A very boring post which might save the world

Simple: read this article by Tony Judt. It's quite long because complicated ideas require lengthy exploration. It's a slowly dying man's attempt to relegitimise the state as a force for good in the face of decades of individualism and selfishness.

This is how he explains his status:

"Today I'm regarded outside New York University as a Looney Tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I'm … a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist … I'm on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable."

If you added a little more hard left authoritarianism, you'd reach my politics. Judt's a classic liberal: he believes in a balance between personal liberty and a state which works for the greater good under the direction of an enlightened electorate. Me? I've met Tories. They can't be rehabilitated. They belong in camps.

Still, in an ideal world, Tony Judt for President. Meanwhile, buy his book.

We have lost touch with the old questions that have defined politics since the Greeks: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society? A better world? The US and UK today are more unequal – in incomes, wealth, health, education, life chances – than at any time since 1914. Is this desirable? Is it prudent? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. Until we have learned – or re-learned – how to pose them, we shall go on as before.

And John Rawls' classic A Theory of Justice.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the 19th century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person", writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override."