After Utopia [great title, Judith N. Sklar’s]: The Decline of Political Faith, 1957, pub. date. gives us a lingering decline and utopia a long after

Shklar presents Johann Gottfried von Herder, the first Romantic:

We know that we exist, and that God is, not because we think, but because our whole being tells us that it is so. We are directly and inevitably conscious of existence, just as we cannot even imagine nothingness. There can be no separation of thought and experience, because our awareness of existence, of God, is more than either. It is the basis of all our knowledge and all our happiness, for it is the expression of our whole being as part of a universal Existence. Over and over again Herder remarks our sense of the beautiful helps us see this.

At the bottom of all this lies Herder’s conviction that intuition is our real guide to truth; that it is the highest form of consciousness–which may be true in art, but is certainly dubious philosophy. While Herder engaged in what he mistook for philosophic debates …

Shklar clearly missed out on the Bergson craze.

I flipped forward from page 40 to page 267 and read:

Success is probably an important cause of the theoretical decline of socialism. Sidney Webb’s prediction that “the slow and gradual turning of the popular mind” was toward socialism has been realized. Everyone is a bit socialist today, especially in England. Consequently there is no room for a specifically “socialist” philosophy. That, too, was the fate of liberalism. Success has meant that socialism has lost much talent. As long as it was the champion of the dispossessed, it could count on the artistic and polemic support of many romantic minds anxious to join the battle against the philistines. Once these artists discovered that a socialist state would do no more for them than any other, their ardor cooled markedly, and the revival of purely aesthetic romanticism began. Then, the too close relationship of socialist theory to the “movement” is a particular liability, because theory tends to become mere official propaganda and election material. Lastly, the concentration on pure anti-fascism and then anti-communism has left the socialists intellectually exhausted and has forced both the parties and the theorists into permanently defensive states of mind.