MOST MEN are content to believe that politics deals with the practical problems of the administration of the state. But the term can have a greater and wider significance. It can also mean, as it meant for Aristotle, the whole character of men's life in society. In the past as well as in the present, poets and novelists of every country have often devoted themselves not merely to the good of their art but directly and especially, in varying degrees, to the problem of the good of the state and of society. In an older England, for example, William Langland, Skelton, Dryden, Samuel Butler, Shelley, and William Morris, to mention only a few, have struck into political themes and preoccupations; and today the problem, from manifold aspects, of the relation of the individual to society has not been ignored by T. S. Eliot, J. M. Murry, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and even Mrs. Virginia Woolf, among others. And the “reform” of an afflicted twentieth-century America has engaged talents and humors as dissimilar as those of, say, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, and Maxwell Anderson. The seriousness of such people no one would question, although the agitations of a few, particularly in periods of crisis, for a specific good polity or a specific good economy sometimes interferes gravely with what should be their chief end: good art.
(Re)assembling the ‘normal’ in neoliberal policy discourses: tracing gender regimes in the age of risk
