Sir, – Robert Grant mourns the death of a politics of fact and celebrates in its stead a timeless politics of vision, hope and imagination less susceptible to the manipulative whims of the powerful ("The truth is dead", Opinion & Analysis, September 19th). While this is an admirable aspiration, it evinces a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of politics. Politics is in a sense Janus-faced, concerned with both the time-bound struggle for power and the sort of utopian imagination lauded by Robert Grant. Moreover, these two poles of the political are inextricably linked. It follows that any transcendence of the current order of power must involve an encounter with its limits, even if only in the service of an active refusal of those limits inspired by a vision of what could be. – Yours, etc,
Dr LAURENCE DAVIS,
Department of Government,
University College Cork.