Martha Nussbaum and others claim that the study of literature can make a significant contribution to political education by nurturing empathic capacities. In Nussbaum's reading of the situation, the need to promote the creation of bonds of compassion-based solidarity between co-citizens provides material for an argument to restore the study of novels, in particular the realist social novel, to its former place near the centre of the curriculum in higher education. This paper argues that the unrivalled educational value that Nussbaum ascribes to the study of novels in this regard is compelling only when one fails to appreciate that rich imaginative involvement in another's aversive state is only one of many other psychological routes to compassion. The paper begins by sketching out Nussbaum's curricular proposal. After explaining how it presupposes what is labelled the perspective-taking/compassion hypothesis, I go on to catalogue the various psychological processes which are recognized in social psychology as playing a mediating role in the experience of compassion. In closing, I argue that the educational imperative of building up of bonds compassion-based solidarity between co-citizens calls for a curricular response more varied than Nussbaum's. (Contains 3 notes.)