Desire and Fate

At a time when political writing and cultural criticism have come to be dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, David Rieff's essays offer a bracing antidote. As well as being one of the English-speaking world's most perceptive commentators on global politics, Rieff has in recent years been one of its most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politics – in particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and... Weiter