Michael Ignatieff�s theories are grounded in an attempt to understand human nature for only that leads to the doable. His vision is tragic � he acknowledges the great ironies and paradoxes of being human. Of Blood and Belonging examines the powerful ties of kinship and our desire to belong � ties important in ways that can both comfort and destroy us. Reading it, I remembered a local Serbian economist who was one of the customers at my little business; in 1990 or so I remarked (in my naivet�) that Yugoslavia, [here I reveal my slovenliness; looked it up a week later and he is Hungarian – though obviously our conversation was about Yugoslavia; sorry] with its lovely coastline, would surely not tear itself apart in the coming years because it had so much going for it in terms of tourism, beauty, a bright economic future. He did not laugh, though he treated my stupidity with polite condescension: I teach economics, that is my intellectual life, he said; but people, to them, money is not important – they act from the passions of blood and the heart, of who you are and who �they� are.. He was right of course. (And the course supplement we sold, heavy on Hayek, was my superficial introduction to what economics was � or could be – about.) Ignatieff, like that economist, understands what Faulkner describes as �the old fierce pull of blood�. That old Mississippian understood the heart counters this pull with another, the magnetic universals that transcend our tribal loyalties – abstractions he saw embodied in the law and reaching toward a justice and truth independent of the subjective. Ignatieff, the Canadian, uses similar tensions and arrives at similar conclusions. In The Lesser Evil, he argues those passions must be woven into a world of laws, without which governance is chaotic and brutal; it is, he would argue, �prepolitical.�
He is in the internationalist tradition, one given to US-bashing. Clearly, people like Anthony Lewis welcome this as central to Ignatieff’s vision. But The Lesser Evil argues, for instance, that giving any quarter to the kind of terrorists who have become nihilists is wrong. Often, he surprises. I’m looking forward to other’s, probably broader, contexts for the work I quote from below: