Boris’s boyhood dream may yet become Britain’s nightmare

Benjamin Constant, the Swiss political philosopher active in the decades after the French Revolution, might have had Boris Johnson in mind when he wrote that “nearly all men are obsessed with demonstrating they are something more than they are”. He tartly noted that: “The obsession of writers is to show they are statesmen.”

In his reflection on Constant in The Ruin of Kasch, and on power more generally, Roberto Calasso named “this vanity, which has warped the judgement of many writers” and “led to more problems than we realise in our civil conflicts”.