The old imperative of post-war reconciliation has faded, and nothing comparable has taken its place.
The old imperative that personal fulfillment depends on active engagement with helping others also survives -- in families, churches, charities, service professions like medicine and teaching and support organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous.
Today, we have come to a broader and more nuanced understanding of this age-old imperative: how to better balance the development needs of a growing world population – so all may enjoy the fruits of prosperity and robust economic growth – with the necessity of conserving our planet's most precious resources: land, air and water.
It is there to jolt, to challenge, to disrupt: the old Brechtian imperative.
But the old Allied imperative of 1949 — power in Germany must never again be centralized — still holds.
But new-age gerunds give way to old-fashioned imperatives when the professor hands off to the probation officer: good cop, bad cop.
The work is never done; "Diving Into the Wreck" shows us how, in order to "make it new" — the old Poundian imperative — the language had first to be made just.
Self-styled undergrounders, though they wouldn't mind having million-selling albums like Ghostface Killah, take pride in speed, syncopation, ingenious wordplay and consciousness-raising, which can all take precedence over the old-school imperative of rocking a party.
A second explanation is the old political-bureaucratic imperative.
As educational programs expanded, replacing old buildings was imperative, said Jenny Morgenthau, executive director of the Fresh Air Fund.
