The brave defenders of Ukraine are hailed as fighting not just for their homeland but for a way of life. Isaiah Berlin called it the "liberal predicament" — to remain faithful to liberalism may be to fail liberalism. Cherniss says these thinkers offered a "tempered liberalism"; "an awareness of liberalism's drawbacks and defects". The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, channelling Hegel's …
The first season of HBO’s True Detective stars Matthew McConaughey as a lithe, taciturn detective named Rust Cohle. Life, concluded modern pessimism’s godfather, Arthur Schopenhauer, “is a business that does not cover its costs”. Pessimists perceive, as the scholar Joshua Foa Dienstag describes it, “a persistent mismatch between human purposes and the means available to achieve them; between our desire …
When La Peste was published in 1947, it was read in part as an allegory of France’s plight under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Soon on his rounds he sees rats everywhere, some dead, others alive, and one of his patients who has asthma wryly comments: “they’re coming out, have you noticed?” People start dying, local authorities reluctantly …
