Sympathy for Oswald Mosley: Politics of Reading and Historical Resemblance in the Moral Imagination of an English Literary Society

The mid-twentieth-century English novelist, Henry Williamson, wrote nature stories but also romantic and historical fiction, including a fifteen-volume saga that contains a largely favorable characterization of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. This essay considers the challenge of such a fascist character through the prism of the literary imagination of Williamson readers, and more specifically through my longstanding ethnographic work with an English literary society constituted in the author’s name. I am centrally concerned with how literary society members deal with the positive depiction of the Mosley-based character through the stages of the reading process that they identify and describe. Do the immersive values commonly attached to their solitary reading culture, for instance, assist or further problematize that engagement? What role does their subsequent, shared practice of character evaluation play? As well as considering the treatment of characters as objects of sympathy, I explore the vital sympathies that for literary society members tie characters together with historical persons. Across the essay I dialogue with anthropological literature on exemplars, historical commentaries on the fascist cult of leadership, and finally with the philosophical claims that Nussbaum makes for the moral and political consequences of fiction reading.

Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism

This chapter proposes that a proper telos for the study of religion is Critical Humanism. Drawing on Aristotle and Charles Taylor, it explains how Critical Humanism provides a theoretical framework for studying religion and describes its mobile, liberal, dialogical, and inclusive aspects. Building on the ideas of Felski, Walzer, Rorty, and the environmental humanities, it notes how Critical Humanism places a premium on expanding the moral imagination and examines the connections between that idea and humanistic scholarship. That discussion leads into an account of four values to which the study of religion can be connected: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. The chapter then describes four works in the study of religion that exemplify these values. Lastly, it summarizes the chapter’s arguments in response to the challenges posed by Weber’s view of science and Welch’s reckoning with the field’s “identity crisis” as described in chapters 1 and 2.

Personal and Objective Ethics: How to Read the Crito

Dominant interpretations of Plato's Crito attempt to reconstruct the text deductively, taking the arguments in the famous Laws’ speech as consisting solely in the application of general principles to facts. It is thus conceived that the principles and facts are grasped independently of each other, and then the former are applied to the latter, subsequently reaching the conclusion that Socrates must not escape. Following the lead of Cora Diamond, who argues against this ‘generalist interpretation’, I argue that the Laws’ speech essentially involves an exercise of our moral imagination through which both principles and the facts to which they apply are grasped. This is not to say that a deductive argument is absent from the Laws’ speech. Rather, for the first time, we understand how the deductive arguments in the Laws’ speech can function through imagining a life in which these arguments make sense. The Crito is an attempt to exercise the readers’ imagination, thereby presenting ethics that is both personal and objective. Understanding the Laws’ arguments essentially requires the readers’ imaginative involvement with Socrates’ personal story, but they still have objective import.

The Fork in the Road for Social Enterprises: Leveraging Moral Imagination for Long-Term Stakeholder Support

Social enterprises (SEs) that receive early stakeholder support for their dual economic/social missions risk losing moral legitimacy when stakeholders assess them for social impact and find it lacking. We present a process model that begins at the “fork in the road” of stakeholder assessment and shows that when SEs continue to focus on primary stakeholders at the expense of secondary stakeholders impacted by the firm, they risk losing moral legitimacy and broader stakeholder support. Our model shows the process by which SEs can leverage their moral imagination and develop capabilities to generate long-term stakeholder support and sustained value creation.