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“... In The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy in 1952 the late Jacob Talmon offered an influential diagnosis of ‘the most vital issue of our time ... the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of today consists’. Empirical and liberal democracy was to be read as including social democracy but totalitarian democracy, at the time, as excluding totalitarianism of the right ...”

“... Is there or is there not good reason to believe that the experience of being alive is still on the whole improving for the majority of human beings? And if there is, is there good reason to expect this improvement to persist into the reasonably near, the imaginatively accessible, future? The idea of progress involves the adoption of at least two very different perspectives ...”

“... some of the great political thinkers are commonly seen. His two main heroes are Hugo Grotius and John Selden. In historical range and intellectual suppleness, this is an enormously gifted book. But it is also in the last instance curiously ungenerous to the reader – offhand and introverted, as though by its close the author had simply lost interest in ...”

“... circumstances even impressive, the mere desire to have seems to many today – just as it did to John Locke – a furtive, even incipiently criminal form of lust. Disputes over property, and over the power which flows from it and flows back into it, are far from being the only major theme (let alone the motor) of human history. But for a number of millennia ...”

“... At one point in Thomas Peacock’s satire Melincourt, the heroine Anthelia offers a spirited sketch of the character traits which she looks for in a prospective husband. ‘I would require him to be free in all his thoughts, true in all his words, generous in all his actions – ardent in friendship, enthusiastic in love, disinterested in both … the champion of the feeble, the firm opponent of the powerful oppressor – not to be enervated by luxury, nor corrupted by avarice, nor intimidated by tyranny, nor enthralled by superstition – more desirous to distribute wealth than to possess it, to disseminate liberty than to appropriate power, to cheer the heart of sorrow than to dazzle the eyes of folly ...”

“... of human beings were those of independence and equality, that the human species was at first, as John Locke put it, the ‘great and natural community of mankind’, was accepted in some form by virtually every natural-law thinker. But no other natural-law thinker of whom I am aware seriously supposed that this community could be fully reconstituted, even on ...”

“... As with the sword or the bow and arrow, making up one’s mind responsibly about the Bomb is not an easy task. For anarchists or pacifists the exercise of violence by state powers throughout history has been intrinsically regrettable. But any style of political assessment which weights consequences more heavily than these do must recognise practical connections (sometimes of a surprising kind) between the history of civilised social life and that of repressive force ...”

“... The relation between politics and letters is necessarily a dangerous liaison, and the questions which it raises are huge, blunt and disobliging. Acknowledged too readily, it is apt to highlight the less becoming features in each. But its potential for treachery is probably greatest when its existence is most vehemently denied. If imagination and the exercise of power were ever simple antinomies in human life, the relation could perhaps be avoided in principle ...”

“... pronouncements transcend comment. On the steps of Turin cathedral on 13 April of this year. Pope John Paul concluded a morose diatribe on the emptiness and malignity of modern capitalist society with a ringing proclamation: ‘But there is Christ and he is sufficient for all time.’ Three centuries or so earlier, Blaise Pascal summarised the theme of his ...”

“... In the opening act of The Marriage of Figaro the music master Don Basilio twits Susanna with the absurdity of her sexual tastes. How odd not to prefer, as anyone else would do, the favours of a signor liberal, prudente e saggio to those of a giovinastro and a paggio (a callow adolescent and a mere page). The page Cherubino, despite his giddy youth and relatively menial role, is of course a lad of good family ...”

“... and yet falling short of the ideal moral imperatives? These are the questions which occupy John Dunn in the essays that make up this book and which give it a coherence greater than that usually achieved in such collections. They range from reflections on and exercises in the history of ideas, through detailed case-studies of African and Asian ...”

“... Evidently, things have not greatly changed in the last two hundred years. No existing country, John Dunn suggests, manages ‘to combine prudent regard for the economic limits to modern politics with delicate and effective concern for the sorts of human beings whom its economic momentum fashions’. Professor ...”

“... that whatever is desirable is possible, and that whatever is desirable and possible is inevitable. John Dunn’s short book is much concerned with the disastrous consequences of this Utopian strand in socialism. He argues that socialists, if they want to be taken seriously, must show that the society they propose is economically viable, and that the ...”

“... only because an even more plausible explanation has recently been provided. One source for it is John Dunn’s new book. Let me hasten to say that the explanation of contemporary political behaviour is not the primary task that he sets himself. What he is explicitly concerned with is the exhaustion of the resources provided by traditional Western ...”

“... by the rival needs of literature and politics has long been familiar to modern editors. John Dunn writes about it elsewhere in this issue of the London Review of Books. The present New Statesman has dealt with it by seeming never to have heard of it. It is a problem which, in certain of its relations, may be thought to have been new to the ...”