“Can we find units of government that are “just right” – small enough to facilitate participation and yet large enough to exercise authority so significant as to make participation worthwhile?”
Robert Dahl, 1970, After the Revolution, Yale University Press.
“It is not an accident or a limitation or a prejudice that we cannot care equally about all the suffering in the world: it is a condition of our existence and our sanity.”
Bernard Williams, 2006, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Princeton University Press.
“Symbolically, future generations have replaced the proletariat in the collective imaginary as the focal point of public concern”.
Pierre Rosanvallon, 2013, The Society of Equals, Harvard University Press.
“I argue both directly and implicitly that it was the confrontation with the explosion of the art world and its discourses – as well as events on the street and the barricades – that released a generation of philosophers from the ivory tower of the École Normale Supérieure and that their engagement with contemporary art played a crucial role in formulating the new postmodern mindset”.
Sarah Wilson, 2010, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations, Yale University Press.
“It is no small statement to affirm that the richness of this controversy makes ostensible not the insurmountable divergence of the continental and analytic traditions, but rather the wealth and diversity of the discussions of intentionality in the twentieth century”.
Raoul Moati, 2014, Derrida/Searle: Deconstruction and Ordinary Language, Columbia University Press.
“Overall, the New Deal had to travel uncharted territory, often without maps in hand. To comprehend its achievements and their price, we must incorporate uncertainty’s state of doubt, and identify the objects of fear and the effects of being frightened”.
Ira Katznelson, 2013, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, Liveright Publishing.
“In the early 1960s, there was confusion over what to call this transaction – was it film, the movies, or cinema? You could tell a person’s taste and agenda by the word he used most often. “Cinema” meant the history, and the suggestion that it has been superior then; “film” was the essential function and might be covering an urge to make the stuff: while “movie” usually meant America and fun”.
David Thomson, 2012, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us, Allen Lane.
“Ironically, attempts to render technical that which is inherently political are feeding into and amplifying the proliferation of populist politics”.
Gill Hart, 2013, Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press.
“If we look more carefully at injustice, we will not find it any easier to answer the question: Is this a misfortune or an injustice? on any given occasion, but we may be less passively unjust than if we simply match complaints against the rules and come to a quick conclusion. To investigate the victim’s claims in the ways that I have suggested is only a tentative test to guide us, but it is both in keeping with the best impulses of democracy and our only alternative to a complacency that is bound to favor the unjust”.
Judith Shklar, 1990, The Faces of Injustice, Yale University Press.
“If sincerity has lost its former status, if the word itself has for us a hollow sound and seems almost to negate its meaning, that is because it does not propose being true to one’s own self as an end but only a means. If one is true to oneself for the purpose of avoiding falsehood to others, is one being truly true to one’s own self? The moral end in view implies a public end in view, with all that this suggests of the esteem and fair repute that follows upon the correct fulfilment of a public role”.
Lionel Trilling, 1972, Sincerity and Authenticity, Oxford University Press.
Pop Theory 