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“... My architecture is about presence and absence.’ The lecture hall at the American Academy in Rome was dark and on the projection screen before us was an image of jagged fields of colour. The speaker, a black-clad young architect from New York, was delivering his Fellow’s Lecture. Since most of the previous lectures had been given by historians occupied with mapping the drainage ditches of ancient Pompeii or cataloguing the patronage of Renaissance door jambs, his rambling ‘deconstructivist’ reflections on modern buildings brought a nervous titter from the unknowing audience ...”

“... The modern social sciences were born out of modern political philosophy. Overtime, those sciences declared their independence one by one from the philosophical tradition, then tried to reshape it after their own image. The intimate relation between economics and Anglo-American liberal thought, now centuries old, offers a classic example. A similar story might be told on the Continent, though for different social sciences in different countries ...”

“... was Beccaria guilty of ‘rationalism’? Did Diderot’s and Lessing’s literary works really mark them as ‘unfeeling’ prophets of cultural ‘intolerance’? Did Voltaire’s despairing cry after the Lisbon earthquake, ‘il y a du mal sur la terre’, actually inspire others to plan mad utopias or ‘sacrifice themselves’ on the altar of ...”

“... you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics ...”

“... door is to ask me to expel the Holy Spirit from my life when I serve as a congressman,’ declares Mark Souder, a conservative Republican from Indiana, ‘and that I will not do.’ Such affirmations of the legitimacy of religion in the civic sphere are increasingly common in the United States, even among liberal democrats stung by accusations of secularist ...”

“... years on, the strength of Berlin’s interpretation continues to be evident in the new books by Mark Lilla and Joseph Mali, both of which range Vico against the Enlightenment. Both writers are, however, aware of recent Italian scholarship on Vico, which has in the same period taken a more specifically historical direction. They differ from Berlin over ...”

“... general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, wants the Democratic Party, which under Bill Clinton captured ‘Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny’, to abandon identity politics and help ...”

“... of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome,’ Mark Lilla wrote in the New York Times, ‘is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end,’ and he condemned Clinton for calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop. ‘This,’ he said, ‘was ...”

“... who did most to unmoor Western understandings of politics from Western understandings of God (what Mark Lilla nicely calls ‘the Great Separation’). Seen from this perspective, Hunt’s cursory treatment of Hobbes becomes somewhat less defensible. A final question that she prompts is why and how the idea of human rights appealed so powerfully and so ...”

“... and detestation of ‘social justice warriors’ unites figures as seemingly disparate as Mark Lilla, Steven Pinker, Elon Musk, Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson. Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign confirmed, however, that socialist ideals exist, beyond the experience of communist tyranny, as what John Stuart Mill called ‘one of the most ...”

“... conceived early on as a trilogy, and the last, which is more self-standing, with features that mark it off from its predecessors. Covering the epoch from the French Revolution to the First World War, the trilogy follows a consistent scheme, classically Marxist in its logic: each volume begins with an account of the economic foundations of the period, then ...”