The Danger of Too Much Safety
The authors quote the progressive activist Van Jones giving the perfect response to those who want to maintain a fugitive and cloistered virtue by not listening: "I don’t want you to be safe."
The Medium Against the Message: The Dilemma of Utopian Narration
The inhabitants of utopia, their creators insist, are happy. But their lives are depicted as so relentlessly public, so entirely ordered and uneventful that their posited felicity is not something that many readers would willingly share.
Shylock’s Conversion
The thesis of this essay is simply stated: The Merchant of Venice is a Christian play and a comedy that…
Condorcet and the Logic of Technocracy
From Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre in the eighteenth century through such twentieth-century critics as Lewis Mumford, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin, the utopian concept of a rationally planned or dirigiste society is viewed as one of reason’s most nightmarish monsters.
Lyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution: Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere
A careful reading of Kundera’s observations about the novel suggests that they do not quite cross the border to unmeaning, but in any case it is the novels themselves that embody the deeper insight, as the author himself would no doubt cheerfully concede.
“The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”: The Utopian as Sadist
Only these figures, their inner lives properly regulated, are meant by nature to rule the rest, just as the head rules the body. “A multitude,” Plato asserts, “cannot be philosophical,” a capacity reserved for a select few.