| The most stratospheric flights of that speech exuded the utopian impossibilism which he attacked when practised by the self-indulgent Old Left. |
| Impossibilism is the thesis that free will is conceptually or metaphysically impossible for non-godlike creatures like us. |
| But the tide of history was running strongly in the opposite direction and by the late 80s Benn had drifted into impossibilism. |
| The arts inhabit realms of no-compromise impossibilism, while politicians practise the art of the pragmatically possible. |
