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This chapter considers the long tradition of poetry that is deliberative and argumentative, that stages a dispute or dialogue of two voices. By way of this formal structure of poetry, it extends claims about reading’s capacity to inculcate empathy. It argues that shifts in ethical behavior require a sea change across wide populations of readers. This means that the main work of the humanities is to ensure that books are placed in the hands of each incoming wave of students and carried back out to sea.

Every nation," wrote Kant, "must be so organized internally that not the head of the nation-for whom, properly speaking, war has no cost (since he puts the expense off on others, namely the people)-but rather the people who pay for it have the decisive voice as to whether or not there should be war." 1 He then added in parenthesis: "Of course, this necessarily presupposes the realization of the idea of that original contract." 2 This exercise of the population's voice, and with it, the affirmation of the social contract, is partly ensured in conventional war by the fact that the population is carrying the guns. Hobbes acknowledged the militiry as the final test point of consent when, in Behemoth, he wrote: "[I]f men know not their duty, what is there that can force them to obey the laws. An army, you will say. But what shall force the army?" 3 Kant asserted that war ought to be consensual; Hobbes asserted that war is consensual. When both the "ought" and the "is" are held visibly side by side, they together make clear the extremity of the dissolution of the social contract that comes about when a new form of weapon is invented that is wholly independent of the population's authorization. Everyday life continually puts before us the claim that in the emergency of war, when our own survival is at stake, some of the operations of consent have to fall away because of the speed required to respond. But in contract theory in general-as well as in one very specific social contract, the United States t Elaine Scarry is Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. I am grateful to Yale Law School, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and to the University of California, Berkeley, for the opportunities to present earlier versions of the essay. This Article has profited greatly from ongoing conversations with Akhil Amar. My thanks also to