Sublime

“He can’t serve in the military? Let him seek public office. Must he live in the private sector? Let him be a spokesperson. Is he condemned to silence? Let him aid his fellow citizens by silent public witness. Is it dangerous to enter the Forum? Let him display himself, in private homes, at public events and gatherings, as a good associate, faithfu

“The tragedy of man,” the twentieth-century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “is that he can conceive self-perfection but cannot achieve it.” And the tragedy of America is that we can imagine justice but cannot finally realize it.

The question, then, is why we fight over what we can’t measure. Is it because we need our disputes to be decidable,

politicization—the mapping of a disagreement onto a contest—is

To say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other humans; to say that we are political means something more specific, which is that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so. The set of fictions listed above are attempts to mitigate the

One may well wonder, then, what practical purpose is served by the ideal. If a person who is utterly depraved is no worse in relation to true virtue than one who has just a few faults, then why would one ever try to improve? What would improvement even mean, if virtue is something you either have or you don’t?

At one point, Socrates’ interlocutor Alcibiades makes the claim that “the just differs from the advantageous.”

The two writers must have known one another, and indeed, they were to die accused of conspiracy in the same plot against Nero; but there is no record of a friendship, and the chances are that there was no love lost between the senatorial arbiter elegantarium (“judge of tasteful things”), with his mocking, distanced attitude to the absurdities of co

“You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere—not in logic, nor in wealth, fame, or in any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. How is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil,