Sublime

for those whose politics is founded on nostalgia, there is no need for imagination.

the world’s most visible public intellectuals today more often revive or reassert old ideas, rather than generating new ones. The result is that old zombie orthodoxies survive far longer than they should.

The essence of politics can be subsumed in the question: what are individuals capable of when they meet, organize, think and take decisions?

The nostalgics are beginning to find an identity and empathy with the progressives.

Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.

modus vivendi

political and economic interests

As someone who had spent several years on American campuses, all of these ideas rang familiar to me. They echoed the sixties’ revulsion to military strength, the romance with developing societies, and the questioning of American primacy. Regarding the Middle East, in particular, one could discern the reverberations of Edward Said’s Orientalism, whi