"Man is born a rebel." According to the Inquisitor, the primary source of this "rebelliousness" is the insistence of human beings on regarding themselves as something more than the product of nature. The striving to transcend the limitations of natural necessity expresses itself particularly in the tendency to measure human existence against an ultimate good. In spinning its fine web of necessity around human beings, socialism forgets their insistent need to know that what is necessary can also be called "good." And if they cannot affirm the goodness of the order which provides them with bread, then they will finally reject this order and its bread, whatever the consequences for their natural wants. Against the modern Tower of Babel, then, the Inquisitor asserts the human propensity for making moral distinctions. Whether or not human beings are in truth entirely a product of chance and necessity, they are...