What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.