Sublime

Moreover, for Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs. So, too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics,” “maki

Keep small, vote mainstream, and nod like it all makes sense. Yet here she is, asking for trouble. Acting like what she does might matter.

The lives of learned men have at many times been perforce nomadic. At the beginning of Greek philosophy, many of the philosophers were refugees from the Persians; at the end of it, in the time of Justinian, they became refugees to the Persians. In the fifth century, as we have just seen, men of learning fled from Gaul to the Western Isles to escape

Rather, the task of our democratic society is to be organized in such a way that we are intrinsically motivated to participate in, contribute to, and transform its ongoing life, by virtue of having been educated to exercise our spiritual freedom.

Tocqueville

On 20 May 1968, Sartre spoke to a gathering of about 7,000 students who had occupied the Sorbonne’s magnificent auditorium. Of all the eager intellectuals who had wanted to get involved, Sartre was the one chosen to be wired up to a microphone and led before the melee to speak — as always, so diminutive that he was hard to spot, but in no doubt abo