Sublime

in a godless universe, the abject horror of meaningless existence is too much for any individual to bear.

Postmodernism can be construed as the name for the complex of crises that the decline in the belief in the big Other has triggered, as Lyotard’s famous formulation of the postmodern condition – ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ –suggests. Jameson, of course, would argue that the ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ is one expression of the ‘cult

Rather, it begins with a sense of the limits of the liberal project: the damage done by individualism; liberty reduced to the removal of constraints on private choice; individual rights disconnected from mutual obligations; the erosion of intermediary institutions by the combined power of the free market aided by the centralized state; global disor

What Marx is describing here is how the abandonment of tradition has actually ushered in a gigantic crisis in humanity’s

Macaulay believed that the disjunctions that afflicted us were intrinsic to the human condition and there was no permanent escape from them.

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.” Once inevitability was taken for granted, criticism indeed became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and