People settle by acquiring a first-person plural - a place, a community and a way of life that is 'ours'. The need for this 'we' is not accepted by internationalists, by revolutionary socialists, or by intellectuals wedded to the Enlightenment's timeless, placeless vision of the ideal community. But it is a fact, and indeed the primary fact from which all community and all politics begin. George Orwell noticed this, during the course of the Second World War. The disloyalty of the left intelligentsia was, for Orwell, all the more evident and all the more shocking, when set beside the simple, dogged 'we' of the ordinary people. And the real political choice, about which Orwell had no hesitation, was whether to join the intellectuals in their work of destruction, or to stand by the ordinary people in defending their country in its hour of need.