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At the core of liberalism, Trilling emphasized, was a “primal act of imagination.” Behind all the conceptual infrastructure that made up the liberal world was a visionary desire. Our laws and customs might be the forms of our freedom, but they could not account for its content, for the value we att…

[...] Literature is at once close to home and strange: a world of fantasy and desire, of unwanted guests and uncanny returns. To understand liberalism through literature is to stop asking how it works, or trying to show that it doesn’t. It is, rather, to understand how we could organize our lives a…

That we can even ask such a question suggests that having kids is no longer, as it was for previous generations, a necessary part of the good life. But it reveals something more besides: that as we deprive the earth of its capacities to sustain life, we are losing our own ability to see the point i…

For me, the theme of the convention in Washington was not a new Constitution but organization for survival, and from that time on, we began to refer to the Party community programs as survival programs. The whole idea of the community programs had been developed by Bobby Seale while I was in prison…

All this time I was under immense pressure to give interviews, to fill speaking engagements, to appear on talk shows and television programs, but I accepted none of these for about six months. I even received a brochure from some Hollywood outfit. It contained newspaper clippings about me and a let…