Practical Wisdom and the Literary Imagination: Wendell Berry, C. S. Lewis, and the Promise and Limits of Social Theory  Joshua P. Hochschild Mount St. Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, MD 21727 “One of the most profound human needs is for the truth of imagination to prove itself in every life and place in the world, and for the truth of the world’s lives and places to be proved in imagination.” —Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the University” (1984) What happens when a cabal of secular progressive technocrats takes over an his- toric, traditional liberal arts college? In one vivid instance, things quickly get out of hand: coopted meetings with rigged agendas, intrusion of outside “experts,” intercepted mail, new offices of pseudo-scientific analytics, propaganda cam- paigns and media manipulation, ugly architecture and exploitation of hallowed land, sale of college property, egregious law-breaking, installation of mindless figureheads, rent-seeking self-enrichment, ruthless retaliation against the dis- loyal, elimination of intransigent personnel, hatred of the crucifix, the very denial of truth about human nature. This is all pure fantasy, of course, the product of the fruitful imagination of an Oxford don seventy-five years ago. This is the vision of C. S. Lewis, whose novel That Hideous Strength makes a humble, humane campus the field of cos- mic spiritual warfare, with dark forces mocking and subverting the classical ideals of truth, beauty and goodness and undermining the Christian vision of the human person. We should wonder why Lewis chose progressive technocrats at a small liberal arts college as agents of evil, and whether Lewis’s fantasy offers any enduring practical wisdom. Such questions, interesting in their own right, will also serve as a prelude to reflecting on the political insight of Wendell Berry. I begin with C. S. Lewis’s fictional narrative in order to open up some of the im- aginative space we need to appreciate both the inspiration, and the distinctive contribution, of Berry’s socio-political thought. Lessons from Logres C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength is set at fictional Bracton College, a vener- able English university. As the novel begins, we see the faculty being manipulated into submitting to the authority of the National Institute of Coordi- nated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), an outfit determined to remake the world through  A previous version of this paper was presented as a lecture for the Thomistic Insti- tute chapter at the University of Texas at Austin, October 24, 2019, under the title, “Wendell Berry, Political Philosophy, and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.” The recorded lecture is available online.