Socialism Is The Completion Of

What Persuades Men And Women To Mistake Each Other From Time To Time For Gods Or Vermin Is Ideology. One Can Understand Well Enough How Human Beings May Struggle And Murder For Good Material Reasons - Reasons Connected, For Instance, With Their Physical Survival. It Is Much Harder To Grasp How They May Come To Do So In The Name Of Something As Apparently Abstract As Ideas. Yet Ideas Are What Men And Women Live By, And Will Occasionally Die For.

The Conversion Of Agnostic High Tories To The Anglican Church Is Always Rather Suspect. It Seems Too Pat And Predictable, Too Clearly A Matter Of Politics Rather Than Faith.

In The End, The Humanities Can Only Be Defended By Stressing How Indispensable They Are; And This Means Insisting On Their Vital Role In The Whole Business Of Academic Learning, Rather Than Protesting That, Like Some Poor Relation, They Don't Cost Much To Be Housed.

A Socialist Is Just Someone Who Is Unable To Get Over His Or Her Astonishment That Most People Who Have Lived And Died Have Spent Lives Of Wretched, Fruitless, Unremitting Toil.

Post-structuralism Is Among Other Things A Kind Of Theoretical Hangover From The Failed Uprising Of ‘68, A Way Of Keeping The Revolution Warm At The Level Of Language, Blending The Euphoric Libertarianism Of That Moment With The Stoical Melancholia Of Its Aftermath.