Dennis Hollingsworth

Dinner Table

I read Paul Berman's "A Tale of Two Utopias" in preparation for his recent book "Terror and Liberalism". I'm glad I read the former. It filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the history of humanities in the West. Before, names like Glucksman, Dewey, Whitman, Foucault, Hegel and many others were disembodied for me. Olympian. The intellectual and creative universes woven for me in school reminded me of Hesse's glass bead game: mandarin, obscure, untouchable. Berman renders them in a living and breathing context, human beings with genius and shortcomings aplenty. Just like the rest of us.