reason, what we may in any age have held dear as the fruit of democracy—indeed in the very way in which we ordinarily express its virtues—has never been cherished entirely of itself, but always with a sense of its fragility. The strikes and riots have always been with us. Citizenship, democracy, and other notions like these have ineluctably carried with them the consciousness of their own demise.

Even the character of the thinker, in all places and times, is under siege. As a European intellectual living in the United States, Tony Judt came to see this duality in thinking through its dimensions as they manifested in his professional life: “The twentieth century is the century of the intellectuals,” he writes, “with all of the accompanying treasons and accommodations andcompromises. The problem is that we live today in an age when the illusions, disillusions, and hatreds take front and center. So it requires a conscious effort to both identify and save the core of what was good about intellectual life in the twentieth century.”14

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright remarks that this threat of a Janus-faced democracy, a sense of citizenship that is realized only with its specter of disorder, has marked itself throughout American history. The threat has sometimes inhabited the same body: FDR and Japanese internment, for example, or the intolerant Catholic priest Charles Coughlin. Often, representations of good and evil clashed in their discernible entirety: Fritz Kuhn and the German-American Bund versus the architects of the New Deal would be an example. But