The Needs of Strangers

What do we need in order to survive?
Whose needs do we have a right to speak for?
Which needs can be satisfied through political actions, and which cannot?

To answer these vital questions, Michael Ignatieff returns to the ancient languages of religion, art, and tragedy—and to important texts by Shakespeare, St. Augustine, and the great writers of the Enlightenment.

Drawing on these sources, he has written an incisive, moving interpretation of community and democracy in a work that not only examines the breakdown of human solidarity but shows how it might be re-created. The Needs of Strangers restores philosophy to its proper place as a guide to the art of being human.

Introduction: Tragedy and Utopia
1. The Natural and the Social: King Lear
2. Body and Spirit: Augustine, Bosch, Erasmus, Pascal
3. Metaphysics and the Market: Hume and Boswell
4. The Market and the Republic: Smith and Rousseau
Conclusion: Homelessness and Belonging
Notes
Index"Elegant meditations on human need. Ignatieff says something concrete and serious about each of his large topics."
—Michael Walzer, The New Republic

"Ignatieff frames his questions with passion and precision [in a] searching and beautifully written meditation on human needs."
—Christian Science Monitor

"Michael Ignatieff writes an urgent prose … he will convince people, in highly readable fashion, that the ideas he discusses really matter."
—Salman Rushdie, The Guardian

Michael Ignatieff was born in Toronto in 1947 and educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard University, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1976. A journalist on the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1965 to 1968, a professor of history at the University of British Columbia from 1976 to 1978, and Senior Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, from 1978 to 1984, he is also author of A Just Measure of Pain and co-author of Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Mr Ignatieff lives in London with his wife and son.