Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.

The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.

For four hundred years European civilization has dominated the world - for better or for worse. It is convenient, and flattering, for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it very rash to do so.

America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.

Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans.

Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.

The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres.