The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
I'm more cautious about what I write.
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.
I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.
I think that there is generally less of a community and that the fragmentation of the left is a symptom. I think that it is less and less possible to take for granted certain cultural references.
The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.
The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.
That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.
I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo-Conservatives.
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
We are ruled by quotations.
You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.
That tendency of social thought to generalize, to describe a leading tendency in a society in such a way that it seems that everything falls within its iron laws, is very common. Of course our own experience tells us that life is not as monochrome as these thinkers depict it. On the other hand they are very valuable because they alert us to transformations we are likely to take for granted.
