Richard Hanania on Conrad's Nostromo, Latin American Crime, and Populism

Tyler Cowen and Richard Hanania begin with Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel, set in Costa Guana, a fictional Latin American country whose Occidental Province faces the Pacific. Charles Gould, an Englishman with local roots, runs a silver mine financed by Western “material interests” that support a moderate conservative government. A revolt led by Defense Minister Montero threatens the mine and the region. The title character, Nostromo, is an Italian seaman employed by the O.N.S. Shipping Company; the plot also follows his ties to hotelier Giorgio Viola, Viola’s wife Teresa, and their daughters. Both readers find the 560-page novel difficult but deliberately complex because its fragmented form reflects a complicated world.

Hanania reads Nostromo as a remarkably modern development-economics novel: poor countries need Western capital and expertise, yet foreign wealth is easy for demagogues to attack. The mine raises living standards and is sufficiently popular that miners later march on the city to defend Gould, although Cowen notes that profits may leave the country and that Conrad cares more about moral than material progress. Cowen also argues that Conrad criticizes classical liberalism, not just socialism: liberty, democracy, and foreign rule become another pathology in a society governed by corruption, rent-seeking, and inherited customs. Hanania agrees the liberal characters are foolish but compares them favorably with Montero’s brutal, ignorant political leadership.

Their sharpest disagreement concerns Nostromo. Cowen emphasizes his four names—Nostromo (“our man”), Capataz de Cargadores, and finally Captain Fidanza—and sees the changing labels as exposing a vain thief whose reputation rests on other people’s faith. Teresa’s criticism is decisive for Cowen: Nostromo cares more about being praised than about genuine loyalty, treats the Viola daughters as interchangeable, and is corrupted by the silver. Hanania instead regards him as poor, brave, and broadly decent until tempted by the treasure. His vanity is limited, not sadistic; he wants women to feel valued, and his instinct to protect his reputation reflects a recognizable, healthier masculinity rather than villainy.

Hanania says the novel’s time shifts initially seemed confusing but became a way to show how political events look in retrospect: Captain Mitchell’s later account is itself a jumble that listeners cannot follow, much as revolutions lose their apparent straight line over time. Cowen connects this to Conrad’s Shakespearean interest in tragic situations rather than comparative political judgments. They also discuss the striking absence of serious religion. Although the setting is a former Spanish colony and a priest appears, the Church is portrayed mainly as reactionary and self-interested; both suggest that Conrad, who was not a believer, treats religion as another form of domination or as a vacuum in which political figures become godlike.

Cowen argues that geography and firsthand travel are Conrad’s fundamental forms of political knowledge: his characters move through places whose differences reveal their societies. Hanania sees Conrad as possessing a non-expansionist nationalism—admiring English civic virtue while rejecting Kaiser-era Germany, Tsarist Russia, and modern nativism. They consider Fredric Jameson’s claim that a Latin American author could not have written Nostromo. Hanania thinks Conrad lacks the region’s nostalgic, misty self-understanding; Cowen notes that Conrad had never really visited Latin America yet captured an imagined mixture of Italians, indigenous groups, Englishmen, and others. The United States’ growing role, especially around Panama, points toward a possible future beyond British influence.

Hanania read Nostromo first, then Conrad’s four major novels, Maya Jasanoff’s biography, “Autocracy and War,” and selected criticism; he stopped reading the biography when it summarized The Secret Agent and read that novel directly. He also watched BBC documentaries about the Congo River to understand the geography behind Heart of Darkness. Cowen reread Nostromo twice, switching between Kindle and audiobook, and found most of roughly twenty JSTOR articles unhelpful except Robert Kaplan’s “Conrad’s Nostromo and the Third World” and Claire Rosenfeld’s archetypal analysis. They connect Conrad’s development concerns to Congo’s decline after relative prosperity and to Panama, whose U.S.-backed intervention produced peaceful, comparatively effective governance despite looking in 1980 like it might become another Vietnam.

Hanania says Nostromo contains political violence but little street crime, unlike contemporary Latin America. He attributes the modern pattern to the combination of democracy, civil liberties, and low state capacity: imprisoned cartel leaders can sometimes run their organizations, a situation he considers nearly unthinkable in the Middle East. Cowen adds incomplete nation-building, rapid urbanization, difficult geography, and drug-export markets that make authority contested, particularly in Colombia and Mexico. Hanania stresses that the problem also appears inside cities, where states should most easily monopolize violence, and says this helps explain the excitement around El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. They note that dense family and community ties can make very poor societies safer.

Asked whether he has changed his mind after criticizing Shakespeare, Hanania distinguishes objective artistic superiority from historical influence. He doubts an alien could identify Shakespeare as inherently the best English-language writer, because artistic judgments depend on prestige, social proof, and cultural signaling; nevertheless, Shakespeare was exceptionally innovative and influential, and Hanania would still choose him if forced to name the greatest by history’s standards. Cowen says Hanania is conceding much to the Shakespearean consensus and notes that Conrad admired Shakespeare. Hanania mentions Dennis McCarthy’s argument that Thomas North wrote Shakespeare, which Cowen agrees to investigate through GPT Pro before reading the book.

Hanania remains more favorable to professional media than to Twitter, podcasts, and other unfiltered alternatives, because fact-checkers and journalistic institutions provide an indispensable anchor for knowledge. Still, he says the media have declined in his estimation, especially through hostile, negativity-biased coverage of technology and AI. Cowen agrees that reporting often focuses on theoretical harms and misses major developments. Both are optimistic that AI could improve the information environment: people already ask Grok to verify claims, and research suggests AI can patiently dismantle conspiracy theories without insulting believers. Hanania’s broader lesson from Nostromo and populism is comparative: flawed institutions may be preferable to demagogic replacements.

Hanania names Steve Sailer, Helen Andrews, and Dominic Cummings as relatively worthwhile figures on the populist right, valuing independence over partisan reasoning. He considers “my side is right” the lowest form of bias and looks for writers who can criticize liberals without treating every liberal as evil. He says Trumpism combines economic libertarianism, retrograde nationalism, nativism, and personal corruption; AI deregulation may help the economy, but economic gains cannot excuse every degradation of public life. He is unsure what he will write next, possibly fiction, but wants to spend a month or two studying quantum physics and its philosophical implications. Books remain useful to him as consolidated versions of ideas scattered across shorter media.