This brilliant and penetrating book uncovers a crisis in the political imagination, a wide-spread failure to provide the passionate sense of community in which our need for belonging can be met. Seeking the answers to fundamental questions, Michael Ignatieff writes vividly both about ideas and about the people who tried to live by them - from Augustine to Bosch, from Rousseau to Simone Weil. Incisive and moving, The Needs of Strangers return to philosophy to its proper place, as a guide to the art of being human.