Forty years a firmament dividing East and West, Left and Right, State and Market, the iron curtain one day crumbled like so much meringue. With it crumbled many realities and realisms that once seemed hard as gunmetal: the determination of international relations by the interests and relative strength of military elites, the total control of totalitarian states over their societies, the pseudosophisticated view that, in Francis Fukuyama's phrase, nation-states [are] like billiard balls, whose internal contents, hidden by opaque shells, are irrelevant in predicting their behavior (p. 248). The shells cracked, the curtain parted, and the intractable reality that force rules politics was, at least for the moment, exposed as mere appearance. In a chapter of his Phenomenology entitled Force and Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World,' Hegel evokes the vertigo we experience at such moments, when the forces that rule our world are revealed to be contingent interpretive constructs. We need simplifying generalizations to order our world, and living in an ordered world means treating its regularities as real, its particularity as ephemeral, even illusory. But when regularity itself proves ephemeral, we are reminded that our world was always capable of infinitely varied interpretation. At such moments theories abound, interpretive constructs sell for a quarter on every comer, while contingency and change seem like the only constants. Our world inverts and the rainbow seems realer than the laws of optics.2 The experience of this inversion, in which the world suddenly seems much realer than our ideas of it, paradoxically propels us toward idealism. At the moment when the proud mind its expectations dramatically defeated might be expected to yield in humility