New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

106 The New Imperialists
subjects of their own resistance and emancipation, and his deployment of metaphors
of darkness reinscribes fears of blackness. Despite these major flaws, Heart of Darkness
does advance elements of a devastating critique of the psychology and practice of
empire. For an intriguing assessment of this text see Edward Said, “Two Visions in
Heart of Darkness,” in Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus,
1993), pp. 20–35.
6. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 20.
7. The two most famous cases are the Freudian and Marxian accounts of fetishism. For
Freud, the male fetishist denies the reality of sexual difference, while for Marx
commodity fetishism involves a denial (or forgetting) of the origin of commodities in
human labouring activity. On these points see my Bodies of Meaning: Studies on
Language, Labor and Liberation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
2001), pp. 66–71.
8. Ibid., pp. 84, 112, 118.
9. Michael Ignatieff, “Time to Walk the Walk,” National Post (Toronto), 14 February
2003. The same basic position is expressed in Ignatieff, “The American Empire: The
Burden,” New York Times Magazine, 5 January 2003.
10. Michael Ignatieff, “Second, Sober Thoughts,” Toronto Star, 26 March 2004.
11. Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 163.
12. Ignatieff, “Sober, Second Thoughts.”
13. Michael Ignatieff, “The Terrorist as Auteur,” New York Times Magazine, 14 November
2004, p. 52.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 58.
16. Ignatieff, Empire Lite,p.17.
17. By my count, Ignatieff uses the term “barbarian” or “barbarians” eight times in the
first twenty-one pages of Empire Lite.
18. Ignatieff ’s mild socialism is evident in his A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in
the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978).
Moderate social democracy/social reform liberalism would best describe The Needs of
Strangers: An Essay on Privacy, Solidarity and the Politics of Being Human
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984). Rightward-moving liberal individualism is
the motif of Human Rights as Political Idolatry (2001), Empire Lite (2003), and The
Lesser Evil (2004). Ignatieff ’s positioning on the right of the federal Liberal Party of
Canada is on display in his “Liberal Values in the 21st Century,” Address to the
Biennial Policy Conference, Liberal Party of Canada, 3 March 2005.
19. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Political Idolatry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001), p. 9.
20. See “Liberal Values in the 21st Century.” For commentary on this speech see Jeffrey