It could use an overhaul and some sharp editing. When the City Council president truly was New York's second-highest official, it made sense to designate him as the mayor's successor, but to devolve the succession, almost by inadvertence, on so superfluous a placeholder as the public advocate is ludicrous. The quarrel between deconstruction and the Western classical tradition of reason has been treated predominantly as a matter of metaphysics. Yet taken to its logical conclusion, deconstruction has the potential to go beyond the political correctness and the relativistic postmodern curriculum of which Scruton speaks and eliminate any possibility for communication or political action. In eliminating binding discourse between humans, deconstruction annihilates any possibility for self-knowledge or political community.
Man is left in a linguistic state of nature a war of all against all.
The postmodernists' limited insight into the indeterminacy of language and insufficiency of reason was recognized by the ancients, particularly Aristotle. The Socratic task of constant questioning, of judiciously limiting and being limited by an other, embodies a mindfulness of tyranny's dangers.