ABSTRACT
In Part I, I argued that the novels of Jane Austen demonstrate that our understanding of situations and people depends on the acuity of our descriptions. How we describe others has some connection with how we understand ourselves. For example, when Elizabeth Bennet’s prejudices about Darcy have begun to breakdown and her presumptions about Wickham have been revealed, she comments that she felt like she no longer knew herself or how to describe herself. She recovers. No one in Austen’s literary universe lives in a permanent state of such loss. Such crises of self-description in life, however, can lead to catastrophic breakdowns. I begin my explorations of power and description by examining Alexander Herzen’s account of two crises of self-description in the face of Tsarist autocratic power in nineteenth-century Russia. This chapter provides an anthropology of power, consonant with the descriptive reasoning found in Austen, that delineates a set of modern attitudes toward the relationship between politics and ethics.
