Jose Saramago's political philosophy plays a complex, striking but mostly implicit role in much of his literature. However, by exploring the use of the fantastical counterfactual in his work, we are able to explicate, in more explicit fashion, an underlying understanding of the state, political crises and the various responses individual men and women are able to enact to confront those crises. Through the employment of the "counterfactual," most especially in Blindness, The Stone Raft and Death at Intervals, Saramago offers a riposte both to those who, although sharing his pessimism, enjoin it to a far too reductive view of human nature and to those complacent liberal optimists, who are incapable of providing an accurate view of our collective predicaments.