Estado Sentido

Da introdução de Louis Menand a The Liberal Imagination de Lionel Trilling:

«For a key perception of the book is that most human beings are not ideologues; intellectual coherence is not a notable feature of politics. People’s political views may be rigid but they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to derive from, or to be reflections of, some mixture of sentiment, custom, and moral aspiration. Trilling’s point is that this does not make those views any less potent in the political world; on the contrary, it’s the unexamined attitudes and assumptions – the things that people take to be merely matters of manners or taste, and nothing so consequential as political positions – that require and repay critical analysis. “Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind”, as he puts it in his essay on Partisan Review, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.”

In Trilling’s view, the assumption all liberals share, whether they are Soviet apologists, Hayekian free marketers, or subscribers to Partisan Review, is that people are perfectible. A liberal is someone who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right curriculum, the right psychotherapy, and the right moral posture will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, tragic conflict and neurosis. A liberal is a person who thinks that there is a straight road to health and happiness. The claim of The Liberal Imagination is that literature teaches that life is not so simple – for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, tragic conflict and neurosis are literature’s particular subject matter. This is why literature has something to say about politics.»