Politics & Power Quote by Lincoln Kirstein

Kirstein is doing something sly here: rescuing classical ballet from its reputation as museum art by reframing it as the most contemporary language available for a jittery modern public. His sentence sets up a charged paradox - “liberal democracy and anxious anarchy” - as the atmosphere of the 20th century, a world that loudly celebrates freedom while quietly fearing its own disorder. Into that contradiction he drops “the traditional classic dance,” a form often dismissed as aristocratic decoration, and argues it’s newly “promising” precisely because it contains the tension everyone else is failing to manage.

The subtext is a defense brief. Ballet’s “aristocratic authority” is acknowledged, not apologized for; Kirstein treats hierarchy and discipline as features that can be repurposed rather than discarded. At the same time, he insists on “absolute freedom,” but only “in a necessity of order” - freedom not as self-expression-without-friction, but as expression made legible by rigor. That’s the rhetorical trick: he turns constraint into modernity.

Context matters. Kirstein wasn’t just a dancer-adjacent commentator; he was a builder of American ballet infrastructure, famously instrumental in shaping what became the New York City Ballet with Balanchine. Read that way, “independent expression” is also institutional ambition: a claim that ballet can belong to a democratic culture without becoming populist mush, and can break from European court origins without abandoning the very discipline that gives it bite. In an age of ideological noise, Kirstein bets on a body trained to make order feel like revelation.