后祛魅时代的乌托邦

王元化林毓生谈话录

Sisyphus — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:00:38 GMT+8

转自思与文：http://www.chinese-thought.org/ddpl/005269.htm

来源：文汇报

   时间：2008年1月18日上午

    地点：上海瑞金医院第九病舍

    林毓生（美国威斯康辛大学历史系荣誉教授、香港中文大学东亚研究中心访问教授）：李欧梵等要我代他们问候您。

    王元化：谢谢他们，谢谢他们。

    林毓生：我在香港见到了他们。

    王元化：你已经上了有一个礼拜的课了？

    林毓生：上了两堂课了，两个礼拜了。到了以后，还没有恢复就去讲了第一堂课。

    您给我写的手卷，我非常感谢，非常感动。字写得很好，裱得也很好，很快寄到了。我下次到东方来，就把它带在身边，看有什么人要在卷首题字的。

    《沉思与反思》的序言很有份量，假如您的读者里面年轻人能好好看的话，那应该对他们有点震动。印得也很好。希望在国内能引起注意。

    （蓝云：我们来的路上，车子开不动，街上停的都是车。为什么呢，因为今天小学考试，考完了就放假了。）

    王元化：现在上海的小学生上学都是坐汽车的，这跟我们小时候上学背着书包走好多里路不同。在北京都是那样的。

    林毓生：现在，我与李欧梵都在香港，我们把您的文章翻译成英文的计划，今年一定可以完成，年底之前可以出版。论卢梭的那一篇，林同奇已经翻好了。他用了不少力气。我还要好好看一遍。李欧梵翻您讲“五四”的那一篇，也翻得差不多了。Ted Huters担任翻译您论杜亚泉的那一篇，也翻得差不多。我们已经联系好了香港中文大学出版社，他们也出英文书。他们已经来信说，鉴于您和我们译者在学术界的地位，所以决定不必经过审查合格不合格那一道手续，收到定稿后就可安排印刷了。当然，在交稿之前，我还要写一篇导言。今年年底应该可以出版。

    王元化：好好。

    林毓生：我来之前，跟北京三联书店的编辑孙晓林女士说：我要去看王元化先生（她正在编辑我的《中国传统的创造性转化》重校增补本）。她说：那太好了。我说：王先生在南方，影响很大；因为王先生的关系，大家不能随便乱讲话。她说：不只是在南方，在北方也是一样。

    林毓生：六月份，许纪霖要办一个“高级思想史研讨班”。要找我来，做一个讲座什么的。

    王元化：是在华东师大吗？

    林毓生：是。他说要请国内年轻教师和研究生来。我说：很好，刚好在东方，旅行也不是多难。我说：这次要讲一个很难的题目，是一个方法论理论性的题目。实际上我已经讲过两次，一次在（台湾）“中研院”文哲研究所，还有一次在北大。前年五六月份我不是在北大讲了一个半月吗，在那边的史学系讲过这个题目。在北大，整个屋子，看来很少人听懂。在台湾，大家反应倒是很热烈。

    王元化：用中文还是英文？

    林毓生：用中文。北大听众，从他们提的问题来看，大部分可能并没有听懂（也许有少数听懂了，但他们并没有提出问题、没有参加讨论）。我其它的讲演，他们反应却很热烈，问题也很多。不过，都是要你表态的问题（“你认为这个怎么样？那个怎么样？”），很少思想性、分析性的问题。面对未来，他们希望知道你喜欢什么？希望中国得到什么？这只是对于某些目标的态度，谈不上概念、论旨的分析。因为如要形成概念，就必须在一定程度之内将其内蕴的涵义，系统地思考清楚。我跟许纪霖讲，北大讲得不成功，台湾是否有听懂的人不敢确定。虽然听众反应很热烈，但是精微的地方可能也不甚了了。因为这两次经验，使得我思考用中文怎么讲这个题目。不能硬讲，要稍微缓冲一下。要把韦伯有关论述的重要部分，译成中文，然后印成材料发给大家，一句一句念，再详加解释，这样也许比较容易了解。不是一定不成功，还是可以成功的。

    王元化：我想也是。硬讲恐怕也不行的。

    林毓生：我想讲的题目是韦伯所谓ideal-typical analysis。Ideal-type一般译成“理想型”。这是根据1904年他发表的一篇有关方法论论文中的意思译出的。《新教伦理与资本主义精神》是由两篇论文组成。第一篇（亦即该书的前半部）完成以后，韦伯和他的夫人应邀到美国去，回德以后，他在撰述第二篇（亦即该书的后半部）期间，完成了一篇有关方法论的论文。在这篇论文中，他提出了“ideal-type”的观念，指的是形成对于历史探索性的理解所建构的“本身具有前后一致（不自相矛盾）的思想图像”。正是由于这种思想图像具有概念上的纯粹性。因此是不可能在实在中的任何地方发现它所要指称的东西，所以韦伯说它是一个“乌托邦”。建构理想型的目的，主要是要提供我们认识历史实在的工具，让我们得以在个别的事例中确定：实在与该理想图像相距多远（或多近）。

    王元化：他认为这种分析不可能完全反映现实？

    林毓生：对。然而，事实上，关于ideal-type的理解，在韦伯的一生中是一进展的过程。他前后形成两个观念，虽然都用同一名称来代表。这两个观念彼此之间是矛盾的，互不相容的。西方学者关于韦伯的研究虽然很多；但，甚少注意及此。所以，他们的著作，大部分在这方面也就无法讲清楚了。距离韦伯故世不到五年之前，他在1915年发表了一篇重要的论文，他说“ideal-type”在特定的历史条件下“能够在真实中出现，而且它们已经以历史地重要方式出现过”。“因为思想·理论或实践·伦理中的理性推理力命令（逼使）这种思想非──首尾一贯地──根据其自身的逻辑与自身蕴涵的目的发展出来不可。”所以，韦伯在这里所使用的“ideal-type”，如按他当初的意思，译成“理想型”那就错了，应该译成“理念型”。“Ideal-typical analysis”应译成“理念型分析”。

    在纪霖筹办的“高级思想史研讨班”上，我想就韦伯后期关于“理念型”分析及其在思想史研究上的意义，作些交代与分析。反思我自己的思想史研究：虽然我在实际的研究工作中，并没有自觉地要应用韦伯后期关于“理念型分析”所蕴涵的方法；但，于无形中却反映了那样的方法。这可能是早年在芝加哥大学社会思想委员会接受严格教育的潜移默化的结果。例如，我的著作中对于以鲁迅为代表的五四整体主义的反传统主义包括这样的分析：经由“藉思想·文化以解决问题的途径”所主导的全盘性或整体主义的反传统主义，由于其自身的逻辑死结，注定使得思想革命讲不下去，指向着由政治、军事革命取代思想革命的未来历史轨迹。过去史家对于中共领导的军事、政治革命的历史成因，多从政治、经济、社会等因素入手。事实上，这个历史现象也有极强的内在原因。

    我所说的逻辑死结是指：以鲁迅为代表的，五四式用思想革命来改造国民性的论式蕴涵了自我否定的逻辑。一个思想与精神深患重疴的民族，如何能够认清病症的基本原因是思想与精神呢？既然连认清病症的原因都不易办到，又如何奢言要铲除致病的原因呢？几个知识分子也许已经觉醒：不过，像《狂人日记》中“狂人”那样，他们的语言只能被其他人当作是疯话。根本无法沟通，遑论思想革命！鲁迅带有一元式思想决定论倾向的论式，无可避免地陷入了逻辑的死结。他自己也变得绝望。这样的逻辑死结命令（逼使）鲁迅及其追随者非自我否定思想革命不可──因此非另找出路不可。这种自我否定的逻辑，从韦伯“理念型分析”的观点来看，已经蕴涵在“思想革命”的逻辑之内了，用韦伯自己的话来说：这种自我否定“思想革命”的逻辑是“非根据自身的逻辑与自身的目的发展出来不可”。鲁迅自己说，“改革最快的还是火与剑”，而他所主张的个性解放、精神独立的文学，现在也自言要变成为革命服务的“遵命文学”，成了元化先生所说的“历史的讽刺”。

    说到最后，任何一元式的决定论都蕴涵了自我否定。如果思想只是经济上、生产方式上“上层建筑”，它是经济真实的反映或副产品而已，无所谓思想了。Anyway，这是很抽象的东西，不晓得成功不成功，我想试试看。

    王元化：你讲的这些问题里，有一个也是困惑我很多很多年的。我没读过韦伯，康德也没怎么读，我就是读了一点点黑格尔。那个时候，就是人对自我以外的，到底能够认识到多少？我觉得这是一个很大的问题。有人认为是可以全部认识，有的是认为只能近似的类似的，大体上模仿式的认识。我是到了后来才认识到，就是你讲的，韦伯的理想型的，它只能是近似的、模拟式的、大体上的，不能完全认识到自我外面的东西。当然这近似不近似（的说法），我是完全从中国一套的哲学里面出来的东西。比如说，毛泽东就曾经讲过了。黑格尔讲过啦，所谓“抽象的普遍性”和“总念（或具体）的普遍性”，我觉得，这个有点类似韦伯的“理想型”。“抽象的普遍性”，你只是把一个整体的、综合的、有机的东西，拆散下来，认识它的××有什么什么在里边。黑格尔批评“普遍性的理念”，就运用了歌德的一些诗。他说歌德好像把什么东西握在手里，加以分析，自以为掌握了真理，实际上不是。大体上那个意思，我背不下来。这是黑格尔的。但是黑格尔到了后期，他也谈到了“具体的普遍性”。他认为，任何事物都是由三个环节组成：普遍的、特殊的和个体的。“抽象的普遍性”，把个体包括得很少，是把很抽象的很简陋的情况反映在里面。他后来认为，“具体的普遍性”，具体的可以涵盖特殊的和个体的在内。虽然说是“普遍性”的东西，但是又把个体的本身，作为与普遍性不同的、与特殊性也不同的那些个特点，能够也涵盖在自身之内。所以，他有这么一个东西。

    林毓生：嗯。这个当然有共同点。

    王元化：那么我看了这个……。那个时候，我在隔离反省，为什么我不赞成用太概括性的来谈很多问题。（当然，）没有概括性的，是无法谈问题的，就是你讲的，乱七八糟一大堆，毫无关系的材料，杂七杂八的。所以一定要找出（概括性的东西）。那个时候，毛泽东就有一句话，就是任何事物都是矛盾的，矛盾有一个主要矛盾和其它次要矛盾，你抓住了主要的矛盾，事物很复杂，就抓住了事物的主要方面。主要的矛盾里面还有主要矛盾的主要方面。所以，他这么一讲，这个理论在“文革”时期是极其流行的。那时，1955年吧，我读《黑格尔》的时候，我看到这条，我很仔细地考虑到毛泽东的这个观念。我认为，这个所谓“具体的普遍性”，也还是不能够反映整体的。我有这么一个很简单的看法。我的文章里，大概也没讲清楚。我在我的“三次反思”里面讲到。第二阶段我觉得我得到很大的启发。因为那个时候，都把毛泽东当作神，他的话句句都是真理。这个问题后来呢，更进一步地启发我。那个时候，列宁有一个反映论。列宁的哲学是反映论，他跟普列汉诺夫不同的。到后来，我写过文章讲，我宁可取普列汉诺夫的，是近似的摹写的，不是完全的照相版本的、很刻板的。这是我的一个思路。你讲的那方面，我没有考虑。你是从西方的哲学的基础上面，很多其它问题，理念啊理性啊，这些个问题来考虑的。我也不能多讲，只能简单地说。我不知道你发现过我，谈到过这问题吗？

    林毓生：您谈这些问题（的文章），我都看。我都大致看过。

    王元化：当然那很浅薄的，但是我从自己头脑里，在中国的环境里面所理解的。

    林毓生：讲点轻松的，不总讲这些。

    （蓝云：林先生很高兴很兴奋的一桩事情，让王伯伯分享他的兴奋。）

    王元化：我是常常能够，倒也不是完全瞎吹，我可以经常地来分享你思想的享受。

    我是一个很特殊的例子的人。成长在动乱当中，抗战，就不读书了，抗日了，参加地下党了。到后来嘛，就在政治运动当中了。到了1955年反胡风后，我回到学术里来。后来，“文革”结束了，我平反了，又让我去做官。我虽然很不愿意去做官。做了两年官，害得我六年的思维处于停滞的状态。所以我就没有真正地好好读过书。与你们不同。

    林毓生：海外，您也清楚得很，也有很多不一样的。

    王元化：那当然啦。

    林毓生：不光学问不一样，人格上也很多不一样。外国人本身也有很多不一样。海外那些小政客，坏蛋，多得很。只是有一点不太一样。海外环境，下流，不能下流得过分。因为那个环境，是相互牵制的。我前几天和祖锦（编者按：林毓生夫人）聊天，我说不同文化的思路很不一样，影响太大。我们中国人一讲政治，就讲到“我的抱负”。儒家的政治基本上是要完成道德理想。坏的就是李斯韩非子那一套，勾心斗角，早晨起来以后就想怎样利用你，怎样使自己得利。中国的法家政治，元化先生写得很多，而且很深入。实际上，从亚理士多德的观点来说，那不是政治，是私性活动。好比说，一个人不搞政治，只想用不道德的行为来赚钱，就想法设法怎样骗人，赚钱后跑掉了，把钱存到瑞士银行，这也是一种生活。但他没搞政治，就是赚钱，做生意。这不是政治，这是经济行为里面的坏行为、不道德行为。政治人物呢，坏蛋，一早上起来，就想怎样利用你，怎样拍马屁，该拍的拍，该欺负的欺负，觉得这样对他有利。这也不是政治，这是私性活动。就亚里士多德的政治观念来讲，政治是公的。一切行为只是为了自己，还算是什么政治？公的就很复杂，有它的秩序，有它的哲学，有它的道理，有它的背景。政治牵涉到权力，权力是中性的，能够做好事也能做坏事。儒家思想虽然也看到权力在政治上的作用，却尽量把它压低，基本上认为政治是道德的行为。所以对权力腐化的问题没有像西方自由主义那样敏感。西方宪政民主思想，认为权力必须加以制衡，不是教育或道德劝说，就能对它制衡，只有权力才能制衡权力。所以，权力需要分立，相互制衡。因此，一开始就和中国不一样。这是西方思想比中国思想较为深刻的一面。所以史华慈先生说：“西方问题很多，坏东西太多了，但是我还是觉得，启蒙运动之后，西方对人类有一个重大的贡献，有世界性的意义。”那就是西方宪政民主的思想。宪政民主思想一开始就觉得政治权力很危险，所以，一牵涉到权力，就想到对付权力。中国是另外一套。中国是：你是这么好的人，又是考第一，又是状元，孟子读得很熟：“天降大任于斯人也，必先苦其心志劳其筋骨”。怎么好意思说，你有了权力，就怕你不一定好了呢？你到底怀疑我还是不怀疑我啊，你是真朋友还是假朋友啊。这是另外一个逻辑。

    王元化：这是很重要的一点。

    林毓生：圣经上有一个说法，当耶稣复活时，他将是人间的王，带领人类享受一千年的幸福。这就是所谓的千禧年。不过，当耶稣复活时，同时有一个假耶稣出现，长得、说得和真耶稣完全一样，一真一假。所以，从宪政民主的思路来说，即使你是上帝，你现在以人的形象出现，你到底是真是假，还不知道。所以你的权力必须加以限制，权力本身就是不能化约为道德。就是孔子来了，他也是人，凡是人，都可能堕落。中国的道德想象，以为人的力量可以达到至善。王先生说他早年受到基督教的影响很大。不过那是基督教好的影响，基督教还有坏的一面。

    基督教最大的问题是：它可能异化为文化帝国主义。上帝在我这一边；所以，我比你较为神圣。

    不同教派的争执，可能导致宗教战争。我信的是上帝，那你信的当然是魔鬼了。西方宗教战争非常残忍。宗教战争的时候，每个人都认为自己的信仰是真的上帝，但是你是我的敌人的话，你的上帝当然就是魔鬼的化身了。代表上帝杀人是理直气壮的。中国“文革”时期，政治变成了宗教，所以很残忍。只有真的好学生，假的好学生，真的信徒，假的信徒。

    罗马受基督教影响很大的，那是后期。早期是杀基督徒的。早期的基督徒是底层的劳苦大众，贵族不是基督徒。后来，罗马皇帝，有一次打战，突然看见一个十字架的形象出现，就信了。皇帝信了，底下就信了。力量大得很。西方宗教里面起伏很多，这个故事讲不完的。在基督教的影响下，根据宪政民主制订的宪法，一开始第一原则第一原理，就是如何对付政治的权力。当然，中古以来演变出来的契约观念对于法治的建立发生了关键性的作用；希伯来的上帝与他根据他的形象创造出来的人之间“约”的观念，也是法治思想的背景因素之一。西方有识之士的共识之一是：没有欧洲中古的历史背景，很难想象近代宪政民主所依靠的法治思想能够出现。你是政治人物，我请你做领导，总统也好，首相也好，议员也好，都是经由直接或间接选举。先给你权力。第二件事情，就是怎么限制你的权力。怎么限制呢？不能用道德限制，因为道德本身只能劝说你、感动你，如果你不听或无动于衷的话，道德就没办法了。权力只能用权力限制。权力限制权力，是在法治条件之下才能办到。这里所谓的法治是指rule of law之下的法律，不是rule by law之下的法律。法治是另外一条路演变出来的，不是想出来的。

    林毓生：晓明来看你了？

    王元化：来过。

    林毓生：你把晓明说了一顿，说他到巴黎，看了卢浮宫，就自以为了解艺术了。他接受了吗？

    王元化：不太接受。他也不好反对。

    他觉得他那种趣味啊……。晓明是聪明人，懂的东西比较多，接收东西也很快。他能吸收好的思想、东西。但是他也吸收什么像台湾的董桥啦，美国的什么夏志清啊。这些人的东西，他也吸收。这就一塌糊涂。

    林毓生：国外的人里肤浅的也很多。夏先生是一个很奇怪的人。他讲传统中国小说、讲《红楼梦》，我觉得很有道理，尤其他后来对于用英文发表的关于《红楼梦》分析的修正意见，很有深度。但早年他用英文发表的中国现代小说史，是根据他作研究生时代当时流行的“新批评”的理论，把鲁迅压低，把张爱玲提的那么高，虽然国内外许多学文学的人，多表赞赏，我却不能同意。

    林毓生：您现在接受国内最好的治疗。他们都尽心尽力，可以看得出来，都是诚心的，对您很敬佩。他们是专业医师；但是，他们是知道您的。

    王元化：你儿子是医生？

    林毓生：我儿子是心脏科。有时在家里闲聊，他说他脑子里记着的经常要用的药，有二三百种，但是心脏科里用的药有五六百种，其它的他要从电脑上查出来。现在医生用药都这样，不是什么都知道。医生用药，很有意思。从我儿子的经验就可以看出来。医生啊，有好的医生，有坏的医生。有的学问好，考试得第一，但是做医生不行，治病不一定好；有的考得好，治病也好；也有考得不太好，治病很好。因为每个病人的情况都不太一样，所以医生最后做判断时要根据当时的特殊情况，用什么药最适当，用什么份量，对这个病人最为合适。这实际上是一种感觉、一种艺术。可能性太多了，尤其是不常看医生的病人。只在生病时来找医生，这时候要从好几十种可能性简化，有人一下子就看出眉目了，有的人就是弄半天还没找到真正的病因。所以，医术是科学和艺术的综合体。有人画画，用的颜色，就是对劲。你看印象派的大师，比如莫奈的画，他画中的采光，特别恰当。没有天分的人，怎么努力怎么弄，就是不对劲。穷努力，也没有用。这就是艺术，就和作家一样。

    王元化：感觉啦。光、颜色。这些个感觉。里面的分的层次，和别人不大同。

    林毓生：这就是闪的一下灵感。医生也是这样，好医生一下子就知道大概怎么回事，然后做化验来证明。

    王元化：许纪霖和你见面了吗？

    林毓生：明天他就要这里来，跟您谈谈。前年纪念史华慈的会，我有一篇论文。去年十月我右手忽患急性腕管综合症，无法写字，结果论文没法改写。将来写好后，可能在学报上发表，不能在论文集中发表了。他说很遗憾，我也很遗憾，但是没办法。他来信倒是很大方说：最重要是身体，论文倒不是那么重要。所以，纪念《史华慈论文集》里面没有我的论文。我来香港之前的三个礼拜，由手外科专家做了手术，很成功。他用高科技的办法，伤口一点点，现在在香港正在做物理治疗。在手术之前，朋友建议作针灸，可能不必做手术。我过去没有做过针灸，可是做了六次，并无效果。余（英时）先生和祖锦都比较西化。他们都不赞成我做针灸。您不晓得，余先生生活方面很中国化，但是脑筋很西化。余先生来电话好几次，说：啊呀，什么中医，中医就是理论，要治病还是西医，赶快动手术。

    （蓝云：余先生是不是余英时先生？先生想跟他……）

    王元化：这个事情不要谈，还不晓得弄不弄呢，不要谈。他们要弄点纪念：一个学术研究馆。

    林毓生：这个我知道了。已经成功了。

    王元化：但是中国的事，里面很复杂，谁晓得它将来怎么样。

    林毓生：已经决定了。纪霖来信说，已经在筹备了。很好很好。细节我不知道。

    王元化：他们那个党委书记和校长来了两趟。

    林毓生：张济顺是吧？我跟她有一点来往。她也研究妇女史。

    王元化：是。

    林毓生：已经决定了。一切在筹划中。这个当然应该做，而且没问题。

    林毓生：我听蓝云说，您有的时候吃点燕窝，所以我们从香港带了点官燕。

    祖锦没吃过燕窝。我小时候吃过。祖锦一生就吃过一回。有个故事我讲给你们听。史华慈先生到台湾讲学，我回来当翻译；第一届殷海光先生纪念讲座，请史华慈先生担任。史先生很高兴，就来了，夫人也来了。台湾有个立法委员，是台湾有钱人的孩子。他是哈佛大学法学院毕业的，没上过史先生的课。他有个好朋友，上过史华慈的课。就这么个关系，他出面请客。史华慈说，我不知道这个人是怎么回事。我说就是怎样怎样。他说也好，就去吃了。到了台湾一家豪华的、他家产业里的一个饭店。东家请客，做的酒席当然是山珍海味了。有一道菜是燕窝汤，很多燕窝。但是，史华慈先生信仰的是犹太教，他在犹太教里不是最保守的基本教义派，也不是最开放的解放派，是中间的所谓保守派，有很多戒律。鱼只能吃有刺跟有鳞的。美国很多大鱼，很好吃，但是没有鳞，皮是光的就不能吃。夫人，我的师母，也是犹太教。就上来了燕窝。

    （宋祖锦：燕窝里面有小的银鱼，银鱼是没有鳞的，所以……）

    王元化：燕窝没杀生的。

    林毓生：银鱼没有鳞。没有鳞不能吃。有鳞才能吃。每人一碗，放到桌子上了，大大的。夫人问我：“毓生，这是什么”。我说：“这是燕窝。”她说：“燕窝是什么东西做的？”我说：“这是燕子叼着小鱼在海中小岛的山崖上……。”她问：“这鱼有没有鳞？”我说：“我不太知道，鱼很小，大概没有鳞，这么小的鱼怎么有鳞呢。”史华慈先生很幽默的，他有戒律，但不是基本教义派的那种。说“尝尝总可以吧”。史先生要喝了，夫人正色地说:“Ben!”（史华慈先生的名字叫Benjamin，所以夫人叫他Ben。）史先生说:“嗯？”我说：“这个很贵的。”夫人说：“贵就贵，和我们没有关系。”一碗大概美金四五十块。夫人说：“美金四五十块也和我们没有关系。”就让服务员撤下去了。服务员很奇怪，主客两位的两碗就拿下去了。这时候祖锦开始喝了。祖锦坐在我另一边，正在和她旁边同席的人讲话，并没有听到我们的对话。

    （宋祖锦：他问我那是什么东西，我说：粉丝！）

    林毓生：祖锦没吃过燕窝，我告诉她，这是燕窝。

    王元化：甜的燕窝。

    林毓生：她说：“哦，燕窝。”她生平就吃过那么一次。

Even God Quotes Tocqueville

Sisyphus — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:09:15 GMT+8

By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

Published: July 8, 2007

Americans generally quote Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” as a way of patting themselves on the back. Tocqueville’s first volume, published at the end of 1834 after a nine-month tour of the New World, was the first great study of American institutions and political culture. It declared the American Revolution the triumph of “a mature and considered taste for liberty, not a vague and indefinite instinct for independence.”

But there is another way to read Tocqueville. If Volume 1 laid out what Americans had made of democracy, Volume 2, published six years later, laid out what democracy had made of Americans. This was a bleaker subject. Self-rule had its paradoxes, Tocqueville showed. Equality could come at the price of intellectual independence. And if one man was just as worthy of a political voice as the next, why should any individual involve himself in politics at all? Hugh Brogan, a historian at the University of Essex in England, shares the preoccupations of this second Tocqueville, without sharing his conclusions. In an erudite and combative new biography, he presents many of Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy as specious and reactionary.

Tocqueville was an unlikely student of democracy, and an even less likely voyager to the American wilderness. A sickly blueblood, he grew up listening to his mother sing royalist songs in his father’s chateau. He was a cousin by marriage of the writer René de Chateaubriand and the great-grandson of the eloquent Chrétien de Malesherbes, who defended Louis XVI at trial and died under the guillotine for it. Others in Tocqueville’s family met the same fate, and virtually all of them were either jailed or exiled.

As Brogan keenly notes, there was a paradox in Tocqueville’s position. He felt born to rule; until the last decade of his life his political ambitions were stronger than his literary ones. Yet despite his sympathies for royalism, he benefited from its passing. The postrevolutionary order empowered a new class of well-read “notables,” to which Tocqueville belonged. Intellectually, the July Revolution of 1830 liberated Tocqueville — a young judge who was neither an enthusiast for the newly installed house of Orléans nor (yet) a republican. With his friend Gustave de Beaumont, he obtained a leave to study American prisons — a pretext, Tocqueville admitted, for investigating larger questions.

The success of “Democracy” paved the way for a political career. Tocqueville was elected as a deputy for his family’s district in Normandy. He would be a formidable orator during the revolution of 1848, a drafter of the constitution of France’s second republic and, for five months, foreign minister. He left politics after the coup of Louis Napoleon in 1851.

Brogan’s expertise pays constant rewards to the reader. His knowledge of 19th-century French politics is comprehensive and his attention to context punctilious. Nor does he beat around the bush: Tocqueville’s cousin and confidant Louis de Kergorlay is “a young idiot” and the legitimist insurrectionist the Duchesse de Berry “one of the silliest princesses in all European history.” And although this book is rigorously chronological, it detours into mini-essays on pivotal topics — Tocqueville’s relationship with his invalid mother; Foucault’s reading of Tocqueville’s ideas of incarceration; and so forth. It is never dreary. Tocqueville’s life is always a pulsing intellectual and political drama.

But it is a drama in which Brogan is mostly at odds with his subject. Tocqueville’s goal as a deputy during the 1848 revolution was to protect both liberty and order. In Brogan’s view, he did a poor job of distinguishing between the two. Brogan blames conservative property owners for the excesses of the socialist revolutionaries. “The notables,” he writes, “Tocqueville among them, projected their own violent hatred and panic onto the urban workers, and in doing so created the very monster which they feared.” Brogan faults Tocqueville for “impudence,” “blindly prejudiced” views, an “obsessive cult of property” and a “ruthless hostility” to lower-class Parisians. That Tocqueville now considered himself a republican meant little. “Whatever he called himself,” Brogan writes, “the nobles knew that he was one of them.”

Brogan credits Tocqueville with a deepening respect for the French people in the decade before his death in 1859. Those are the years when he wrote his posthumously published memoir of the revolution of 1848 (Brogan’s favorite among his works) and his unfinished history, “The Old Regime and the Revolution.” Although Brogan sees the history as a “medley of fiction and wishful thinking,” he is deeply impressed with Tocqueville’s pioneering use of local archives, which allowed him to lay out the continuity between prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary France.

Brogan sees Tocqueville as a purveyor, rather than a generator, of insights. With an insistence that verges on hostility, he repeats that Tocqueville, despite a “craving” to seem original, was not. Some of Brogan’s misgivings have been shared even by readers well-disposed toward Tocqueville: He didn’t always define his terms with precision. He missed the significance of the Industrial Revolution. He had a weak grasp of how political parties worked, and of the role of the American presidency.

But Brogan adds further complaints, dismissing Tocqueville’s theory of the tyranny of the majority as his “most serious mistake.” Tocqueville’s aphorism on American conformism in the first volume of “Democracy” (“I know no country where in general there prevails less independence of mind and true freedom of debate”) is, Brogan writes, “absurd, as a comparison of the polemics of the age of Jackson with the ice age of Metternich or with the press laws of Louis Philippe quickly makes clear.” Brogan has even less use for the second volume of “Democracy,” where this paradox-seeking tone predominates. He views it as a book marked by the longing for “good old aristocratic times,” written for purposes of self-justification and “shaped as much by personal neurosis as by logic and observation.”

So how do we explain the praise that Brogan heaps on “Democracy,” which he calls a “masterpiece and a classic,” after spending almost 30 pages pillorying its second volume? The answer lies in Brogan’s view of Tocqueville’s work as a whole. “A man like Tocqueville,” Brogan says, “enlarges our sense of human possibility and of the meaning of human lives in everything he writes. He does this through his intellectual and artistic gifts, and through his passionate sincerity. So the accuracy of his conclusions is of limited importance.”

It is hard to agree. For Tocqueville, democracy sets society moving in an egalitarian, not a libertarian, direction. To be preoccupied with equality under such circumstances is to be preoccupied with a foregone conclusion. It is the “passion for liberty,” by contrast, that is most in danger of dying out, and most in need of defenders. This is Tocqueville’s core belief. Brogan disagrees with it diametrically. He believes equality is more vulnerable than liberty, and perhaps as precious. Out of this disagreement comes an impressive, fascinating but somewhat odd book, in which Brogan praises Tocqueville as a thinker and writer while hammering away at much of what he thought and wrote.

Joseph Epstein’s brief “Alexis de Tocqueville” leans on the work of earlier historians, including Brogan. It takes seriously Tocqueville’s worry about trade-offs between liberty and equality. In an unpretentious, even wiseacre style (“God himself may have quoted Tocqueville”), Epstein piles up Tocquevillean aperÃ§us (“Nations are like men in that they prefer a fuss made on their behalf to real services rendered”), ranks Tocqueville’s predictions for accuracy (he “nailed” the way democracies have trouble ending wars, but overestimated the long-term constitutional importance of state governments) and gives a serviceable rundown of how he has been received by English-language readers from John Stuart Mill to Sean Wilentz. It is a brisk and admirably accessible account of how Tocqueville gave a name to certain misgivings about democracy that are with us still.

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is at work on a book about immigration, Islam and Europe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/books/review/Caldwell.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=0343fcd48c887ea7&ex=1341547200&adxnnl=0&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1185724891-7w5CaK5cgH9VnZ2l9kz4rQ

比尔·盖茨在哈佛大学毕业典礼上的演讲

Sisyphus — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:02:35 GMT+8

President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: "Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree."

I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me "Harvard’s most successful dropout." I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyone who failed.

But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.

Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.

Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.

One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.

I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: "We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month," which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.

What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.

You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.

I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care." I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.

But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: "Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent."

The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.

We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.

If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.

Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks "How can I help?," then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have — whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.

Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.

You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.

But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.

Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring – and that’s why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: "I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation."

Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.

The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.

The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.

At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don’t. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don’t have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.

We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.

What for?

There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?

These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.

My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: "From those to whom much is given, much is expected."

When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.

Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

Knowing what you know, how could you not?

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Good luck.

The philosophical Madonna

Sisyphus — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 07:04:11 GMT+8

14/12/2005

The philosophical Madonna

Daniel Cohn-Bendit recalls his relationship with Hannah Arendt and reflects on her and his generation

Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, to parents of Russian-Jewish origin. She studied theology at the University of Marburg, where she met and fell in love with Martin Heidegger and later at the University of Heidelberg under Karl Jaspers. Arrested by the Gestapo for conducting research on anti-Semitic propaganda, Arendt escaped to Paris where she met the German communist Heinrich Blücher, who was to become her husband. The couple was interned by the Nazis and managed to escape to the USA. After taking American citizenship, Arendt pursued a career as a journalist and academic. Her coverage for the New Yorker of the trail of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1960 became the basis of her most controversial work. Best known for her profound analysis of totalitarianism, Arendt is one of the 20th century's foremost intellectuals. She died in 1975.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was born in 1945 in Montauban, France and grew up in Germany. He was one of the leading spokesmen of the May Revolution 1968 in Paris, was a member of the Frankfurt "Sponti" (radicals) scene in the 1970s, edited the legendary magazine "Pflasterstrand", joined the Green Party in 1984 and is today co-chairman of the Greens in the European Parliament. Interviewer was Hannes Stein.

Die Welt: What did Hannah Arendt mean to you, when you were still a real, radical leftist 68er?

Daniel Cohn-Bendit: That's complicated, because she was a friend of my parents. I knew her and was aware of her theses as a child. After emigrating in 1934, she belonged to a group of intellectuals in Paris along with my parents, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt's husband Heinrich Blücher. My father and Blücher were interned together at the beginning of the war, and that resulted in a deep friendship. But you make a point in your question: Hannah Arendt was not the most influential thinker for me at that time.

Hannah Arendt 1941. Foto: Fred Stein

When did you meet Hannah Arendt?

When she held a laudatio for Karl Jaspers in 1958, when he received the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. My father had just died and she visited my mother. The second time I saw her was at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. I was there with my school class – and she happened to be there too.

When did you begin to get interested in Hannah Arendt's work?

In the 1970s, as the discussions about totalitarianism became more and more pressing. I was a leftist anti-communist and when I came to Germany in 1968, I was perplexed by the reluctance to compare communism with national socialism, which was rooted in German history.

Did your referring to Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" lead to conflicts with your colleagues?

There was conflict from the outset, because when I was expelled from France in 1968, I was absolutely certain that, despite my revolutionary convictions, I would prefer to live in West Germany than in the GDR. I saw in France and the GDR bourgeois societies – that's what we called them back then – that needed reform but not totalitarian systems.

What does Hannah Arendt's still controversial book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" mean to you?

That the demonisation of the Nazis doesn't help us in the long run. The most insane thing, that has to be understood is that the Nazis were "normal people"! Eichmann was a nobody who was only to achieve the status and commit the annihilation he did in a totalitarian, totally racist system.

But some of the claims that Hannah Arendt makes in "Eichmann in Jerusalem" don't hold up historically. Take for example her complete condemnation of the Jewish councils...

Daniel Cohn-Bendit facing the police in Nanterre 1968

Nonetheless, the question that she asks with the Jewish council remains relevant: when does one accept developments and at what point does one put up resistance? It's possible that Hannah Arendt was not fair on the Jewish councils. But her basic question is still legitimate: Was it right to collaborate in the first place? Because it wasn't just the Jews who didn't want to see the annihilation that was facing them. When the western democracies signed a treaty with Hitler in Munich in 1938, they didn't see the annihilation potential that was being developed in Germany. It's basically this question that is still being asked in Israel. The injustice that Israel is doing to Palestine is related to the feeling that one doesn't want to ever end up in the same situation again. That's a problem that, in my opinion, has not been dealt with adequately – but it's a real problem.

Hannah Arendt's position on Zionism was complicated in an interesting way; she vacillated between agreement and rejection. Do you see your own position reflected in that?

Hannah Arendt realised that Jews wanted to have a place somewhere where they could live in peace as Jews. That's a kind of primary Zionism that I can understand for the generation of people who lived through the Holocaust. I was born later. And I am A-Zionist. That means I am neither pro nor anti Zionist. I can understand Jews wanting to live in Israel – but I want to remain a Jew of the diaspora. Hannah Arendt sensed in 1947 and 48 that the violent-military assertion of the state of Israel would lead to a permanent state of conflict. At the same time, the Six Day War represented a reality: there was only one state of Israel and despite all criticism, she stood in solidarity with the people of Israel. She did not want to do away with Israelis.

On another subject: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Can you explain that for us?

No! But that's the nice thing about life: love and sex cannot be explained rationally, philosophically. I always say: Hannah Arendt is the philosophical Madonna. Put it this way - Madonna is the woman who said: I'll take the man that I want. Whether that's Christ - who she takes down from the cross in her famous music video – or her sports teacher, or whoever else. And Hannah Arendt is a political philosopher who can think radically, who takes on her teacher Heidegger with her radical thinking, who falls totally in love with this man – and the love was enduring. It was buried deep in her head and in her body. Some relationships are not to be explained; one has to accept that.

Back to politics...

We've been talking about politics the whole time. It's crazy to assert that Hannah Arendt should only have politically correct relationships. By the way, she also had a politically correct love. The interesting thing about her life is these two men. The other one was her husband, the former radical leftist who remained leftist later. Heinrich Blücher influenced Hannah Arendt a great deal in her book "The Human Condition". She always had a leftist understanding of the social. She thought in liberal terms about democratic institutions but she was very left in the social realm. She said America was politically democratic, and socially totalitarian. That's true! If you go into an American suburb, you see communism realised. Communist levelling is fully achieved. One identical row house after the next, for kilometres.

Since we're talking about America... how do you think Hannah Arendt would respond today to Islamicism?

She would say that Islamic fundamentalism is a form of totalitarianism. And that we need to have the power to fight this totalitarianism while at the same time considering Islam as a religion as equal to others. But she would also say that all religions have totalitarian moments in them. That our democracies developed in the emancipation from religion. And that's what Islam has to address: the emancipation of Muslims from their religion, through which a changed Islam and a Muslim atheism would emerge.

*

This article appeared in German in Die Welt on Saturday December 3, 2005.

translation: nb

http://www.signandsight.com/features/510.html

Habermas：Philosopher, poet and friend

Sisyphus — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 06:50:00 GMT+8

12/06/2007

Philosopher, poet and friend

Jürgen Habermas writes an obiturary for American philosopher Richard Rorty

The American philosopher Richard Rorty passed away on Friday. Rorty, whose work ranges over an unusually broad intellectual terrain, was the author of many works, including "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979), "Consequences of Pragmatism" (1982), and "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989).

Richard Rorty. Photo: Suhrkamp Verlag

I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."

Three and a half decades ago, Richard Rorty loosened himself from the corset of a profession whose conventions had become too narrow - not to elude the discipline of analytic thinking, but to take philosophy along untrodden paths. Rorty had a masterful command of the handicraft of our profession. In duels with the best among his peers, with Donald Davidson, Hillary Putnam or Daniel Dennett, he was a constant source of the subtlest, most sophisticated arguments. But he never forgot that philosophy - above and beyond objections by colleagues - mustn't ignore the problems posed by life as we live it.

Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues - and not only them - over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher. And it owes much to the unforgettable rhetorical skill and flawless prose of a writer who was always ready to shock readers with unaccustomed strategies of representation, unexpected oppositional concepts and new vocabularies - one of Rorty's favourite terms. Rorty's talent as an essayist spanned the range from Friedrich Schlegel to Surrealism.

The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this impression doesn't do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was often shy and withdrawn - and always sensitive to others.

One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

*

The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on June 11, 2007.

Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929, is one of Germany's foremost intellectual figures. A philosopher and sociologist, he is professor emeritus at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and the leading representative of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His works include "Legitimation Crisis", "Knowledge and Human Interests", "Theory of Communicative Action" and "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity."

Translation: jab.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1386.html

2006.10.15纪念福柯（M.FOUCAULT）诞辰80周年

Sisyphus — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 08:57:37 GMT+8

2006.10.15 纪念福柯(M.FOUCAULT)诞辰80周年

2006.10.15纪念福柯（M.FOUCAULT）诞辰80周年

Sisyphus — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 08:52:36 GMT+8

2006.10.15 纪念福柯(M.FOUCAULT)诞辰80周年

Sisyphus — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 07:58:06 GMT+8

FOUCAULT-AUSSTELLUNG IM SCHWULEN MUSEUM, BERLIN

辑录：纪念穆勒诞辰200周年

Sisyphus — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 05:53:05 GMT+8

Thoroughly Modern Mill
牐燗 utilitarian who became a liberal--but never understood the limits of reason.
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牐燘Y ROGER SCRUTON
牐燜riday, May 19, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
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牐燤ay 20 sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Stuart Mill, the greatest exponent of 19th-century liberalism, whose philosophy still dominates jurisprudence in the English-speaking world. Mill was a many-faceted intellectual who wrote on all aspects of philosophy, on law and morals, on political economy, and on poetry and the arts. His home-schooling at the hands of his father, the economist and historian James Mill, was a model of rigor, causing him to read and write Greek aged 6, to master Latin aged 9, and to have acquired a thorough grounding in history and mathematics aged 10, when he began work on a history of Roman government. Mill later developed a taste for poetry, acquired a perfect knowledge of French, and, despite his agnostic upbringing, read deeply in the Bible, which he believed to be one of the two Great Books, the other being Homer.
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牐燤ill was never a member of a university, but devoted his life to self-education while holding lucrative posts at the India Office. He suffered a serious nervous breakdown in 1836. This breakdown, described in Mill's remarkable "Autobiography," was in part a response to the hard-headed utilitarianism of his father and his circle of "Philosophical Radicals." The cost-benefit morality that James Mill had inherited from Jeremy Bentham, and which he had instilled into his son, left Mill bereft of all emotional succor.
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牐燯tilitarianism ("that action is right which promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number") was a philosophy of the head which seemed to make no room for the heart. Mill recovered through reading Wordsworth, found consolation with Harriet Taylor, the wife of a tolerant gentleman who no doubt had good grounds for trusting in his wife's chastity, and subsequently married the widowed Mrs. Taylor to continue in an apparently sexless union.
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牐燤ill's rebellion against utilitarianism did not prevent him from writing a qualified defense of it, and his "Utilitarianism" is acknowledged today as one of the few readable accounts of a moral disorder that would have died out two centuries ago, had people not discovered that the utilitarian can excuse every crime. Lenin and Hitler were pious utilitarians, as were Stalin and Mao, as are most members of the Mafia. As Mill recognized, the "greatest happiness principle" must be qualified by some guarantee of individual rights, if it is not to excuse the tyrant. In response to his own wavering discipleship, therefore, he wrote "On Liberty," perhaps his most influential, though by no means his best, production. At the time, Benthamite ways of thinking were influencing jurisprudence, and arguments based on the "general good" and the "good of society" appealed to the conservative imagination of the Victorian middle classes. It seemed right to control the forms of public worship, to forbid the expression of heretical opinions, or to criminalize adultery, for the sake of a "public morality" which exists for the general good. If individual freedom suffers, then that, according to the utilitarians, is the price we must pay.
牐
牐燗ccording to Mill's argument, that way of thinking has everything upside down. The law does not exist to uphold majority morality against the individual, but to protect the individual against tyranny--including the "tyranny of the majority." Of course, if the exercise of individual freedom threatens harm to others, it is legitimate to curtail it--for in such circumstances one person's gain in freedom is another person's loss of it. But when there is no proof of harm to another, the law must protect the individual's right to act and speak as he chooses.
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牐燭his principle has a profound significance: It is saying that the purpose of law is not to uphold the will of the majority, or to impose the will of the sovereign, but to protect the will of the individual. It is the legal expression of the "sovereignty of the individual." The problem lies in the concept of harm. How can I prove that one person's action does not harm another? How can I prove, for example, that other people are not harmed by my public criticism of their religious beliefs--beliefs on which they depend for their peace of mind and emotional stability? How can I prove that consensual sex between two adults leaves the rest of us unaffected, when so much of life's meaning seems to rest on the assumption of shared sexual norms? These questions are as significant for us as they were for Mill; the difference is that radical Islam has now replaced Scottish puritanism as the enemy of liberal values.
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牐
牐燤ill's defense of liberty, which was enunciated with great force and seeming clarity, soon followed the path taken by his defense of utilitarianism, and died the death of a thousand qualifications. "On Liberty" sees individual freedom as the aim of government, whose business is to reconcile one person's freedom with his neighbor's. "The Principles of Political Economy" by contrast, while pretending to be a popular exposition of Adam Smith, accords extensive powers of social engineering to the state, and develops a socialist vision of the economy, with a constitutional role for trade unions, and extensive provisions for social security and welfare. The book is, in fact, a concealed socialist tract. While "On Liberty" belongs to the 18th-century tradition that we know as classical liberalism, "Principles" is an example of liberalism in its more modern sense.
牐燤ill's hostility to privilege, to landed property, and to inheritance of property had implications which he seemed unwilling or unable to work out. His argument that all property should be confiscated by the state on death, and redistributed according to its own greater wisdom, has the implication that the state, rather than the family, is to be treated as the basic unit of society--the true arbiter of our destiny, and the thing to which everything is owed. The argument makes all property a temporary lease from the state, and also ensures that the state is the greatest spender, and the one least bound by the sense of responsibility to heirs and neighbors. It is, in short, a recipe for the disaster that we have seen in the communist and socialist systems, and it is a sign of Mill's failure of imagination that, unlike Smith, he did not foresee the likely results of his favored policies.
牐
牐燭aking "On Liberty" and "Principles" together we find, in fact, a premonition of much that conservatives object to in the modern liberal worldview. The "harm" doctrine of "On Liberty" has been used again and again to subvert those aspects of law which are founded not in policy but in our inherited sense of the sacred and the prohibited. Hence this doctrine has made it impossible for the law to protect the core institutions of society, namely marriage and the family, from the sexual predators. Meanwhile, the statist morality of "Principles" has flowed into the moral vacuum, so that the very same law that refuses to intervene to protect children from pornography will insist that every aspect of our lives be governed by regulations that put the state in charge.
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牐燤ill famously referred to the Conservative Party as "the stupider party," he being, from 1865, a member of Parliament in the Liberal interest. And no doubt the average Tory MP was no match for the brain that had conceived the "System of Logic"--an enduring classic and Mill's greatest achievement. Yet Mill suffered from the same defect as his father. He never understood that wisdom is deeper and rarer than rational thought. He never understood that the intellect, which flies so easily to its conclusions, relies on something else for its premises. Those conservatives who upheld what Mill called "the despotism of custom" against the "experiments in living" advocated in "On Liberty" were not stupid simply because they recognized the limits of the human intellect. They were, on the contrary, aware that freedom and custom are mutually dependent, and that to free oneself from moral norms is to surrender to the state. For only the state can manage the ensuing disaster.
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牐燤r. Scruton is author, most recently, of "Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life" (Continuum, 2005).

辑录：“妖魔化施特劳斯”

Sisyphus — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 05:27:23 GMT+8

The Demonization Of Leo Strauss
牐燘Y ADAM KIRSCH
牐燤ay 17, 2006
牐燯RL: http://www.nysun.com/article/32841
牐
牐燞ere are some of the things that a reader of the press might know about Leo Strauss. Strauss, a political philosopher who died in 1973, is "the high priest of ultra conservatism" (the Guardian). His views on politics are "disturbingly elitist and antidemocratic," full of warnings not to "let the rabble get above themselves" (the New York Times). He believed that "a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise" (the Guardian again). For such rulers, he taught, lying is not a sin, but a necessity: The leader should "use the language of morality to mask [his] real interests, which are his own survival in power and his ability to continue to exert dominance over the populace" (the Nation).
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牐燭o join this elite that is beyond good and evil, the aspirant must submit wholly to Strauss, as to a cult leader: "surrender of the critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss's ideas" (the New York Review of Books). And some of the most powerful men in American government - all of them, like their guru, Jewish - have made that submission: "They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, and the writers Robert Kagan and William Kristol" (the International Herald Tribune).
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牐燭urn to the Internet, that bargain basement of the collective unconscious, and you can see the way these cues from the mainstream press have been followed up. "Why Is Leo Strauss Running My Country?" demands one political blogger. In an interview on another site, Shadia Drury, a Canadian professor and the author of "Leo Strauss and the American Right," informs readers that "the Straussian cabal in the [Bush] administration" lied about the real motivation for the invasion of Iraq,which was "reorganizing the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of Israel." Search for Strauss's name and one of the first results is a profile from the Lyndon LaRouche Web site, titled "Leo Strauss, Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons."
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牐燭hus, in dismayingly few steps, the caricature of Strauss travels to the gutter. He is known to millions who have never read his books as a sinister Jewish mastermind; a man who stayed far from the spotlight, but exercised tremendous power behind the scenes; who believed in the right of the chosen few to dupe the innocent masses; and whose agents have secretly commandeered the government for the benefit of Israel. It is an image directly out of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and in one guise or another it has become common currency on the left.
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牐燭he anti-Semitism behind the current wave of Strauss hatred, like the anti-Semitism that drives so much talk about the neoconservative "cabal" in Washington, is barely even veiled. There is no mistaking the insolent glee with which some of his critics (or, better, his slanderers) associate Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, with the greatest enemies of the Jews. Tim Robbins, in his recent play "Embedded," portrays characters based on Messrs. Wolfowitz and Perle shouting "Hail Leo Strauss," in an echo of the Nazi salute. Last year, a BBC documentary called "The Power of Nightmares" compared Strauss to Sayyid Qutb, the ideological godfather of Hamas.
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牐燭he demonization of Leo Strauss, in short, is one of the most dismal signs of the times. The shamelessness and baseness of much of what has been written about him is redolent of the propaganda of the 1930s, Auden's "low, dishonest decade."That is why "Reading Leo Strauss" (Chicago, 256 pages, $32.50), a sober new study by Yale professor Steven Smith, feels so heartening.By returning to the source and examining what Strauss actually wrote, Mr. Smith lets the breeze of reason into the feverish sickroom of ideology. He portrays a Strauss who cherished democracy as the best bulwark against tyranny, and who valued intellectual honesty above all. By the time Mr. Smith is done, nothing is left of the Strauss caricature except the ignorance and malice that fathered it.
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牐"Reading Leo Strauss," in turning from received opinion to the original texts, follows the characteristic movement of Strauss's own work. Leo Strauss was born in Germany in 1899, part of the stellar last generation of German Jewish intellectuals; his contemporaries included Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin. In 1932, he joined the exodus of Jewish professors from Germany, moving first to England, then to America, where he taught in New York at the New School for Social Research. Finally, his career took him to the University of Chicago, where he produced the work for which he is best known and trained generations of exceptionally devoted students.
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牐燤uch of the left's ire against Strauss, in fact, has its origins in academic politics."Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire," by Anne Norton, was widely praised when it appeared in 2004. But Ms. Norton's critique of Strauss is really fueled by her grievance against the "Straussians," his students and his students' students, whom she accuses of bad manners, cliquishness, and arrogance. (The most famous Straussian was Allan Bloom, whose 1987 best seller, "The Closing of the American Mind" gave the school, if that is the right word, some prominence outside the academy.) Whether these charges are true or not, the Straussians surely have no monopoly on academic back-scratching and backbiting. And in any case, Strauss's actual work cannot be judged on his students' merits or demerits. As he himself wrote, with reference to Calvin and the Calvinists, "epigones ... are very likely to miss the decisive point."
牐
牐燱hat is the decisive point in Strauss's own "teaching," to use one of his favorite words? Mr. Smith's title offers a good clue: As he says, "Strauss was, above all, a reader." His work took the form not of a new philosophical system or a theory of politics but of very close readings of classic texts. Some of his most important books are commentaries: "Thoughts on Machiavelli," "The Political Philosophy of Hobbes," and "On Tyranny," which examines a dialogue by Xenophon. In his best-known book, "Natural Right and History," he examines the development of the idea of rights from Plato and Aristotle, through Hobbes and Locke, down to Rousseau and Burke.
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牐燘ut Strauss's readings are not of merely anti quarian interest.What gives his work its stature and urgency is the way he turned to the wisdom of the past for guidance about the problems of the present. By asking what Plato or Machiavelli thought about tyranny, or the rights of man, or the place of morality in politics, he aimed to help his contemporaries think better about the health of liberal democracy and the challenge of totalitarianism. In a century when the Western political tradition seemed sick unto death, he went back to its origins, trying to trace its mistakes and expose its unexamined assumptions. In this sense, his approach to political philosophy is similar to that of Arendt, who also turned to the Greeks for guidance, and of Isaiah Berlin, who focused on the Enlightenment and its foes.
牐
牐燗t the core of Strauss's work is not a prescription but a diagnosis. Classical political philosophy, of the kind practiced by Plato and Aristotle, approached the problem of the best government by asking questions about human nature and virtue. That is why Plato's "Republic" is built around a comparison of the city with the individual soul: He believed that we can only decide how society should be organized if we know what human beings need in order to flourish. Indeed, Strauss wrote, "each regime" - a favorite Str auss word, suggesting not just government but culture and society as well - "raises a claim, explicitly or implicitly," about what kind of human life is best.
牐
牐燘ut beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes - pivotal figures for Strauss, whom he regards with a mixture of admiration and dismay - political philosophy changed its premises. Instead of virtues, it began to think about human beings as driven solely by needs - above all, the need to avoid violent death in the state of nature. In modern political philosophy, politics is no longer seen as a natural part of human life, as it was for Aristotle, but as a fatal necessity.
牐
牐燳et this pessimism, paradoxically, increases philosophy's expectations of what politics can do. After all, if a regime is something the human mind consciously devises, then it is theoretically capable of being perfected, like any other machine. In a well-engineered society, there would be no more conflict: This is the principle that animates Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx in their different ways. Thus the nihilism of modern thought leads directly to its utopianism, with the disastrous consequences that Strauss lived to witness.
牐
牐營t is only on the basis of this justifiably dark view of the modern world that one can understand Strauss's more controversial, and more easily distorted, teachings. The most notorious of these are his ideas about secrecy, or lying. But the actual role of secrecy in Strauss's work will come as a surprise to those who only know the press caricature. For Strauss did not say that it was justified for great men to lie in the pursuit of their goals. As Mr. Smith writes firmly, "He did not sanction the selective use of lies in public life, as has been asserted." Nor does he lie about his own beliefs in order to cloak a nefarious anti-democratic purpose, an idea that would have repelled him: "The political philosopher," he wrote, "is primarily interested in, or attached to, the truth."
牐
牐燭he importance of secrecy, for Strauss, was a matter of history and hermeneutics. In reading classic texts, he argued, we have to remember that their authors often lived in authoritarian societies governed by religious dogma. In such times and places, from ancient Greece to Puritan England, the philosopher's commitment to truth meant that he inevitably came into conflict with the idols of the tribe.
牐
牐燭o avoid the fate of Socrates - the founder of political philosophy, who was put to death by the Athenians - such thinkers wrote with deliberate caution. Machiavelli and Hobbes, for example, did not lie about their real views - if they did, how could posterity ever learn what those views were? - but expressed them indirectly, so that only the skillful, patient reader could fully grasp them. In Strauss's words, they were "driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests."
牐
牐燭his understanding of the classic philosophers helps to explain why Strauss reads them so very carefully, assuming that no feature of their work - no pattern, self-contradiction, or allusion - can be brushed aside as accidental. It also explains the originality - at times, the perversity - of his interpretations. But in no way can Strauss's hermeneutics of suspicion be reduced to a belief in the "noble lie," as so many propagandists have claimed. Rather, what Strauss really teaches is the importance of being a good reader, of mastering an author's nuances, of being alert to textual devices and conventions. (Ironically, this is just the kind of reading his own work fails to receive from his enemies.) In a literary critic, all this would be utterly uncontroversial; only in the context of political philosophy can it be made to appear sinister.
牐
牐營s there some secret message at the heart of Strauss's own work? Here, again, the answer is no. What there is, rather, is an uncertainty - the kind of uncertainty shared by the most penetrating and sincere modern thinkers. For while Strauss recognizes the catastrophic effects of modern nihilism and relativism, he is too honest to believe they can simply be bypassed, like a ditch in the road. Like the rest of us, he too lives in a world shorn of transcendent authority, a world where "the more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism."
牐
牐營n such a world, even the best human societies seem fragile, resting on little more than habit and convention.And it is precisely because Strauss believed American democracy was one of those best societies that he hesitated to undermine it with loud declarations of doubt. As Mr. Smith puts it
牐
牐燬trauss did write cautiously and reticently, especially with regard to the American regime, but certainly not to conceal some sinister intent. He did not write for the sake of undermining democracy, restoring ancient hierarchies, or advocating policies of imperial expansion - all accusions that have been leveled against him - but for the purpose of protecting the regime from the corrosive blasts of skepticism that philosophy necessarily effects on any body of received opinion.
牐
牐燬trauss's sense of the fragility of democracy, reinforced by his experiences in Weimar Germany, did not make him an enemy of democracy. Just the reverse: It made him aware of the tragic vulnerability of modern liberalism, whose commitment to freedom and complexity makes it tempting prey for the unfree and the uncomplex. This awareness, as Mr. Smith writes, is what links Strauss with the great "cold-war liberals of his generation - Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, Walter Lippmann, Raymond Aron." Like them, Strauss taught that liberalism has real enemies, and that moral judgments are inescapable in political life. The real question today is not why this message has important admirers. It is why so many self-proclaimed liberals are so unwilling to hear it that they would rather stop up their ears with lies and hatred.

三本著作：《近代中国的知识分子与文明》（French Revolution）……

Sisyphus — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 08:29:09 GMT+8

《近代中国的知识分子与文明》
　作者：[日]佐藤慎一
　译者：
　出版社：江苏人民出版社
　ISBN：7-214-03901-X/D·642
　版次：2006-5
　页数：151

【内容简介】

　本书以从19世纪后半期到20世纪初约半个多世纪的中国为主要舞台，以这一时期知识分子的思想轨迹和精神世界为主要课题。在这半个多世纪中，中国的对外关系由朝贡体制转换为条约体制，而且面临着被瓜分的威胁。同时，这一时期也是中国的政治体制从王朝体制到共和体制转换的时期。这一时期中国的政治变动和社会变动，其规模之深广是不难想象的。生活在这种激荡的旋涡中的中国知识分子，他们是如何认识所处国家的变化以及他们想使中国如何变化，是本书所要解决的主题。本书分别从“万国公法观的变化”、“法国革命观的变化”、“体制选择”这些不同的角度来分析近代中国知识分子对世界认识的转换过程

【目录】

前言……………………………………………………………………………………2

序章近代中国与知识分子……………………………………………………………6
一位老学者士大夫与中国的近代化科举的废止与新知识分子的诞生士大夫与知识阶层小结
主要参考文献…………………………………………………………………………21

第一章文明与万国公法………………………………………………………………22
引言……………………………………………………………………………………22
一、不平等条约………………………………………………………………………24
万国公法与不平等条约中华文明与不平等条约
二、《万国公法》的翻译……………………………………………………………30
总理衙门首脑的反应附会论与万国公法
三、外交官与万国公法………………………………………………………………37
首任驻英公使郭嵩焘中国的薛福成欧洲的薛福成
四、变法运动与万国公法……………………………………………………………45
甲午战争失败的冲击与万国公法变法派的理论结构孔子与格罗修斯三世进化说与社会进化论
五、中国革命与万国公法……………………………………………………………62
“文明之革命”与“文明之排外” 世界列国赞成中国革命吧政治犯与国际法排外与国际法
六、不平等条约解除的历史…………………………………………………………76
辛亥革命从新文化运动到“五四”运动国民革命与关税自主权的恢复抗日战争与治外法权的撤消中华人民共和国的诞生与新的不平等关系向激进路线的转换邓小平路线与香港问题
小结……………………………………………………………………………………92
主要参考文献…………………………………………………………………………93

第二章法国革命与中国………………………………………………………………96
引言……………………………………………………………………………………96
一、前史………………………………………………………………………………97
最初的法国革命介绍微不足道之国法国史与法国革命
二、法国革命论的展开………………………………………………………………103
康有为的《法国革命记》梁启超之迷惑革命派的法国革命论的出现论争调侃与恫吓
三、法国革命论的论争………………………………………………………………113
论争一;进化与革命论争二;专制与革命论争三;民主与革命论争四;革命与国际环境
四、从法国革命到俄国革命…………………………………………………………118
陈独秀与法国革命再评价社会革命论的谱系自由与面包从法国革命到法国文化
小结……………………………………………………………………………………123

第三章近代中国的体制构想…………………………………………………………125
一、体制构想的历史射程……………………………………………………………125
最初的体制选择第二次划时代的选择语汇的变化各种各样的体制构想围绕专制的一致性认识对专制的不同评价
二、世界史与中国的专制……………………………………………………………128
君主之国;民主之国;君民共主之国从君主之国到君主专制从政体类型论到政体进化论
三、专制与自由………………………………………………………………………132
共和制;立宪君主制论争初期革命派的自由观天赋的自由与强者的自由文明的自由与野蛮的自由直接的专制与间接的专制自由精神与奴隶根性再论革命派的自由观
小结……………………………………………………………………………………139
补论1 无政府主义者的专制论………………………………………………………141
补论2 严复的《政治讲义》与专制论………………………………………………143
主要参考文献…………………………………………………………………………146

后记……………………………………………………………………………………148
译后记…………………………………………………………………………………151

新版《孤独漫步者的遐想》　
作　　者： [法国]让-雅克"卢梭
译　　者：钱培鑫　
定　　价：￥18　
版　　次： 2006年1月第1版 2006年1月第1次印刷　
上架日期： 2006.3.3　
　
简介：
　卢梭是十八世纪杰出的思想家、作家。他一生颠沛流离,饱受磨难,倍感孤独,其原因:一是他的代表作之一《爱弥儿》被当局列为大逆不道的禁书;二是伏尔泰在一篇文章中揭露他抛弃亲生子女的事实。为此他写了《忏悔录》,但仍遭种种非议和侮辱。晚年,他重审自己的一生,写出了《孤独漫步者的遐想》,再次为自己辩白。《孤独漫步者的遐想》、《忏悔录》与《对话录:卢梭评论让-雅克》被视为卢梭的自传三部曲。

（略）…………………………………………………………………………

卢梭相关作品选段………………………………………………………………

纸牌背面的笔记…………………………………………………………………

《对话录：卢梭评判让－雅克》………………………………………………

《近作纪事》……………………………………………………………………

贝纳尔丹"德"圣－皮埃尔眼中的卢梭………………………………………

卢梭生平年表……………………………………………………………………

《宪政与民主》

丛书：汉语法学文丛
作者：萧公权
出版社：清华大学出版社
ISBN：7302125287
定价：24元
印次：1-1
装帧：活脊假精装
印刷日期：2006-3-23

图书简介：
本书收录萧公权先生1932年移讲清华大学起，至1949年去国止，关于宪政和民主的一系列著述，计22篇。曾于1948年题为《宪政与民主》，合集刊布。所论既有宪政与民主的一般原理，对于外域政制的介绍，更多的还是对于当日中国的实际所作的阐发，特别是对于中国施行宪政和民主的现实途径的剖析，而寄希望于批评，寓建议于分析。先生文风平实，运思细密，将实证与学理沟通，解释与建构合为一体，足堪垂范后世；其思其虑，不仅有助于省思过去，而且裨益于措置当下，瞻望将来。
本书适合于从事法学理论与宪政研究的学者、教师和研究生学习，同时也适合于对宪政和民主有兴趣的其他人士阅读。

作者简介：
萧公权先生（1897－1981），原名笃平，自号迹园，笔名君衡，江西泰和人。1918年夏自上海青年会中学毕业，考入清华学校高等科三年级（庚申级），毕业后赴美留学，先后就读于密苏里大学新闻专业和康奈尔大学哲学系，1926年获哲学博士学位后返国，任教于南开大学、东北大学、燕京大学和清华大学等校。1949年转任西雅图华盛顿大学教职，凡近二十年。当选第一届中央研究院院士。主要著作有《政治多元论》、《中国政治思想史》、《中国乡村》、《康有为思想研究》等，遗著辑成《萧公权全集》，计九册。先生主治政治学说和社会史，学贯中西，调和新旧，蔚然一代大家。
《宪政与民主》本书收录萧公权先生1932年移讲清华大学起，至1949年去国止，关于宪政和民主的一系列著述，计22篇。曾于1948年题为《宪政与民主》，合集刊布。所论既有宪政与民主的一般原理，对于外域政制的介绍，更多的还是对于当日中国的实际所作的阐发，特别是对于中国施行宪政和民主的现实途径的剖析，而寄希望于批评，寓建议于分析。先生文风平实，运思细密，将实证与学理沟通，解释与建构合为一体，足堪垂范后世；其思其虑，不仅有助于省思过去，而且裨益于措置当下，瞻望将来。

编者说明：
本书初版于1948年，由上海中国文化服务社印行。1982年作为《萧公权全集》第八卷，由台湾联经出版事业公司重刊。转瞬将近一个甲子，公权先生的“颠扑不破之论”重回故里，嘉惠汉语学思。特别是先生曾经就学、执教清华，此次由母校重印刊布，不仅记录下一位思想者关于中国政治民主化艰难历程的深邃思考，而且象征着清华文脉重续，更予中国文明探索现代治道与政道以当下启迪。
蒙汪荣祖先生惠允，书后附刊三则传文，述介乃师迹园先生的行宜与学术，当有裨于了解著者的心思，理解诸文的时代语境。特此恭致谢忱！
原文凡碍于“意蒂牢结”处，遵嘱酌删。知罪在我，特此说明。
钱季平同学制作索引，粗校一过；责任编辑方洁女士任劳任怨，保证了出版质量；翟志勇、周林刚、田夫诸同学惠予协助。各位劳心劳力，感铭五内，通此致谢！

许章润谨识 2005年初冬于清华园明理楼

弁言
萧公权先生研治政治学，精湛笃实，然未尝一日从政。抗战期间，不少学人入仕，萧先生亦曾为当局延请，但终觉其性格与志趣，仅可作在野之诤友，不能为朝上之党官，乃婉谢不就。不做官并不就是漠视政治，不关心国事。萧先生在其《问学谏往录》中明言：

我虽始终不曾从政，但时常关心国事，并且撰写政论，贡献一偏之见，一得之愚，也算小尽匹夫的责任，借孔子的一句话来说，“是亦为政”。

“是亦为政”就是以文字报国。此册所辑者即是此报国文字的一部分。萧先生自民国二十一年（一九三二）移讲清华大学起，到民国三十七年（一九四八）去国前为止，撰写了一系列的政论文字，围绕民主与宪政一课题，分别发表于国内的著名报章与杂志上。这些文字曾于战后在南京辑印成书，即以《宪政与民主》为题。今据原书重排、重印、重校，列入《萧公权全集》第八册。
政论文字原有时间性。萧先生针对抗战前后国内的重大政治问题，所发之言论，诸如对国家体制的商榷、对宪法的评议、对民主与自由的阐述，以及对选举的检讨等，已成明日黄花。但宪政与民主的大课题并未过时，仍然是我们追求的目标。何况萧先生的平实言论风度与细密思考精神，足为后人的典范。因此，我们今日重读此书，仍可从中得到益处，可以帮助我们回顾过去，瞻望将来。
如何回顾过去？萧先生立论遣意，没有任何党派立场，但凭个人的学问与品格，务求直率与坦白，曾说：“笔者所取的观点，简言之，是超党派的‘客观’观点。所谓客观者，就是依据一般政治学的原理和具体的事实”（见本书135页）。是则，此书可引导我们对抗战前后中国追求宪政与民主的曲折道路，有深一层的了解。对研究民国宪政史者，尤可得启悟的效果。
弁言宪政与民主如何瞻望将来？萧先生精通西洋政治学理，对“民主”、“自由”、“宪政”等概念的阐释，都有高度的权威性；而根据其学识而发之主张，更有超时代的正确性，足资我们思考今后宪政与民主问题的依据和借镜。书中胜义络绎，兹列举若干颠扑不破之论，作为读者的参考：
（一）论言论自由：“盖非言论自由无以宪政，非行宪政无以得言论自由。”（见本书32页）
（二）论选举：“清洁的选举不能一蹴而及，‘譬如为山，初覆一篑’。能够实行选举，就是宪政的具体开端。”（见本书106页）
（三）论妥协：“妥协不一定是坏事。对不同意见的妥协，为了获取有用的结果而妥协，为了避免决裂分争而妥协——这样的妥协可以说是民主政治的一个运用原则。”（见本书111页）
（四）论民主：“政治民主注重个人自由，经济民主注重人类平等。后者偏重物质的满足，前者偏重意志的解放。”（见本书163页）又曰：“什么是民主？我们的简单答复是：人民有说话的机会，有得到一切言论和消息的机会，有用和平方式自由选择生活途径的机会，有用和平方式选择政府和政策的机会。”（见本书166页）又曰：“民主政治只有从实地练习的过程中建立起来。”（见本书182页）
（五）论反对党：“一个民主国家必须要有健全的，经常存在的反对党。”“凡是拥护民主宪政而愿意用和平手段竞争的政党，都有资格做忠实的反对党。”（见本书177页）

萧先生在抗战后期，希望中国能于战后成为“世界上民主重镇之一”，虽然落空，但他所播下的一些宪政与民主的种籽，仍然藉此册保存。让我们盼望这些种籽能有一天开出宪政之花，民主之果。

汪荣祖谨撰于柏堡白舍一九八二年八月廿一日

原序：
前几年作者留滞成都的时候，承朋友们督促，在教学的余暇，偶而写点讨论时事的文字，在若干刊物上发表。来南京之前，吴惠人教授来信说刘百闵先生愿意把作者所写有关宪政的文字汇集付印，希望从速送稿。自省并无高明深刻的见解，值得重行刊印流传。但以部分友人每以个人对于党政的意见如何相问，重复口答，颇觉费辞，现在有这个良机，可以作一种省事的“书面答复”，当然乐于接受。因此到南京后便搜检著作，把勉强可以见人的成篇，寄交刘先生付印，并且杜撰了“宪政与民主”一个好看的书名。现在行宪业已开始，书中所发的片段零星议论有一些已经过时了。但作者相信个人对于中国宪政的基本认识尚没有修改之必要。
第一届国民大会开会时一部分代表发动了一个修改宪法的运动。主张修宪者的最大理由似乎有两个：宪法的条文不完善和制宪时的特殊环境已改变。一部分的国大代表希望在两年之后，再度集会时来推进修宪的工作。作者承认任何宪法都可以修改，并且在不能适用的时候必须修改。但同时作者也承认宪法不可以轻易修改。宪政就是法治。宪政的成立，有赖于守法习惯的培养。在我们缺乏守法习惯的中国，严守宪法的习惯远比条文完美的宪典为重要。如果宪法可以轻易修改，任何人都可以借口条文有缺点，企图以修改宪法为名，遂其便利私意之实。现行宪法纵不完善，似乎还不至恶劣到开始行宪，即需修宪的程度。照宪法规定，国民大会六年必须开会一次。因此至少六年当中有一个修宪的机会。任何迅速的进步，似乎不至于迅速到使得六年可以修改一次的宪法成为国家进步的障碍，“行宪国大”开会时候的政治环境诚然异于“制宪国大”开会时候的政治环境，最重要而显明的差异就是中国的政治局势由多党共同“协商”而转入于三党联合戡乱。“协商”局势对于宪法最大的影响似乎有两点，第一是因为各党的主张，把“五五宪草”所拟定略近于总统制的中央制度改为略近于内阁制的中央制度，第二是略为加强草案所拟定的地方制。这两个由协商影响而采取的制度是否果然优于原拟，是一个可以讨论的问题。但我们不经试行，实在无法断定它们的好坏。如果说，不修改宪法而行宪法所规定的制度是以全国的安危作尝试，那么试行修改宪法后所立的制度，那个制度既然未经在中国行过，岂不也是以国家作尝试吗？
作者久已渴望民主宪政的实现。他在这本小书中的意见纵然可能有许多错误，但希望能够由这些意见而引起了国人对于宪法更大的注意，引出了时贤对于宪政更高明正确的主张，使宪政能够早日纳入正轨，逐步前进。
除了感谢刘百闵、吴惠人两先生外，作者对于督促他写这些文字的各位先生和原来发表它们的各刊物主编者，同样表示谢意。

民国三十七年五月一日序于南京

目录
　
编者说明
　　许章润　（1）
　弁言
　　汪荣祖　（3）
　原序　　（7）
　均权与均势　（1）
　均权与联邦　（6）
　论县政建设　　（11）
　施行宪政之准备　（17）
　宪政的条件　（24）
　说言论自由　　（29）
　宪政卑论　（33）
　宪政实施后之中央政制　（38）
　怎样研究宪草　（43）
　宪政的心理建设　（48）
　宪政二疑及其答复　（55）
　英美民主政治　（58）
　中国君主政体的实质　（65）
　　一、中国君主专制政体的形成　　（66）
　　二、专制政体的定义　　（69）
　　三、中国专制政体的实质　　（71）
　　四、中国限制君权的制度　　（72）
　　五、限制君权制度的实际效力　　（74）
　　
　地方民意机构的初步检讨　（80）
　　一、民意机构的素质　　（83）
　　二、民意机构的效能　　（93）
　低调谈选举　（100）
　制宪与行宪　（107）
　论宪草中的国体　（114）
　宪法与宪草　（118）
　　一、宪法与政协原则的异同　　（126）
　　二、宪法与孙先生学说的异同　　（130）
　　三、宪法所定制度的测论　　（135）
　　四、行宪的准备　　（142）
　中华民国宪法述评
　　———为《中美周报》创刊五周年纪念作　（145）
　　一、制之经过与施行之展望　　（146）
　　二、国体与人权之规定　　（148）
　　三、中央制度之规定　　（150）
　　四、地方制度之规定　　（156）
　　五、基本国策之规定　　（158）
　说民主　（160）
　中国政党的过去与将来　（171）
　论选举　（180）
　附录
　　萧公权先生传略
　　汪荣祖　（189）
　　萧公权先生学术次第
　　汪荣祖　（193）
　　萧公权学术年表
　　汪荣祖　（214）
索引　（220）

刘师译著《以赛亚•伯林的遗产》导言

Sisyphus — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 08:59:49 GMT+8

　　【马克"里拉罗纳德"德沃金罗伯特"西尔维斯编，刘擎殷莹译，《以赛亚"伯林的遗产》（新星出版社2006年5月出版）】

　　以赛亚"伯林（Isaiah Berlin）于1997年辞世，享年88岁，这让他的友人与读者感到巨大的损失。伯林有一种罕见的天赋，能将他在阅读他所赞赏的哲学家、诗人、音乐家和政治家的作品时所感受到的兴奋来激发别人，尽管他对那些作品的赞赏从不是纯粹的。在论及思想史的生动作品以及对人物生平的勾勒中，以赛亚"伯林本能性地在他自己与他的研究对象之间保持着批评性的距离。这种本能对他和他的研究对象同样有益。通过发现和揭示一个思想家的思想中或一个作者的生活中存在的矛盾，通过指出一个卓越政治家的远见如何被一些盲点所遮蔽以及被无意识的局限所制约，伯林得以展现他在道德上与政治上为之辩护的多元主义是如何深入地根植于人类经验之中。他以这种方式赋予了他所珍爱的东西更多的价值。

　　1998年秋，纽约人文研究院主办了一个纪念伯林逝世周年的会议。此前，牛津、伦敦、华盛顿和耶路撒冷已经举办过各种悼念活动，但这些活动主要意在赞美伯林的个人品质——他的热忱、他的智慧、他对音乐的钟爱、他对闲谈的热心以及他的谈话天才。我们相信，一个不同类型的纪念活动——集中讨论他的思想遗产，并以他会赞赏的方式，向公开的审视与批评开放——也会是合适的。因此，人文研究院邀请了为数不多的一群对伯林著作颇有研究的学者和作家汇集纽约，展开为期两天的研讨与辩论。这是一次愉快而令人兴奋的活动。起初，我们并没有发表论文集的计划。学术会议大多是昙花一现的事件，很快就会让人失去兴趣。但是以下几种考虑说服我们改变了想法：提交给会议的论文的质量，它们所激发的辩论的强度，列席会议的听众的数量之多，以及我们所收到的索取会议记录的众多请求（特别是在关于会议的一篇文章在《纽约时报》刊出之后）。这部文集的发表受惠于丹尼尔"罗斯与乔安娜"罗斯（Daniel and Joanna S. Rose）的赞助以及洛蕾塔"兰迪"索伦森（Loretta Landi Sorensen）在编辑方面的协助，我们对此深表感谢。

　　纽约学术会议的不同部分都涉及了多元主义的各种方面——道德的、意识形态的、伦理的和文化的。对多元主义的承认与宽容被伯林看作是自由主义价值的精髓所在，而且他相信，他对多元主义的分析是他对道德与政治思想的主要贡献。而他那些哲学性较强的研究，也是通过这个思想线索，与他另一些性质不同的对思想史和当代政治的探索形成了联系。这部文集起始于探讨伯林的多元主义如何萌生于他在思想史中所发现的“刺猬与狐狸”之间的差别——“刺猬”建立了关于人类行为、历史经验与政治价值的无所不包的统一性理论；“狐狸”则在所有地方都看到了多样性，而畏惧那种甘愿把人类尊严牺牲于一个理念祭坛上的狂热分子。伯林用这种分类来区别与对比现代思想的两大潮流，一种来自德国与法国的启蒙运动，另一种出自更少为人理解的源头——他称之为“反启蒙运动”，这个术语也因为他的使用而变得流行。艾琳"凯利、马克"里拉和史蒂文"卢克斯对这两种思想潮流的特征以及它们与现代自由主义的关系表达了不同的见解。

　　第二组论文考察评价了伯林具有影响的哲学论断：客观上有效的（的确也是吸引人的）人类价值必然相互冲突，所以满足一种价值必然意味着牺牲另外一些价值，而这个损失是无可挽回的。我们如何来理解这一论断，它是合理的吗？这恰恰涉及到，比如，在自由与平等这两个观念中，一个理想只有在牺牲另一个的情况下才能实现吗？或者，伯林所辨识的这两个理想之间表面上的冲突仅仅反映了对于如何理解和贯彻它们的一种误解和不确定性吗？如果自由主义的各种核心价值之间的确互相冲突，那么我们能以此推论自由主义必定失败吗？或者这仅仅意味着自由主义必须谨慎地避免那些过度的和不现实的方案吗？这些是罗纳德"德沃金、伯纳德"威廉姆斯、托马斯"内格尔和查尔斯"泰勒等人提交的论文所针对的主题，也是在论文报告之后他们之间热烈辩论的话题。

　　第三组论文致力于讨论民族主义问题，特别是在犹太复国主义（Zionism）和以色列国的语境中。正如像迈克尔"伊格纳季耶夫（Michael Ignatieff）在新近出版的优秀传记作品《以赛亚"伯林的一生》（Isaiah Berlin: A Life）中所显示的那样，伯林对民族主义问题的专注思考与他对20世纪以色列和犹太人命运的热烈关切是紧密相联的。虽然在伯林的其它作品中，他强调各种价值之间的多元性冲突以及种种被迫的妥协，但在这个主题上他却坚持认为，自由主义的价值与现代民族主义的现实或许可以和谐相容，前者之中养成的那种“正派感”（the sense of decency）可能会在后者所提供的归属感中找到根源。罗伯特"西尔维斯、阿维赛"玛格里特、理查德"魏赫姆和迈克尔"沃尔泽在此讨论了“自由民族主义”——作为一种原则以及作为实践性的政治目标——的内在一致性。

　　纽约会议所讨论的这些主题当然没有、也并不想要穷尽以赛亚"伯林作品惊人的丰富性。许多他最为重要的思想论题——浪漫主义、政治家以及俄国文学等——都没有被纳入这次会议的讨论之中，但我们期望这部文集将会引发更多的同道，继续致力于对以赛亚"伯林非凡思想成就的全面研究。

　　马克"里拉

　　罗纳德"德沃金

　　罗伯特"西尔维斯

　　编者与作者简介

　　罗纳德"德沃金（Ronald Dworkin）：伦敦大学“大学学院”法学Quain讲座教授，纽约大学法学与哲学教授。他的著作包括Life’s Dominion和Freedom’s law: The Moral Reading of the Constitution等。

　　艾琳"凯利（Aileen Kelly）：剑桥大学国王学院研究员。著有Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance和Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin等。

　　马克"里拉（Mark Lilla）：芝加哥大学社会思想委员会教授。他是G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern的作者和New French Thought: Political Philosophy的编者。

　　史蒂文"卢克斯（Steven Lukes）：锡耶纳大学道德哲学教授，纽约大学社会学教授。他的著作包括Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work和The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Comedy of Ideas等。

　　阿维赛"玛格里特（Avishai Margalit）：耶路撒冷希伯来大学哲学教授。最新著作有：The Decent Society和Views in Review: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews。

　　托马斯"内格尔（Thomas Nagel）：纽约大学哲学与法学教授。他的著作包括The View from Nowhere和The Last Word等。

　　罗伯特"西尔维斯（Robert Silvers）：《纽约书评》（The New York Review of Books）的主编之一。

　　查尔斯"泰勒（Charles Taylor）：麦吉尔大学政治学和哲学教授。他的著作包括Hegel和Sources of the Self等。

　　迈克尔"沃尔泽（Michael Walzer）：普林斯顿大学高等研究院社会科学教授，《异议》（Dissent）的主编之一。他的著作包括Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality和On Toleration等。

　　伯纳德"威廉姆斯（Bernard Williams）：加利福尼亚大学伯克利校区哲学Deutsch讲座教授，牛津大学众灵学院研究员。他的著作包括Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy和Shame and Necessity等。（译者注：伯纳德"威廉姆斯教授于2003年6月10日去世，享年73岁。）

　　理查德"魏赫姆（Richard Wollheim）：加利福尼亚大学伯克利校区哲学系系主任。他的著作包括Painting as an Art和On the Emotions等。（译者注：理查德"魏赫姆教授于2003年11月4日去世，享年80岁。）

　　封底介绍文字

　　1998年秋，在伯林去世一年之后，纽约人文学院组织了一次关于伯林思想遗产的研讨会。与会学者将对多元主义予以相当的关注。伯林的多元主义信念是他的思想史研究与哲学论述的核心，他也将多元主义视为自由价值的关键所在。

　　在会议上提交并编入此书的论文着眼于伯林作品的三个方面。艾琳"凯利、马克"里拉与史蒂文"卢克斯回溯了他关于“刺猬”与“狐狸”之区别的发展和结果。伯林以“刺猬”指称那些对人类行为和历史持有整体的、统一的理论的思想家，而以“狐狸”指称那些信奉多样性的思想家，他们拒绝那种将人性服从于普遍视野的冲动。罗纳德"德沃金、伯纳德"威廉姆斯、托马斯"内格尔与查尔斯"泰勒研究分析了在面对伯林的洞见——同等合法的价值，如自由与平等，可能走向无法调和的相互冲突——时候，如何可能支持自由主义。阿维赛"玛格里特、理查德"魏赫姆、迈克尔"沃尔泽与罗伯特"西尔维斯探讨伯林对以色列国家的辩护，以及他对以色列所寄予的希望——使其成为能使自由主义与民族主义这两种经常对立的价值和谐共存的地方。

　　《以赛亚"伯林的遗产》不仅包括会议发言小组成员的论文，而且在每一部分最后还收入了他们之间、以及与其他与会者之间现场交流讨论的文本记录。在此收录的为期两天的探索与讨论显示了以赛亚"伯林的思想在当今社会与政治辩论中依然持续的活力和相关性。

　　“能够在这本书里，看到托马斯"内格尔、罗纳德"德沃金、查尔斯"泰勒和伯纳德"威廉姆斯这些卓越的思想家聚集一起，就一个问题著述讨论，真是一次难得的享受……每一个观点似乎都充满了神韵。”——英国《观察家》（Spectator）杂志。

　　目录

　　导言

　　第一部分：刺猬与狐狸

　　一个没有狂热的革命者艾琳"凯利

　　狼与羊马克"里拉

　　一个过时的狐狸史蒂文"卢克斯

　　讨论

　　第二部分：多元主义

　　自由的各种价值冲突吗？罗纳德"德沃金

　　自由主义与损失伯纳德"威廉姆斯

　　多元主义与一致性托马斯"内格尔

　　善的多元性查尔斯"泰勒

　　讨论

　　第三部分：民族主义与以色列

　　引言罗伯特"西尔维斯

　　民族主义的曲木阿维赛"玛格里特

　　伯林和犹太复国主义理查德"魏赫姆

　　自由主义，民族主义与改良迈克尔"沃尔泽

　　讨论