Harry Potter, Market Wiz 
By ILIAS YOCARIS
Published: NYT July 18, 2004

> The success of the Harry Potter series has provoked a lively discussion
among French literary theorists about the novels' underlying message and the
structure of Harry's school, Poudlard (Hogwarts). This article, which
appeared last month in the French daily Le Monde, got particular attention,
including an essay published in response arguing that Harry is an
antiglobalist crusader.

NICE, France	With the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling has enchanted
the world: the reader is drawn into a magical universe of flying cars,
spells that make its victims spew slugs, trees that give blows, books that
bite, elf servants, portraits that argue and dragons with pointed tails.

On the face of it, the world of Harry Potter has nothing in common with our
own. Nothing at all, except one detail: like ours, the fantastic universe of
Harry Potter is a capitalist universe.

Hogwarts is a private sorcery school, and its director constantly has to
battle against the state as represented, essentially, by the inept minister
of Magic, Cornelius Fudge; the ridiculous bureaucrat Percy Weasley; and the
odious inspector Dolores Umbridge.

The apprentice sorcerers are also consumers who dream of acquiring all sorts
of high-tech magical objects, like high performance wands or the latest
brand-name flying brooms, manufactured by multinational corporations.
Hogwarts, then, is not only a school, but also a market: subject to an
incessant advertising onslaught, the students are never as happy as when
they can spend their money in the boutiques near the school. There is all
sorts of bartering between students, and the author heavily emphasizes the
possibility of social success for young people who enrich themselves thanks
to trade in magical products.

The tableau is completed by the ritual complaints about the rigidity and
incompetence of bureaucrats. Their mediocrity is starkly contrasted with the
inventiveness and audacity of some entrepreneurs, whom Ms. Rowling never
ceases to praise. For example, Bill Weasley, who works for the goblin bank
Gringotts, is presented as the opposite of his brother, Percy the
bureaucrat. The first is young, dynamic and creative, and wears clothes that
"would not have looked out of place at a rock concert"; the second is
unintelligent, obtuse, limited and devoted to state regulation, his career's
masterpiece being a report on the standards for the thicknesses of
cauldrons.

We have, then, an invasion of neoliberal stereotypes in a fairy tale. The
fictional universe of Harry Potter offers a caricature of the excesses of
the Anglo-Saxon social model: under a veneer of regimentation and
traditional rituals, Hogwarts is a pitiless jungle where competition,
violence and the cult of winning run riot.

The psychological conditioning of the apprentice sorcerers is clearly based
on a culture of confrontation: competition among students to be prefect;
competition among Hogwarts "houses" to win points; competition among sorcery
schools to win the Goblet of Fire; and, ultimately, the bloody competition
between the forces of Good and Evil.

This permanent state of war ends up redefining the role of institutions:
faced with ever-more violent conflicts, they are no longer able to protect
individuals against the menaces that they face everywhere. The minister of
magic fails pitifully in his combat against Evil, and the regulatory
constraints of school life hinder Harry and his friends in defending
themselves against the attacks and provocations that they constantly
encounter. The apprentice sorcerers are thus alone in their struggle to
survive in a hostile milieu, and the weakest, like Harry's schoolmate Cedric
Diggory, are inexorably eliminated.

These circumstances influence the education given the young students of
Hogwarts. The only disciplines that matter are those that can give students
an immediately exploitable practical knowledge that can help them in their
battle to survive.

That's not astonishing, considering how this prestigious school aims to
form, above all, graduates who can compete in the job market and fight
against Evil. Artistic subjects are thus absent from Hogwarts's curriculum,
and the teaching of social sciences is considered of little value: the
students have only some tedious courses of history. It's very revealing that
Harry finds them "as boring as Percy's reports cauldron-bottom report." In
other words, in the cultural universe of Harry Potter, social sciences are
as useless and obsolete as state regulation.

Harry Potter, probably unintentionally, thus appears as a summary of the
social and educational aims of neoliberal capitalism. Like Orwellian
totalitarianism, this capitalism tries to fashion not only the real world,
but also the imagination of consumer-citizens. The underlying message to
young fans is this: You can imagine as many fictional worlds, parallel
universes or educational systems as you want, they will still all be
regulated by the laws of the market. Given the success of the Harry Potter
series, several generations of young people will be indelibly marked by this
lesson.

> Ilias Yocaris is a professor of literary theory and French literature at
the University Institute of Teacher Training in Nice. This article was
translated by The Times from the French.