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progressives (who, he claims, cleave to a Nurturant Parent Model) and conservatives (who prefer a Strict Father Model). The index to Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think includes two columns of metaphors, with keywords capitalized in what had by that time become the author’s trademark style. These include the Moral Accounting metaphor, the Moral Action as Financial Transaction metaphor, the Moral Boundaries metaphor, the Moral Essence metaphor, the Moral Growth metaphor, the Morality as Empathy metaphor, and many other capitalized metaphors of the same kind. Thus the section on Moral Health includes the propositions “Morality Is Health” and “Immorality Is Disease.” Without question, these are powerful paradigms, but they are even more powerful when the figure precedes the ground or, to use the standard phrase about metaphors, the vehicle precedes the tenor.

The “X is Y” formulation irresistibly suggests the George Orwell of both 1984 and Animal Farm but these literary and critical examples, together with the ironies and interpretive dangers they present, are few and far between. Orwell is, however, mentioned as the inventor of Big Brother, the “nightmare head of state” whose title illustrates the pervasiveness of “the Nation as Family metaphor.”9 In fact George Orwell is the only literary author mentioned in Moral Politics, a book that cites Christine Todd Whitman but not Walt Whitman, William Bennett but not Arnold Bennett, Katherine Harris but not Joel Chandler Harris, Sandra Day O’Connor but not Flannery O’Connor. Lakoff and another collaborator, Mark Turner, did, however, address the question of metaphors in literature in a book called More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. With advanced degrees in both mathematics and English literature, Turner was well placed to participate in ongoing conversations about such cognitive topics as “conceptual blending,” “conceptual integration,” and “the mind as an autocatalytic vortex.” He would later write several influential books that combined literary study and neuroscience. What is especially notable may be that his own career has migrated from English studies to cognitive science, where his professorial appointment is located.

In the preface to his book The Literary Mind Turner makes a set of claims about the centrality of literary thinking that might be considered compatible with the argument I’m making here. He sets out three “principles of mind,” which he calls story, projection, and parable, and makes a case for considering them fundamental to all thinking, not just the specialized processes and practices that are often called literary.

Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified by projection—one story helps us make sense of another. The projection of one story onto another is parable, a basic cognitive principle …

“In this book,” he continues, “I explore technical details of the brain sciences and the mind sciences that cast light on our use of parable … I explore the possibility that language is not the source of parable but instead its complex product.”

In itself, this is not a surprising idea. Narratologists from Vladimir Propp to Tzvetan Todorov to Gerard Genette have made claims for the role of story and fable. As early as the 1920s, Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale distinguished between fabula (the content of the story) and sujet (the form that the telling of the tale imposes on that content).10 In the late sixties, when ideas about the scientific (or social scientific) basis of literature provided an impetus for literary theorists, some of this work became important in the anthropological and critical practice known as structuralism. Man as the fiction-making animal was a favorite trope of the mid-twentieth century, in disciplines from literary studies to anthropology. Thus, for example, an innovative course, “Man and His Fictions”—otherwise known as Literature X—was the starting point of the new literature major