Word: absolutist
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Sitting throughout and speaking entirely without any prepared text or notes, the rumpled classicist drew from the range of ancient Greek literature, as he built up his unorthodox argument that Socrates and Plato were totalitarian, absolutist, and elitists to boot. Along the way, he made brief detours, for instance to call Solon the "Franklin D. Roosevelt of Athens" or to make a plug for studying the great classes ("All our feelings as human beings are there...
...unthinkable tragedies of Jewish history conspire with the radical vulnerability of Israel to enforce sometimes an aggressive and absolutist approach to life. In a warrior like Ariel Sharon, that morality hardens into a brute logic: the end justifies the means. It is a complicated and dangerous business when the People of the Book become also a People...
...judicial involvement in America's policy-making apparatus so long as judges steer clear of entanglement that could prejudice their decisions. For as the lives of Brandeis and Frankfurter show, judges often do wrong what is best for the nation--and their wisdom should not go untapped because of absolutist notions of the need for judicial seclusion
...assured, but in the interim a mix of conservation and dirty energy--coal and nuclear electricity generation--are imperative, he insists. Neither right nor left has met the problem square on; it will take, he says, a realist unswayed by the dogma of free enterprise or the hypnosis of absolutist environmentalism. And perhaps, in this case, he is right; at any rate, he is credible, and his pronuclear argument is sounder than most...
Ronald Reagan's election is not the biggest source of despair--rather it is the confluence of the size of his victory, the triumph of other conservatives (especially a half-dozen Bible-believing absolutist senators), and the apparently terminal case of tax fever that felled even the residents of Massachusetts. And the results of last week's elections are not, by themselves, the heralds of Armageddon. Instead, they are proofs--compass checks--of trends a few years older. They demonstrate that the car has gone over the top of the roller coaster, that the nation is shrieking and waving...