ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the uses of rational description as part of not only political thinking, but as central to what power is, especially in the way we struggle to disentangle power and goodness. Some people imagine that power is evil. If power is evil, then the ideal, the dream, becomes of a world without coercion, and, therefore, a life without conflict, free of the evils of force and constraint. The context for thinking and discussion will not be arguments about theories of justice or the nature of obligation. Instead the context for thinking and discussion will be a collection of literary texts and everyday examples in which the kind of descriptive reasoning exemplified by Elizabeth Bennet can be brought to bear. Someone like Lydia never even loses her positive self-description no matter how precarious her social position becomes.
