For Stephan Haggard, fiction provides a unique way to study the dynamics of dictatorships and the people living under their rule
UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy emeritus professor Stephan Haggard is a political scientist who spent much of his career studying transitions to and from democratic rule. Now, he’s adding a new role to his CV as a reviewer of novels.
Haggard, in conjunction with recent UC San Diego Ph.D. Matthew Draper, has launched a project at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) probing what social scientists can learn from novels on authoritarian rule.
Haggard had been deeply involved in IGCC’s Future of Democracy Initiative, working with social scientists — and he is hardly alone. GPS has a host of faculty who are interested in studying democracies and how to prevent them from sliding into authoritarian rule, including Jesse Driscoll, Emilie Hafner-Burton, Lauren Prather and Barbara F. Walter. But Haggard saw an opportunity to broaden the lens to consider the contributions that fiction and the humanities more generally had to offer.
From 1984 to the Present
Haggard and Draper were collaborating on a related project about how academics and public intellectuals viewed the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In the course of doing that work, they were studying George Orwell’s intellectual trajectory. They found an increasing preoccupation over time with the theme of democracy and dictatorship that culminated in “Animal Farm” and “1984.”
As they re-read these novels, it dawned on them there was an entire genre at stake: novels in which authoritarian rule figured centrally in the narrative. As they started to probe, they identified well over 100 novels with this theme, and as colleagues, friends and readers respond, more are turning up every day.
To date they have reviewed about 30 novels in five posts on the IGCC website. These reviews had a particular purpose: to probe themes in the novels that lined up with what we know about how such systems work.
Navigating the Genre
It quickly became apparent that this work came in a variety of different forms. Some novels were closely-researched historical fiction. These often came from victims of dictatorship who sought to bear witness about particular systems: from Communist ones (Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”) to the military dictatorships of Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world (Han Kang’s “Human Acts” on Korea or Isabell Allende’s “The House of Spirits” on Chile).
Yet other novels were dystopias, starting with early entries like Zamyatin’s “We,” Kafka’s “The Trial” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” from the 1920s and 1930s, up to the present These novels imagined futures in which adverse trends culminated in various forms of authoritarian rule.
One recurrent theme in these dystopias are the two-edge effects of technology. Surveillance, for example, is a theme from 1984 straight through to contemporary dystopias such as Laila Lalami’s recent “The Dream Hotel,” which imagines a world in which even our dreams can be monitored.
Technologies can also be used both to repress but also to lull publics into passivity. In Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” for example, massive TV-like screens covering the four walls of living rooms gradually dumb down the public and make it hostile to books, which the regime burns when found.
One variant of these dystopias are those probing near misses, including in the U.S. In “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth explores anti-semitism by depicting what the U.S. might have looked like if Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator who also espoused Nazi beliefs, were elected president. Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Prophet Song” portrays an Ireland slipping backward into authoritarian rule and probes how households navigate mysterious new rules that make life uncertain and difficult.
“It’s so exciting to work on this project with Steph,” Draper said. “He’s always a novel or two ahead of me, and it’s a lot of fun to discuss the novels with him. His edits always make my reviews better, and he has a knack for distilling the real point out of a mass of sloppy prose.”
What Can We Learn from Novels
Haggard believes novels are uniquely suited to portraits of how characters think, feel and behave.
“Authoritarian rule is sustained by individual choices,” he said. “One common question that many of these novels raise is: Do you have the courage or the wherewithal to attempt to resist?”
In “Midnight in Berlin,” Hans Fallada shows how the Nazi regime fostered a culture of informing on neighbors you might happen to dislike; relationships are poisoned. And collective family punishment meant that acts of resistance put many at risk.
Nonetheless, such resistance ultimately arises and is usually grounded in some psychological breaking point when it is no longer possible to remain complicit.
Some novels work to demythologize the dictator, looking at him (and it usually is a him) as a flesh-and-blood human rather than a figurehead emblazoned on propaganda posters. This allows readers to catch a rare glimpse, albeit a conjectural one, into the thought processes, beliefs and fears that motivate autocrats.
Haggard gives the example of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” which examines the inner thoughts of a fictional Caribbean dictator. He contends with the fact that despite his virtually unlimited earthly power, he is doomed to die just like everyone else.
Although the project is in an early stage, Draper and Haggard plan a book on the genre. At a minimum, Haggard believes that such an effort would help those teaching about democracy and autocracy. But he thinks there might be more at stake.
“The personal stories that undergird all fiction aren’t always the focus of academic social science,” Haggard said. “But it is those choices which ultimately make democracy and autocracy stable political forms.”
