Well, What’s Seven Decades, More or Less?
The book has been controversial from the start—in fact, it was controversial as a short essay before it became a book. After a quarter century, the laws in reasoning are becoming much clearer. Even more so are the author’s predictions, such as this one:
“Can it not be argued, moreover, that the current crisis of authoritarianism is a fluke, a rare convergence of political planets that will not recur for the next hundred years?”
Pride or Esteem?
Pride, the author explains, is a state of feeling that can still be experienced even absent external recognition. Pride differs from esteem, however, because esteem
“is not a "thing" like an apple or a Porsche: it is a state of consciousness, and to have subjective certainty about one's own sense of worth, it must be recognized by another consciousness.”
Conspiracy Theorist
Though written in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain, the author very much seems stuck in the time-warp of the Red Scare of the 1950’s. At times, his predictions of the future take on the tone of a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist:
“A future leftwing threat to liberal democracy is much more likely to wear the clothing of liberalism while changing its meaning from within, rather than to stage a frontal attack on basic democratic institutions and principles.”
What Is Liberalism?
What is the definition of liberalism in a political sense? The author suggests it is a term that is merely a metaphor:
“Political liberalism can be defined simply as a rule of law that recognizes certain individual rights or freedoms from government control.”
And that Last Man is...
To be completely honest here, the author provides a number of different theoretical possibilities in metaphorical form to describe the “last man.”
“The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a `last man’ who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation.”
“Nietzsche's last man was, in essence, the victorious slave.”
“That is why modern man is the last man: he has been jaded by the experience of history, and disabused of the possibility of direct experience of values.”
