Praktischer Idealismus — published in Vienna in 1925 under the subtitle “Noblesse, Technique, Pacifisme” — gathers three essays written between 1920 and 1924 by Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the Pan-Europa movement. It is a work of practical philosophy: a set of connected arguments about elites, technology, and peace, written in the shadow of a shattered postwar Europe and addressed to readers who had just watched a civilization destroy itself. The book proceeds less as a single treatise than as a sequence of linked meditations, each one testing the same conviction from a different angle — that ideals are worthless unless they are acted upon, and that action is blind unless it serves an ideal.
“La technique est un enfant de l’esprit européen.”
The author’s own foreword sets the terms. Practical idealism, he writes, is heroism; practical materialism is the pursuit of pleasure. Anyone who does not believe in an ideal has no reason to fight or suffer for it, since such a person recognizes only pleasure as a value and pain as an evil. This opposition, he insists, runs deeper than the divide between theist and atheist — Epicurus believed in gods, after all, while Buddha was an atheist idealist. What matters is belief in values, not belief in deities. From this premise the essays fan out: toward a theory of aristocracy, toward a defense of technology as modern heroism, and toward a pacifism grounded in reason rather than sentiment.
From Nobility of Blood to Nobility of Spirit
The Translator’s Warning and the Book’s Occasion
Adeline Gasnier’s 2014 French rendering of Praktischer Idealismus comes with a candid disclaimer: the translation has no official standing, undertaken voluntarily from a scan of the 1925 Vienna and Leipzig edition, since the German original is likely out of print and apparently never translated, with library copies scarce. What circulates instead, she notes, are truncated quotations appearing in disconcerting contexts—which is precisely why a complete, faithful version seemed necessary. Her editorial choices are meticulous: original pagination bracketed, translator’s notes marked, the author’s italics reproduced so that foreign words like otium and status quo stay unitalicized, German tenses and adjective agreements preserved where possible, and a same-word-same-translation policy maintained to keep the semantic weaving intact, with polysemies such as Recht glossed in brackets. She frames the book’s remarkable historical situation: three essays edited in 1925, shortly before Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the two works functioning as counterpoints on a collapsed, bellicose Europe while responding in opposite directions. What if this book had been more widely read, she asks. It answers the question “Why Europe?” and, amid the early twenty-first-century crisis and rising nationalisms, offers reflexivity—Europe is not a new problem—while measuring the path traveled in nearly ninety years. The essays remain topical: “Noblesse” (1920) on elites, excellence, and merit; “Apologie de la technique” (1922) on paradoxical technological attitudes, with its warning that technique without ethics leads to catastrophes as much as ethics without technique, so the two must advance together; and “Pacifisme” (1924) on pacifist and ecological questions, an antidote to a logical trap she attributes to Mein Kampf: if A holds physical violence the only valid argument and B holds dialogical reason the only valid argument, then whether B submits and dies or defends and kills A, A is right. “Pacifisme” confronts this impasse and reconnects with Enlightenment optimism.
Heroism Against Eudemonism
The foreword, dated Vienna, November 1925, sets the book’s axis: practical idealism is heroism, practical materialism is eudemonism. One who does not believe in an ideal has no reason to act ideally, fight, or suffer for it, recognizing only pleasure as value and pain as evil. Heroism presupposes belief in an ideal—conviction that values greater than pleasure and evils greater than pain exist. This opposition runs through history as Epicureans versus Stoics, deeper than theist versus atheist: Epicurus believed in gods; Buddha was an atheist idealist. It concerns belief in values, not gods. Materialism is presuppositionless but imaginationless and uncreative; idealism is problematic, often woven of nonsense, yet humanity owes it its greatest works and deeds. Heroism is an aristocracy of mentality, akin to the aristocratic ideal as materialism is to the democratic: democracy believes in number over value, luck over greatness. Political democracy becomes fruitful only by demolishing the pseudo-democracy of name and gold, birthing an eternally renewed aristocracy of spirit and mentality. The leader must replace the ruler, the noblest meaning the noblest name, the richest heart the richest purse—any other meaning is cultural suicide. Hence Plato was prophet of spiritual aristocracy and socialist economy and father of the idealist worldview: aristocracy and socialism are practical idealism.
The Northern Hero and the Age of Work
Ascetic idealism of the South appeared as religion; heroic idealism of the North as technique. Nature in the North was a challenge: other peoples submitted; the European fought until strong enough to subjugate the Earth and force nature into service. This struggle demanded and engendered heroism; the hero became in Europe what the saint was in Asia. Active ideal replaced contemplative; fighting for an ideal became greater than suffering for it. With modern times Europe first grasped this heroic world mission—its technical age, its war of liberation against winter, also the age of work. The worker is the hero of our time; his opposite is not the bourgeois but the parasite—the worker aims to act, the parasite to enjoy. Technique is modern heroism; the worker a practical idealist. The twentieth century’s political-social problem is catching up with the nineteenth’s technical progress, harder as technique advances ever faster relative to human development. Two escapes exist: slow technical progress or accelerate social progress—otherwise humanity loses balance and overturns; the World War was a warning. Technique poses the alternative: suicide or understanding. Coming decades will be unprecedented: current technical-social disequilibrium leads either to destructive catastrophe or political progress surpassing all historical models in speed and precision. As technique opens new paths for human impact and heroism, war begins playing out its historical role.
The Junker and the Letté
The book then contrasts two human types—the rural noble, junker and officer, and the urban intellectual, lettré and journalist—as extremes of nobility of blood and nobility of spirit. The junker-officer remains psychologically at the knight’s stage: hard, dutiful, energetic, conservative, narrow, living by dynastic, military, nationalist, and social prejudices; deeply distrusting modernity, the city, democracy, socialism, and internationalism, while believing in his blood, honor, and ancestral worldview; he despises city-dwellers, especially Jewish intellectuals and journalists. The lettré is progressive, skeptical, witty, versatile, changeable—a eudaimonist, rationalist, socialist, materialist—overvaluing spirit and undervaluing body and character, thus despising the junker as a backward barbarian. The junker’s essence is rigidity of will; the lettré’s is mobility of spirit. They are born rivals: where the junker caste rules, spirit yields to power; where the lettré caste rules, power yields to spirit. Their mutual hatred roots in mutual incomprehension—each sees only the other’s dark sides.
The Future Noble Human
The argument closes its case on nobility by predicting a convergence. Judaism, the text holds, will move toward the Western ideal of nobility, and that ideal will shift to meet it halfway. In a pacified Europe the aristocrat sheds his warlike character for a priestly, spiritual one; a socialized West will need leaders, educators, and models rather than masters and rulers. The future noble will resemble a brahmin or a mandarin more than a knight.
The résumé insists this future human will be neither feudal, Jewish, bourgeois, nor proletarian but synthetic—races and classes in the current sense dissolving while personalities endure. Old feudal blood rises to new flowering only through alliance with the best bourgeois stock; the Jewish element reaches full development only through union with the summits of non-Jewish Europeanness. A rustic nobility could offer accomplished bodies and gestures, an urban one a spiritualized face, soul-filled eyes and hands. Past nobility rested on quantity—ancestors or millions—while the coming one rests on quality: personal worth, perfection of body, soul, and spirit. A nobility of chance has already replaced hereditary nobility, elevating noble individuals by hazardous blood composition; from them will emerge an international noble race, eminent persons drawn to one another by secret laws of erotic attraction. Once feudal and capitalist limits fall, the most beautiful women return to the most significant men. Only the noblest pair freely; lesser persons satisfy lesser persons—free love for the mediocre, free marriage for the elect. This breeding nobility arises not from artificial caste norms but from erotic eugenics, and socialism, having begun by leveling humanity, culminates in producing nobility: leading from unjust inequality through equality to just inequality.
The Curse of Culture and the Lost Paradise
An apology for technique opens with a motto—ethics the soul of culture, technique its body—and a first section on paradise lost. Culture, the text charges, has turned Europe into a house of correction and most of its inhabitants into convicts. A buffalo in the primeval forest, a condor in the Andes, a shark in the ocean live more beautifully and freely than a factory worker chained to his machine, performing inorganic gestures to avoid starvation. Primitive humans were happy animals, free, living in nature rather than in a State, playing rather than working, hence beautiful and happy. The European, believing himself civilization’s summit, breathes stale air in ugly cities, his instincts atrophied, robbed of freedom by organized society while a harsh climate condemns him to perpetual work.
Unfolding as the Measure of Value
The final goal of earthly existence is unfolding: rock wants to crystallize, plant to flower, animal and human to live fully. Pleasure is only a symptom—the animal feels pleasure because it satisfies instinct, not the reverse. Unfolding means growth according to the laws of one’s own interiority, and every external constraint inhibits it; freedom means dependence on internal laws, unfreedom on external conditions. The product of freedom is the unfolded human, of unfreedom the atrophied one. All wild animals are beautiful, while most humans are ugly—there are more accomplished tigers and eagles than accomplished humans. The legend of the lost paradise states a truth: humanity is banished from the kingdom of freedom, otium, and natural life, which the fauna of the primeval forest still inhabits.
The Spiral from Paradise to Paradise
Culture follows a spiral from a natural paradise to a cultural one, along two parallel courses: natural anarchy, overpopulation, forced state, ethics, cultural anarchy; and natural otium, migration north, forced labor, technology, cultural otium. The present sits midway between both paradises, which explains modern misery—the average European is no longer an animal but not yet human, no longer part of nature but not yet its master. Ethics and technique are sisters: ethics conquers the forces within us, technique those around us; ethics delivers through resignation, technique through the deed. Asia’s key problem is overpopulation, Europe’s the climate; Asia’s greatness lies in ethics, Europe’s in technique. Life holds two values, harmony and energy: Asia lives in space—contemplative, feminine, static, Apollonian; Europe lives in time—active, masculine, dynamic, Dionysian. The white human is winter’s son, forged by cold into the heroic type; from the choice between deed and death emerged the strongest peoples on each culture’s northern fringe. Heat limits activity, cold maximizes it; the active North conquered the passive South, which civilized its conquerors until a new North regenerated it. Three religious types follow the climates—contemplative, heroic, harmonious—and each spreading faith adapts to its ground. The Oriental surpasses the European in goodness and wisdom, yields in strength and intelligence; European Christ images look sad while Buddha’s statues smile. Yet Europe is great in its kind, the world’s heroine on every front, its symbol not sage or saint but hero, fighter, liberator.
Europe as Cultural Tangent
All prior cultures resembled one another because they rested on the same technical presuppositions; from Egypt to the Middle Ages there was no essential technical progress. The coming technical age will stand as high above antiquity as antiquity stood above the Stone Age. Europe is not a cultural circle but a cultural tangent—the tangent of the larger cycle of Eastern cultures, making that cycle jump toward unknown life-forms. World history consists of Asiatic cycles and European tangents; without the tangents there would be only flourishing, not development. Inventions, not narratives or religions, mark the levels: bronze, iron, electricity. With the Middle Ages the iron circle closed; with modern times begins the machine age, created by the Promethean, Germanized European, resting equally on his inventor spirit and on Jewish ethics, Hellenic art, and Roman politics. Leonardo and Bacon anticipated Europe’s meaning: Leonardo’s dream of human flight, realized in the airplane, conquered gravity technically where India’s yogis suspended it through asceticism; Bacon’s “Nova Atlantis” marks the turn from More’s ethical utopia to a technical one—More was still a Christian, Bacon already a European.
The Beauty of the Machine
The book turns to aesthetics, and to the charge that the machine age is ugly. Anyone who doubted the beauty of technology, it argues, must fall silent before a human being in flight. The airplane is only the most spectacular case: the automobile, the motorboat, the locomotive and the dynamo all possess a beauty of their own, a beauty located in activity and movement rather than in form. Because this beauty is dynamic, it cannot be fixed by brush, point or burin the way the static beauty of a landscape can. It therefore does not exist for people who lack an original sense of beauty and need art as a guide through the labyrinth. Something is beautiful, the argument runs, through the ideal of vitality and harmony it lets us reach and the impulse it gives in that direction. Every culture builds its own symbols of force and beauty: the Greek increased his harmony through statues and temples, the Roman his bravery through circus combats, the medieval Christian transfigured his soul through the Passion and the eucharist, the modern bourgeois grew through the heroes of his theater and novels, the Japanese learned grace and devotion to fate from flowers. In an age of incessant progress the ideal of beauty had to become dynamic, and its symbol with it. The human of the technical age is a pupil of the machine he created, learning from it tireless activity and concentrated force; the machine, creature and temple of the human spirit, symbolizes the overcoming of matter by spirit, of fixity by movement, of inertia by force.
Cinema as the New Gospel
Technology has handed the coming age a new form of expression: cinema, about to displace today’s theater, yesterday’s church, and the amphitheater of the day before, and destined to play a leading cultural role in the future State of labor. Despite its artistic defects, film already brings the masses an unconscious gospel of force and beauty, announcing beyond good and evil the victory of the strongest man and the most beautiful woman—whether the man wins through body, will or spirit, adventurer or hero, criminal or detective; whether the woman is charming or noble, graceful or devoted, hetaera or mother. The screen preaches “Be strong!” to men and “Be beautiful!” to women. Clarifying and improving this mass-pedagogical mission is among the artist’s most responsible tasks, since future cinema will shape proletarian culture more than theater ever shaped bourgeois culture.
Emancipation as Masculinization
The cult of the technical age, the book continues, is a cult of force; harmony must wait for the golden age of culture that will follow the iron age of work. Nietzsche’s masculine-European ethic represents the epoch’s dynamic attitude, protesting against the feminine-Asiatic morality of Christianity. Women’s emancipation is a symptom of the world’s masculinization: it does not lead the feminine type toward power but the masculine, so that men of both sexes now brandish the scepter of economic and political power. Emancipation means the triumph of the masculine woman over the truly feminine one; the Dame is already extinguished, and the Frau must follow her. The female sex, hitherto partly spared, is mobilized into the army of labor. The emancipation of Asians follows the same logic, a symptom of the world’s Europeanization: it brings not the Oriental type to victory but the European. Where Asian blood wins in the East, the spirit of Europe wins with it—masculine, hard, dynamic, rationalist. To share in progress the Asian must trade his harmonious soul for the Euro-vitalist one and enter the Euro-American army of labor. Only after that victory may Asia be Asian again and woman feminine, educating the world to a purer harmony; meanwhile both must wear the European uniform.
Christianity, Chivalry and the New Honor
Whoever understands culture as harmony with nature must call this epoch barbarian; whoever understands it as a reckoning with nature must honor its specifically masculine-European form. From its Christian-Oriental origin, European ethics misrecognizes the ethical value of technical progress; only under the Nietzschean perspective does the heroic-ascetic struggle of the technical age appear good and noble. Its virtues are force to act, endurance, bravery, renunciation, self-domination and solidarity, forging the soul for the bloodless combat of social labor. The ethics of work links to the chivalric ethics of combat: both masculine, both Nordic. The new honor will rest on work, the new shame on laziness; the lazy human will be despised as a deserter from the labor front.
Mercenaries and Soldiers of Labor
In a capitalist state the worker is a mercenary and the entrepreneur a condottiere of labor; in a communist state the worker is a soldier of a people’s army under generals employed by the State. As condottieri once conquered principalities with their mercenaries’ blood, modern industrial captains conquer fortunes with their workers’ sweat and found dynasties of plutocrats, negotiating with governments as equals. Communism’s reform of the labor army mirrors the military reforms of modern states: general labor duty, etatized industry, private entrepreneurship forbidden, State-employed directors in place of owners, labor exalted as a moral duty. Stinnes and Krassine command rival labor troops fighting a common enemy, Nordic nature—the one a mercenary army, the other a people’s army. Though they see themselves as adversaries, they are allies: march separately, strike united.
Social Capitalism, Liberal Communism
As Catholicism regenerated after the Reformation, so capitalism and communism could fertilize each other if they competed through cultural performance rather than murder and sabotage. No theory pleads better for capitalism than the fact that American workers, many driving to the factory by car, fare better than Russian workers who starve; prosperity matters more than equality, and only envy opposes the preference for many prosperous and few rich over uniform misery. Only a social capitalism reconciled with workers, and a liberal communism reconciled with the intelligentsia, have prospects of survival. Krassine understood that communism must learn from capitalism: he encourages private initiative, appoints competent engineers to run State enterprises with profit shares, recalls expelled industrialists, and puts the fight against hunger, electrification and reconstruction at the center of his politics, sacrificing a whole series of principles.
The War Against National Hatred
Pacifism, the argument continues, has to begin with the small, stubborn thing: the “stupid hatred of peoples,” which damages everyone and profits no one. The remedy is truth-telling and steady resistance to the malicious, half-educated incitement of racial hatred. Peoples hate each other chiefly because they do not know each other; they see one another only through the distorted images manufactured by chauvinist newspapers and literature. Against those images pacifism must build an enlightening popular literature, encourage translations, and set professors, teachers, students, and even schoolchildren to exchanging visits across borders. An international agreement should make chauvinist harassment of foreign nations a thing fought relentlessly in schools and in the press. To anchor pacifist thought and wear down bellicism, ministries of peace should arise in every state, in permanent contact with one another and with pacifist organizations at home and abroad, all of them serving reconciliation.
One Language for the World
A most essential task is an international language of understanding. Before peoples can talk to each other, one can hardly demand that they already understand each other. Such a language would let each person speak his mother tongue at home and the international tongue among foreigners; anyone leaving his homeland would need to master only that one language, where today he needs several abroad. Only Esperanto or English can be considered, and which is chosen matters little beside the demand that the world unite on one of them. English has the great advantage of already playing this role across Australia, half of Asia, Africa, and America, and much of Europe, so that official introduction would merely formalize existing practice. Its intermediate position between the Germanic and Latin languages makes it easy for Germans and Latins, and for Slavs who already command a Germanic or Latin tongue; it is the language of the two most powerful empires on earth and the most widespread mother tongue of white humanity. Introduction could succeed through a League of Nations proposal making it obligatory first in all colleges and teacher-training institutions worldwide, then, after a decade, in primary schools.
Enlightenment Rather Than Humanity
Spreading Enlightenment and fighting human ignorance offers faster prospects for peace propaganda than spreading humanity and fighting wickedness, since convictions change faster than instincts; the peace movement need not appeal to the human heart, at least in Europe, if it can count on human understanding. As the Enlightenment ended witch-burning, torture, and slavery, so it will end war, a remnant of a barbaric epoch. When is uncertain; that it will happen is certain; the tempo depends on pacifists. That humans learned to fly after hundreds of thousands of years was more miraculous than that they will learn to live in peace. A translator’s footnote distinguishes Menschheit, humanity, from Humanität, the moral and religious ideal of the human, noting that humanism and Enlightenment are distinct philosophical approaches.
The Long Work of Peace Propaganda
Peace propaganda is the necessary complement of peace policy: policy is short-term, propaganda long-term. Propaganda alone cannot prevent an imminent war, needing at least two generations; policy alone cannot secure lasting peace, its reach barely two generations. At best policy can create a provisional peace allowing propaganda to disarm peoples morally and convince them that war is barbaric, impractical, and outdated. Until this prevails internationally, and peoples stop seeing war as suitable for imposing political goals, peace can rest only on the military superiority of pacifists. Total disarmament is possible only after pacifist thought wins—as abolishing the police is possible only after crime disappears; otherwise abolition of the police leads to the dictatorship of crime, abolition of the army to the dictatorship of war.
Diverting the Instincts
Pacifist propaganda targets war instincts, war interests, and war ideals. Fighting instincts requires weakening, diverting, and strengthening opposite instincts—chiefly unhabituating peoples from war, as smokers, drinkers, and morphinists abandon habits by no longer indulging. Sport is very suited to diverting combat instincts, especially masculine ones; not by chance are the most sporting European peoples, the English and Scandinavians, also the most pacific. Hunting is the exception: it preserves the most primitive form of combat and strengthens murderous instincts; hunting’s role as the principal sport of dominant castes contributed to European militarism, since it educates disrespect for foreign life and dulls sensitivity to bloodshed.
Combat Is Good; Only War Is Bad
Condemnation of war must never degenerate into condemnation of combat; such derailment would play into militarists’ arguments and compromise pacifism ethically and biologically. Combat and the will to combat are creators and maintainers of human culture; their end would mean the death of culture and the human. Combat is good; only war is bad—a primitive, coarse, aged form of international combat, as the duel is of societal combat. Pacifism’s goal is thus refinement, sublimation, and modernization of combat methods.
Spiritual Weapons and the Bad Business of War
Economic combat is replacing military combat: boycotts and blockades replace wars, political strikes replace revolution. China won several political battles against Japan through boycott; Gandhi seeks Indian liberation through non-bloody methods. A time will come when national rivalries are settled with spiritual weapons rather than knives and lead balls—competition in scientific, artistic, and technical performance, in justice and social assistance, public health, public education, and the promotion of great personalities. Fighting war interests means proving to peoples and individuals the reduced chances of gain and the enormous risks of loss—war has become a bad, risky, unprofitable business. For peoples, Norman Angell already proved this before the war, and the World War brilliantly confirmed his thesis. Whether a victorious Indian liberation war or a Mongol conquest of Australia would compensate the sacrifices can remain undebated; certainly a new European war would leave the victor heavily ruined politically, economically, nationally, while the defeated people would be annihilated forever.
The Synthesis of Character and Intellect
The book’s most distinctive intellectual move is its refusal to choose between the two aristocracies it describes. The rural noble and the urban intellectual are presented as extremes, not summits — and extremes, Coudenhove-Kalergi argues, diverge most precisely where the highest types converge. The grand-seigneur and the genius touch: Caesar, the culmination of the man of blood, was also Rome’s most genial mind; Goethe, the summit of geniality, was the greatest grand-seigneur among German poets. The junker and the lettré, by contrast, are rigidified caricatures — will without spirit on one side, spirit without character on the other — and their mutual incomprehension, he suggests, had concrete political consequences. Militarist Germany underestimated the cities’ resistance to war; revolutionary Germany underestimated the countryside’s resistance to revolution. Germany lost the war, then lost the revolution, for the same reason: each caste could see only the other’s dark side.
This is why the book keeps returning to the image of synthesis. The gentleman and the bohemian, the Englishman of form and the Frenchman of temperament, are treated as complementary rather than rival ideals; Germany, lacking the atmosphere for either, produced instead the mechanized officer and the mechanized professor, Siegfried and Faust hardened into functionaries. The argument extends to the political sphere, where Lenin and Ludendorff appear as antagonists in doctrine but brothers in attitude of will — a pairing meant to unsettle any reader who prefers his enemies neatly separated. What the age lacks, the book repeatedly says, is not intelligence or courage but their union in a single person.
Ethics and Technique as Sisters
The essay on technology carries the book’s most surprising claim: that the inventor is a greater benefactor than the saint. The automobile, Coudenhove-Kalergi notes, spared horses more suffering than all the animal-protection societies combined; the inventors of diphtheria and smallpox sera saved more children than all the orphanages; modern navigation freed the galley slaves, and the oil engine is liberating the stoker from his infernal profession. Technology, in this account, is not the enemy of culture but its precondition — the means by which humanity might finally escape the slavery on which every previous culture rested. Antiquity had its slaves, the Middle Ages its serfs, modernity its proletarians; the machine, by replacing muscle with energy, promises to break that chain at last.
The pairing of ethics and technique runs through the whole book. Ethics conquers the forces of nature within us; technique conquers those around us. Neither suffices alone: ethics cannot feed a hungry humanity, and technique cannot restrain a greedy one. The formula the author quotes — that technique without ethics leads to catastrophe as much as ethics without technique — is the hinge on which the argument turns. Asia’s greatness lies in ethics, Europe’s in technique; the two must advance together or not at all. Even the book’s treatment of gender and race runs on this axis: the emancipation of women and of Asia is read as a symptom of the world’s masculinization and Europeanization, a mobilization into the army of labor that must be endured before a purer harmony can return.
A Book Against Its Moment
The historical situation gives these essays their weight. They were edited in 1925, shortly before Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared from the same city, and the two books respond to a collapsed, bellicose Europe in opposite directions. Where one builds a logic of violence, the other tries to dismantle it — the pacifism essay confronts the trap in which physical force is held to be the only valid argument and dialogical reason merely a way of submitting, and answers it by reconnecting with Enlightenment optimism. The book’s translator, working from a rare copy of the 1925 edition, notes that the German original is effectively out of print and circulates online mainly in truncated and disconcerting quotations; her complete translation was made to restore the arguments to their context.
Whether or not one accepts its conclusions, the book’s way of posing the questions retains its use. Its vision of a future nobility built on quality rather than ancestry, its insistence that socialism’s highest mission is the production of genuine excellence rather than the leveling of all distinction, its faith that invention might accomplish what politics cannot — these are the arguments of a man thinking hard against his own time. The result is a document of interwar Europe that is also a provocation to the present: a reminder that the problem of reconciling excellence with equality, and technique with ethics, is not a new one.
