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The urgency of our times has engendered demands for action, and action has followed: economic, political, diplomatic. We are concerned for the technical competence of those who are acting. But surely there are other and even more fundamental concerns. Action too easily distracts from the assumptions on which action is based. Many of those assumptions are born in that dark region of the popular imagination where nations define themselves in terms of basic myths of national mission and national identity. We are tempted by, and too easily succumb to, oversimple versions of those myths. Urgent as is our need for action, we need reflection more.The basic instrument of reflection on national identity and mission is literature, and ours is incredibly rich, Literature has helped both to shape and to reveal that obscure popular imagination and has criticized the ways it has shaped itself.

I am grateful to Professor Wand for devoting so much space to my "conceptual apparatus." I should have been more grateful if he had got it more nearly right. His criticism of my concepts, particularly of the central concept of powers, is so wide of the mark that one wonders about his concept of criticism. The puzzle is how he can pronounce with such assurance his "grave charges" that my thought is confused and misleading. The answer I shall suggest is partly (a) that he has not paid attention to my definitions, and partly (b) that he has tried to fit my argument into a conceptual framework – his own – which he assumes has some absolute validity. Perhaps (b) accounts for (a): he was perhaps unable to read what I wrote because it does not fit his conceptual scheme. Let me take in reverse order his criticisms of the three concepts he deals with.