Journal article
Machiavellian fantasy and the game of laws
Critical Quarterly, Vol.57(1), pp.34-48
2015
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Abstract
For the emerging (inter)discipline of cultural legal studies, Game of Thrones provides a fascinating case study because it stages a society which is absolutely law-full, its fantastic ‘life-world’ constituted through binding oaths and dispositive judgments. Paradoxical then is the lawlessness which obtains here; for, if ever there was a socius in which rules were made to be broken, then it is Westeros: a realm in which realpolitik trumps law to such an extent that many commentators have hailed Martin’s cycle as ‘Machiavellian’—albeit in a rather loose, journalistic sense of that term of politics-as-machination. This paper will to take up and explore, in a more sustained fashion, the law/politics nexus of this singular ‘Machiavellian fantasy’, investigating how Game of Thrones problematises notions of ‘the prince’ (Robert Baratheon), civic republicanism (the city-states of Essos), and Pocockian ‘virtue, trade and commerce’ (the Lannisters). For the ‘Machiavellian moment’ that Martin’s text really longs may very well reside in an intervention—Daenerys and her dragons-as-‘WMDs’—which will break with the repetitive deadlock of the ‘game of thrones’, substituting instead a ‘game of laws’ capable of engaging the narrative’s central allegory: of global climate change in which ‘winter is coming’.
Details
- Title
- Machiavellian fantasy and the game of laws
- Creators
- William P MacNeil (Author) - Griffith University
- Publication Details
- Critical Quarterly, Vol.57(1), pp.34-48
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Identifiers
- 991012848100102368
- Copyright
- © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
- Academic Unit
- Law; Faculty of Business, Law and Arts; School of Law and Justice
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article