I guess what happens to a lot of people as they get older is that they get more conservative, but with me, the opposite is the case.

The yearning for the common good comes from the refusal to accept that perhaps Americans have very little in common apart from the elements of a sometimes successful civil religion based around a sentimental, indeed sometimes teary-eyed, attachment to the constitution and a belief in the quasi-divine wisdom of the founding fathers.

I've always been very keen on Pascal, and what I'm most keen on in Pascal is his emphasis upon human wretchedness. He has a phrase which goes something like 'Anxiety, boredom and inconstancy, that is the human condition' and I've always been very partial to that.

That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.

So, I am a b*stard, and the English are b*stards. But the really bad news is that you are too. My vision of Europe would be Europe of b*stards for whom the question of legitimacy was a site of endless struggle and contestation.

I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history.

There's a floating distraction in the contemporary world, life at a distance enabled by technology. I want people to commit at the level of their subjectivity. The idea of subjective commitment is at the core of ethics, something that divides the self from itself. I become an ethical self. I cannot meet that ideal, I cannot fulfill it, it divides me from myself and it makes me strive harder. This ideal subjective ethical drive is at the heart of an absolutely earnest, radical politics that insists that people will be able to engage with each other, and they're lifted from irony at that point.