The first postmodern ironist. ‘We live in a passionless age, wrote the philosopher

Soren Kierkegaard. That is why he speaks to us

today, believes Julian Evans …There are good reasons why we…might listen

to him now, at a moment when relations between

leaders and led, corporations and consumers, press

and people have rarely looked so shaky.

Listen to this: “A revolutionary age is an age of

action; ours is the age of advertisement and

publicity. Nothing ever happens, but there is

immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age,

a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable.

Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous

to the calculating intelligence of our times.”

Or this: “In order that everything should be reduced

to the same level, it is first of all necessary to

procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous

abstraction, an all-embracing something which is

nothing, a mirage – and that phantom is the public.”

Both passages were written in 1847.’ New Statesman