Miguel de Cervantes as Political Theorist: The Narrative Politics of Don Quixote

This article proposes reading Don Quixote as a work of, rather than a supplement to, political theory. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s accounts of narrative configuration and narrative identity, I develop a concept called ‘narrative politics’ to describe the condition when political judgment must proceed through contested interpretation rather than the application of a unified framework. I argue that Cervantes stages precisely this condition through the formal innovations of Don Quixote: the novel’s unstable narrators, competing sources, and politically charged choice of a Moorish historian as chronicler establish the condition of narrative politics from its opening pages. Two extended case studies develop this argument. First, the interpolated tale ‘El curioso impertinente’ dramatizes how the pursuit of epistemic certainty through rational method destroys the bonds of trust on which collective life depends. Second, the metafictional opening of Part II stages the instability of narrative authority under conditions of competing interpretations. Together these episodes reveal Don Quixote as a meditation on the fragility of political judgment in Cervantes’s own early modern Iberian world, where no single narrative can secure authority, and where judgment emerges only through the irreducibly plural activity of interpretation.