Politics without Reason: The Perfect World and the Liberal Ideal

Politics without Reason explores the roots of contemporary hostility toward liberalism. The thesis of the book is that ambivalence about the self and about desire as an expression of the self fosters the intense animosity we observe directed toward the liberal ideal. Ambivalence arises because the self is viewed as the locus of a destructive form of desire, one that must be controlled and repressed. The author argues that speaking of ambivalence toward the self is another way of speaking of ambivalence toward freedom, an ambivalence expressed in the impulse toward coercion that plays such a powerful role in the attack on liberalism.