"Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition...The bottle was protected, not the wine".It now looks as if he was wrong.
It means detaching health care and pensions from employment, so that every time you move your job, you are not risking an awful lot else besides.
The ministry is also detaching itself ideologically from hardline judges, with whom it used to be in close alliance.On Monday Mr Yunessi denounced the trial verdicts as "seriously flawed".
In some cases, exile makes people more attached to their religion (and hence more inclined to bond with co-religionists) while detaching them from the home country's culture.
The 30,000 or so people who turned up to denounce the closure, and were beaten up by the police, later got little moral support from the politicians who had been addressing them.At the time, Vuk Draskovic, the best-known opposition leader, was in Montenegro, where a stand-off continues between westernisers, who dream of detaching the republic from Serbia, and politicians loyal to Belgrade.
Others are not so sure: recently the Asian Development Bank said it could find "no evidence" that fast-growing East Asian economies were detaching themselves from America, Europe and Japan.One chapter in the Outlook, from which economists on both sides have claimed support, weighs up the evidence.
They hope that Britain is detaching itself from the folly that is the EU, and are already arguing that Mr Cameron must soon seek a radical renegotiation of relations, tested by a referendum of the British people.Avowed "better-off-out" Conservatives are a (substantial) minority among Tory MPs.
And because their emphasis has been on objects, rather than on information, paintings have been separated from writings and artefacts from both.This curatorial tradition, neatly detaching most objects from the historical context which created them, is beginning to change.
As independence loomed, Britain even considered detaching it from the north, to fit into a new East African federation.
Western defence chiefs will insist strongly on nailing down the objectives of a bombing campaign as precisely as possible, and that will not be easy.At least notionally, western governments condemn the KLA and reject its aim of detaching Kosovo from Serbia, fearing that the Albanian bit of Macedonia would follow suit.
Inevitably, the present crisis has encouraged the prime minister's instinct for detaching himself from the fray of party politics.
