Fintan O'Toole: The Idiocy of Greatness

The idea of greatness has infused politics across much of the globe in the last decade, from Brexit to Donald Trump's MAGA movement and from Vladimir Putin's attempts to restore the Russian empire to Narendra Modi's identification of himself with the divine. It feeds into a culture of hype and everyday exaggeration. Greatness is attractive because it transcends rational discourse and, by making every "great " country an exception to the rules, dissolves the rules themselves. In this lecture, Fintan O'Toole suggests why greatness is, after all, not so great: it is in thrall to an imagined past, it generates a constant state of disappointment, and it drains energy away from the achievement of ordinary decency.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky in recognition of the work of Robert B. Silvers, who was a co-founding editor of The New York Review of Books.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Fintan O'Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review of Books and a columnist for The Irish Times. His book For and Against a United Ireland, cowritten with Sam McBride, is published in the U.S. in February 2026.