And they cannot do so, in large part, because they have not found their usable past.

I came across a phrase that says it all: 'the search for a usable past'.

He participated in the effort among leading cultural figures to define what constituted American art and was motivated to create "a usable past."

And no post-modernist has shown a deeper commitment to locating a usable past.

"When I have characters who don't have much of a usable past, I like to use the present," he said.

But as conservatives understand better than liberals, that is the value of a usable past: it frees you from the intellectual confines of the moment.

As we search - these words may be Thomas Jefferson's - for a 'usable past,' we cannot cut ourselves off from our roots.

The Usable Past Sometimes you read a preface by a writer who doesn't seem to have absorbed the book he purports to be introducing.

"I sometimes think of my interest in them as my search for a usable past," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Buffalo.

The search for a "usable past," one of post-modernism's abiding preoccupations, has lured many architects back to the historical styles rejected by the modern movement.