Fouad Ajami criticised Aflaq for a lack of real substance, stating, "Nearly three hundred pages of text yield no insight, on his part, into what went wrong and what needed to be done; there is only the visible infatuation with words" and "Aflaq summons the party to renounce power and go back to its 'pure essence'". There is some truth in this critique. Aflaq spent much time and energy writing optimistically about the future, and the past, of the Arab Nation, and of how the Arab World could be unified. As Kanan Makiya, the author of "Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq", notes: for "Aflaq, reality is confined to the inner world of the party." In contrast to other philosophers, such as Karl Marx or John Locke, Aflaq's ideological view of the world makes no clear stand on the materialistic or socioeconomic behavior of humanity. While other philosophers make distinctions between what is real and what is not real, that is between prescriptive and descriptive analysis, Aflaq did not as a rule define what "is" and what "ought" to be. In his thought both are molded into the same category: that which is "attainable".