marched in a half-century later, riding on the high that literature is a site of ideology and power (as opposed to something to muse upon, heartbroken, by a river), and henceforth, literary criticism donned the purple robes of ideology critique. The strident schools of literary criticism were overtly named “Marxist”, “postcolonial”, “feminist”.
As I trudge my way through my Classics and English degree (two disciplines that were anathema to each other a century ago, with the former inveterate and the latter arriviste), I am continually baffled at the discipline’s fetishisation of dismantling. The correct ideology must be the dismantling one. We have put Rhodes in a cage - we may now put Wuthering Heights in one too.
But there is no mandate that literature should churn out willing customers of natural wine bars. And neither is it a necessity that the “kindness” literature engenders should incubate politicians of the left. The discipline prides itself that it holds no “right answer”. But the range of answers that emerge is much narrower than one might expect. In the potential of what English can teach, even if that demonstrably is, admittedly, quite woke, we can find a nuance of thought that could easily hone its strength in public life. And - I promise - producing a politician of free-market bent is clearly within its scope.
An education in English affords a remarkable freedom to its students. Periods and papers are loosely programmatic, but you are free to engage with anything, however lowly, that could be classed as “literature” within them. Single-honours English at Oxford forces you to do Old English, but Burnham’s Cambridge does not even impose this. I find myself reading everything from 18th century political pamphlets to gaudy 1930s novellas. The syllabus leaves ample room for self-actualisation… or mere indulgence of your own tastes. The enjoyment of this freedom, I believe, has given its students the materials to turn up their noses at oppressive top-down bureaucracy.
And good reading attunes your mind to particulars; the nuanced, irreducible vagaries of lives that cannot be aptly explained by a model, but make our existence interesting. Yes, much has been made of “regular” lives, but it is in their aberrations that literature finds its realm - the regular wife who has a wild affair, or the salaryman who quits his job. Your economist ears might be firing up - this catallaxy of specific circumstances shares much with Hayek and his Knowledge Problem. The epistemology of the two converge in the damning realisation that a jobsworth with a clipboard cannot discern the inner world of man.
But we cannot, exactly, call a novel Hayekian - the very existence of a narrative is the fruit of the top-down planning of the author. A plot is no catallaxy. And the “market” can only be shown with a specific face, which is often as unappealing as an imperious mill owner or uppity landlord. I caveat: the anti-market reading is not a stupid one to reach, but it is certainly not the only one.
English students’ virtue is that they are “empathetic”, which has been lauded as a good prospect for Burnham’s premiership. He is a man who can weep along with the plight of the disadvantaged, rather than just reach for the clipboard. But “empathy” is chained to what is “seen”, in Bastiat’s terms - it fixates on the vivid particular, like the single mother fighting to make ends meet, and ignores the many things that go “unseen”, which simply cannot be written into a plot. Not even Hardy could write a compelling novel chronicling all those who didn’t lose their jobs.
The antidote to this blindness is, however, contained right within good literature: it is the wonderful device of irony, which at once holds the sufferer’s frame and the frame he lacks in view of the discerning reader, taking him beyond the deceitfulness of an image. But, crucially, this vantage does not allow the reader the omniscience of a central planner - unreliable narrators, such as Humbert in Lolita, deprive us of that privilege. That leaves the trained reader knowing that “empathy” is easily manipulated and often short-sighted - which is but one step away from suspecting the same of a policy paper.
Burnham has told us that his favourite novel is Eliot’s Middlemarch. This novel is an easy choice for a soft-left politician; Dorothea Brooke yearns to do good at scale, and the novel’s sympathy is reformist. But the novel readily permits an alternate reading. Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies is the apotheosis and downfall of the totalising scheme, and Lydgate, who despite modelling a decent plan for the town, is destroyed by particulars: debt, a bad marriage, and irrevocably tangled local interests. Even Dorothea’s dignified ambition is gently disciplined until it finds its most effective form in familiar, rather than grand, philanthropy. The finale is marked by “unhistoric acts”, whose effect is “incalculably diffusive” by virtue of its lack of design. It would certainly not be a stretch to feel the same dignification of the spontaneous in classical liberalism or with the Austrians.
I believe that English’s greatest strength is its infinite variety. It is a shame that a discipline that promises an infinity of interpretations has sequestered itself down one critical alley, insofar that the study of English is deemed a defining feature of a politician like Burnham. Perhaps the decades of theory piled atop finally deserves its own dismantling.