Böcker av Mark Lilla

Aristotle claimed that all human beings want to know. Yet our own experience proves that all human beings also want not to know. Today, centuries after the Enlightenment, mesmerised crowds still follow preposterous prophets; irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts; and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. Why is this? Where does this will to ignorance come from, and how does it continue to shape our lives?In this dazzling exploration of our wish for innocence and ignoranceand its consequences acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know. With erudition and brio, Lilla ranges from the Book of Genesis and PlatosDialoguesto Sufi parables and Sigmund Freud, revealing the paradoxes of hiding truth from ourselves. He also exposes the illusions that this impulse can lead us to entertain: the belief that the ecstasies of prophets, mystics and holy fools will offer access to esoteric truths; the mythology of childrens lamb-like innocence; and nostalgic fantasies of recapturing the glories of vanished, allegedly purer civilisations.

From one of the most internationally admired political thinkers, a controversial polemic on the failures of identity politics and what comes next for the left -- in America and beyond.Following the shocking results of the US election of 2016, public intellectuals across the globe offered theories and explanations, but few were met with such vitriol, panic, and debate as Mark Lilla's. The Once and Future Liberal is a passionate plea to liberals to turn from the divisive politics of identity and develop a vision of the future that can persuade all citizens that they share a common destiny.Driven by a sincere desire to protect society's most vulnerable, the left has unwittingly balkanized the electorate, encouraged self-absorption rather than solidarity, and invested its energies in social movements rather than party politics. Identity-focused individualism has insidiously conspired with amoral economic individualism to shape an electorate with little sense of a shared future and near-contempt for the idea of the common good.Now is the time to re-build a sense of common feeling and purpose, and a sense of duty to one another. A fiercely argued, important book, enlivened by acerbic wit and erudition, The Once and Future Liberal is essential reading for our times.

European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How could intellectuals whose work depends on freedom defend those who would deny it?   In profiles of six leading twentieth-century thinkers—Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida—Mark Lilla explores the psychology of political commitment. As continental Europe gave birth to two great ideological systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, the philotyrannical intellectual. Lilla shows how these thinkers were not only grappling with enduring philosophical questions, they were also writing out of their own experiences and passions. These profiles demonstrate how intellectuals can be driven into a political sphere they scarcely understand, with momentous results.In a new afterword, Lilla traces how the intellectual world has changed since the end of the cold war. The ideological passions of the past have been replaced in the West, he argues, by a dogma of individual autonomy and freedom that both obscures the historical forces at work in the present and sanctions ignorance about them, leaving us ill-equipped to understand those who are inflamed by the new global ideologies of our time.

An impassioned and biting critique of the failure of American liberalism.