Sublime

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

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.

Foucault’s conception of the episteme, which is an updated version of Marx’s theory of ideology. Since the class-theory is a genuine science, bourgeois political thought is ideology.

I believe that future critics of our current political order will identify, as political fictions, what might be called the liberalism triad: freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice.

Une nation ne tombera jamais d’accord sur un modèle de bonheur. Toute tentative d’un gouvernement d’imposer une seule philosophie à ses citoyens s’avère nécessairement coercitive et despotique. Berlin affirme que les gouvernements devraient protéger la « liberté négative » de leurs citoyens – c’est-à-dire se garder de toute ingérence – et les laiss