What JK Rowling’s Magical World Teaches Us About "Magical" Politics

• In Event: “The Boy Who Lived” On: Politics, Populism, and Harry Potter

Abstract

When J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are read as works of fantasy literature, and measured against other such works, one notices something rather rare: Rowling’s imagined world takes place in our world (specifically, the United Kingdom) and in our time (specifically, the 1990s). Hers was an organized magical community–with a government, a system of economy, a popular culture, and much more–co-existing with (or, specifically, hidden alongside) the technology, sociology, and politics of the late 20th-century. Typically, fantasy writers will not attempt this; usually fantasy presents us either with entirely different worlds (e.g., J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, George R.R. Martin’s Westeros and Essos), or with the magic of the fantasy world existing in a parallel world connected to, but still fundamentally distinct from, our own (C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, Lev Grossman’s Fillory). Rowling’s struggle to make her magical society concomitant with the societies of the real world is thus worthy of reflection.

I say “struggle” because, as a great many of some of Rowling’s more devoted fans could explain at length, her effort is not always a persuasive one. This is visible in all sorts of small ways–for example, if wizards and witches cannot simply create food out of thin air, then either there is, somewhere, an extensive wizarding agricultural industry, or else the wizarding world’s must use Oblivation spells constantly to allow tens of thousands of people in Great Britain alone to obtain foodstuffs without anyone knowing about their existence. But perhaps the most interesting way it manifests itself, though, is through the Ministry of Magic. This government is shown–for story purposes, of course–to fail to act in ways that one would hope a representative government would act. And yet the reactions of the characters in the story reveal that the conceptual world governed by the Ministry of Magic is all but entirely borrowed from the representative assumptions associated with the U.K.’s parliamentary government, despite the many elements of the story–ranging from magical forms of communication to quasi-medieval conceptions about law and order–that seem to provide no ground whatsoever for such assumptions to ever exist.

All this underscores a point which has long haunted, and continues to haunt, those who would pursue a politics that contravenes the economic, social, and technological supports of modern liberal and capitalist societies. If fiction writers struggle to figure out how to bring radical, even utopian (and what could be more utopian than magic?) possibilities into the existing world, without at the same time, whether intentionally or not, changing that world to accommodate them, then surely political theorists have to recognize the difficulty of postulating radical–and what their many critics deride as “magical”–possibilities, be they agrarian or socialist or Luddite or democratic. Many do recognize this, of course. But the lessons of Rowling’s work–its imaginative successes as well as its failures–needs to be added to the argument which has been taken up by such thinkers as David Eastlund, Gerald Gaus, Jacob Levy, John Rawls, and Erik Olin Wright: namely, how can the imagining of different political arrangements be disentangled from the pedestrian assumptions which, under such “ideal” conditions, shouldn’t exist at all?

Author

• Russell Arben Fox, Friends University