A shelter in the tempest of history

By Terry Eagleton

Eagleton

The soothsayer seeks to predict the future in order to control it. He peers into the entrails of a social system so as to decipher the omens, which will assure its rulers that their profits are safe and the system will endure. These days, he is generally an economist or a business executive. The prophet, by contrast, has no interest in foretelling the future, other than to warn that unless people change their ways there’s unlikely to be one. His concern is to rebuke the injustice of the present, not dream of some future perfection; but since you can’t identify injustice without some notion of justice, a kind of future is implicit in the denunciation.

literary critic.^[1][2] Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at theUniversity of Lancaster, and as a former Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway.