ABSTRACT
Former United States permanent representative to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, is popularly regarded as an articulate supporter of unremitting anti-Communist foreign policies. George F. Will describes Kirkpatrick as a “woman whose intellectual gifts and attainments at least match those of Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger.” According to Kirkpatrick, rationalist thinkers harbor many illusions, including the belief that anything conceivable to the human mind “can be brought into being.” Rationalists fail to see the distinction between the realms of thought and experience. According to Kirkpatrick, rationalist Utopians, in seeking to combine the worlds of thought and action, advocate “absolute equality” as a social good. But attempts to achieve absolute equality are doomed to fail because “so many of the inequalities among humans are rooted in nature and accident that it is quixotic to imagine they can be eliminated by government policy.”
