ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections in the course of reading a novel from Japan that was translated by one of Friedrich Hayek's students at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s. It argues that the novel allows us to consider how the hard edges and concrete closures of ideological conviction can dissolve into more delicate moments of open-ended literary pleasure. The chapter examines the moments in Kokoro which do not disclose any obvious alignment with a particular political position. Edwin McClellan came of age at around the same time that Hayek formed the Mont Pelerin Society. As an indeterminate novel which is not "patently" ideological, McClellan's Kokoro appealed to the liberal imagination at mid-century not as a pedagogical manual of citizenship, nor through the closed circuits of doctrinaire conviction, but as a "great book" of the human condition available for continual interpretation.
