Initial evaluation indicates that ast.literal_eval doesn't cut the mustard: it doesn't do any name lookups, so you can't for example successfully evaluate something like 'handlers.WatchedFileHandler' or even 'FileHandler'. 

However, a limited evaluator which goes further than ast.literal_eval will probably work. One such is shown in this Gist:

https://gist.github.com/3182304

It supports a reasonable subset of Python expressions and also could be useful in other contexts than logging configuration.