IGNORANCE AND BLISS
On Wanting Not to Know
In Ignorance and Bliss, the acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know. With erudition and brio, Lilla ranges from the Book of Genesis and Plato’s dialogues to Sufi parables and Sigmund Freud, revealing the paradoxes of hiding truth from ourselves.
TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS
Introduction by Mark Lilla
In an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals is a classic that speaks with a new and extraordinary urgency.
REFLECTIONS OF A NONPOLITICAL MAN
Introduction by Mark Lilla
When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many people on both sides of the conflict, was exhilarated. Finally, the era of decadence that he had anatomized in Death in Venice had come to an end; finally, there was a cause worth fighting and even dying for, or, at least when it came to Mann himself, writing about.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE LIBERAL
After Identity Politics
From one of the country’s most admired political thinkers, an urgent wake-up call to American liberals to turn from the divisive politics of identity and develop a vision of our future that can persuade all citizens that they share a common destiny.
THE SHIPWRECKED MIND
On Political Reaction
We don’t understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today’s political dramas are unintelligible to us.
THE RECKLESS MIND
Intellectuals in Politics
European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How could intellectuals whose work depends on freedom defend those who would deny it?
THE STILLBORN GOD
Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
The wish to bring political life under God's authority is nothing new, and it's clear that today religious passions are again driving world politics, confounding expectations of a secular future. In this major book, Mark Lilla reveals the sources of this age-old quest—and its surprising role in shaping Western thought.
THE LEGACY OF ISAIAH BERLIN
Edited by Mark Lilla, Ronald Dworkin and Robert B. Silvers
In the fall of 1998, one year after the death of Isaiah Berlin, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a conference to consider his intellectual legacy. The scholars who participated devoted much of their attention to the question of pluralism, which for Berlin was central to liberal values. His belief in pluralism was at the core of his philosophical writings as well as his studies of contemporary politics and the history of ideas.
NEW FRENCH THOUGHT
Edited by Mark Lilla
This anthology brings into English for the first time essays by some of the best young French political thinkers writing today, including Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, Luc Ferry, and Alain Renaut. The central theme of these essays is liberal democracy: its nature, its development, its problems, its fundamental legitimacy.
G. B. VICO
The Making of an Anti-Modern
The Italian scholar Giambattista Vico is viewed as the first modern philosopher of history, a judgement largely based on his obscure 1744 masterpiece, “New Science.” In this study Mark Lilla complicates this picture by presenting Vico as one of the most troubling of anti-modern thinkers.
BOOKS:
Ignorance and Bliss
The Once and Future Liberal
The Shipwrecked Mind
The Reckless Mind
The Stillborn God
G. B. Vico
EDITED BY MARK LILLA:
The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin
New French Thought
INTRODUCTION BY
MARK LILLA:
Treason of the Intellectuals
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man