In his repudiation of literary as well as political fellow traveling, the anti-Stalinist Trilling looked to poetry and fiction to affirm a skeptical liberalism, founded on what he called "the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity and difficulty".
In Trilling's celebrated statement: "To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance... because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty".
One reason for this prismatic variousness has to do with the novel's form.
"Literature," Trilling wrote, "is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty".
"The authority that day lay not with the speakers," she wrote, "but with the listeners, in their inwardness and variousness".
But it created room for that variousness within the law.
But these groups were gathered with no systematic purpose and no suggestion other than the variousness of the life portrayed.
To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty".
King may have repudiated his youthful Keynesianism, but like Keynes he is well aware that economics is in the end about people, in all their non-reductive variousness, making history in ways the present cannot foretell.
