Possibility's Parents: Stories at the End of Liberalism by Margaret Seyford Hrezo and Nicholas Pappas (review)

Our still fresh decade has quickly come to be defined by cultural upheaval, political turmoil, and societal rupture of, indeed, pandemic proportions. This pervasive state of flux and crisis underscores the calls for ideological reconfigurations presented in Possibility's Parents, which is also to say that the publication of this book is nothing if not timely.

Margaret Seyford Hrezo and Nicholas Pappas waste no time announcing that their work is an ambitious and academically idiosyncratic response to an age of crisis. The first line of the preface reads: "This book's approach to the human search for communal order is unusual" (xi). Both authors are emeritus professors of political science, but Possibility's Parents aims to use analyses of works of literature to suggest a full-scale alternative to the tradition of classical Western liberalism from Locke to these days, which Hrezo and Pappas deem "no longer viable," so that "political philosophy must begin searching for new possibilities in answering the questions posed by human existence" (xi).

The book is first and foremost unusual in the sense that it explicitly situates itself against certain academic norms, or what the authors see as a lack of accessibility and "overspecialization" that characterizes the field of political science. The need to ameliorate this alienation between theorists and a less specialized audience of readers is presented in the preface as the reason for the book's deployment of literature as its prism for fleshing out ideas that are more often encountered within the realm of political philosophy. Furthermore, a glossary is appended "to help with unfamiliar terms" used throughout the book (x). Another rather unusual device used in the book's attempt to further the general relatability of its subject matter is the choice to set off each chapter with a question posed by a grandson of one of the authors—questions such as, "Do you believe in magic?" and "What do you think happens to people when they die?" Yet, contrary to the helpful and commendable pedagogical enhancements provided by the glossary and the preface, this structural device does not add anything substantial to the book's approach.

In their quest for new ways of answering the questions posed by human existence, the authors erect a philosophical and terminological scaffolding that is lucidly explained in the book's first chapter. The identification of Western liberalism as the bane of life and existence in late modernity might sound like part of a deconstructivist or postmodern approach to recent history. At first glance this seems to be borne out by the statement that "[t]otalizing narratives serve no purpose other than to develop or sustain entrenched power," which seems to point towards both Foucauldian perspectives on power structures and a postmodern resistance to grand narratives. However, Hrezo and Pappas quickly distance themselves from postmodernism in any of its guises with the added claim that "meta-narratives do not need to be totalizing. They can reflect preliminary answers to the unending search for the truth of human existence" (ix). In other words, Possibility's Parents is a book that believes in the existence of a kernel of universal truth and, furthermore, believes that such truth can be attainable through the transformative potential of literature. Paradoxically, this rather altmodisch notion of a universally valid truth, along with the authors' decision to forego a more conventionally academic approach to their subject, provides a certain freshness to the book's perspective, after several decades when questioning the viability of truth as an experiential category has been de rigueur across disciplines in the humanities.

The non-totalizing meta-narrative presented in the first chapter, which also serves as the framework for the book's literary analyses, is constructed on the concepts of "mythopoesis" and "metaxy." The privileged status of "mythopoesis"— and its practitioners, the "mythopoets"—is rooted in the authors' assumptions that "all human beings live some myth," that "myth is part of the...