And I find that absolutely amazing, just as an intellectual notion.
In this case, the intellectual notion was the inevitable paradox posed by following any of the nuclear strategies to their extreme limits.
To stand out from the crowd, you have to be willing to give more weight to an abstract intellectual notion -- stocks' long-term historical return -- than to the very real losses you feel in your pocketbook.
His other films had involved putting novels on the screen, but "Dr. Strangelove," though it did have its historical origins in "Red Alert," a serious nuclear suspense story by Peter George, soon turned into an attempt to use a purely intellectual notion as the basis of a film.
Even his great intellectual contribution the notion that economies can remain in an "equilibrium" state with mass unemployment defies easy explanation.
This might have sounded familiar to an audience of European intellectuals — the notion of Americans as either "a puerile backwoods clan," in Lewis's phrase, or else a boorish mass of humanity enthralled by industry, science, and high finance.
It is conceivable that Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1825 27; The Betrothed), often called the greatest modern Italian novel, gave 19th-century Italian intellectuals some notion of a viable modern prose style in an Italian that might be termed "national," but even this is a large claim.
Even his great intellectual contribution — the notion that economies can remain in an "equilibrium" state with mass unemployment — defies easy explanation.
Universal basic income, a form of social security involving the state paying its citizens a regular unconditional lump sum regardless of whether they work, claims a 500-year intellectual pedigree, the notion of providing "everyone with some livelihood" having been countenanced by Thomas More in Utopia (1516) as an antidote to crime.
From the time he was young, Hitchens says, he's tried to keep dueling notions in intellectual and emotional equipoise.
