Matthew Stewart > Quotes

“class does not make people smarter; it produces a small group of people who are deluded about the sources of their good fortune and a large group of people who are deceived about the sources of their misfortune.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“The simplest answer is that scientific management fulfilled too many hopes and prayers to be ignored merely on account of its logical and factual deficiencies.”
― Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong

“Tyranny happens when a society turns against itself, with one part usurping the power of [the] whole and applying it to the exploitation of the rest. Corruption, or misdirection of public effort for private gain, is one common feature of tyranny.... Government through fear is another common feature of tyranny, since it it through fear that one part of society can induce the other to betray its own interests.”
― Matthew Stewart

“Deism” in its own day referred not to a superficial theological doctrine but to a comprehensive intellectual tradition that ranged freely across the terrain we now associate with ethics, political theory, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. It was an astonishingly coherent and systematic body of thought, closer to a way of being than any particular dogma, and it retained its essential elements over a span of centuries, not decades. In origin and substance, deism was neither British nor Christian, as the conventional view supposes, but largely ancient, pagan, and continental, and it spread in America far beyond the educated elite.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“It is certain in theory that the only moral foundation of government is, the consent of the people. But to what an extent shall we carry this principle?” he wanted to know. “Women will demand a vote,” he intoned with horror, as might “every man who has not a farthing.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“When one…compares one’s own small talents with those of a Leibniz,” wrote Denis Diderot in the Encyclopédie, “one is tempted to throw away one’s books and go die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner.”
― Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza & the Fate of God in the Modern World

“The Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom ranked for Jefferson as one of the three achievements worthy of gracing his tombstone (the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia were the other two).”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“The rebellion of 1861 was a rebellion of the richer classes in America against the rule of the middle classes.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“But pantheism is better understood as the idea that God and Nature are two ways of talking about the same thing, and in this sense it is the core religious sensibility of the Enlightenment, from its beginning with Bruno’s rediscovery of Lucretius through Locke’s proof of a God to the American Revolution. Spinoza did not invent this movement; he epitomized it.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“Market" is not the opposite of "regulation" or "government" any more than "swim meet" is the opposite of "swimming pool." Every market needs its rules, these rules necessarily come from outside the market itself, and they aren't always written down.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“By “radical” I mean something more than that they aimed to change the order of society in a fundamental way or that they searched for the deepest roots of problems. The opposite of radical is not “moderate” or “conservative” but “common.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“Notwithstanding the many variations and exceptions that prove the rule, the common experience of human beings naturally gives rise to a certain shared set of ideas about what we are, how the world works, and how we ought to organize our moral and political existence, or so I will argue. This common consciousness is useful in a limited way for the purpose of making it through the everyday struggles of lives that, in the scheme of things, are not very long or broad.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“When the safety of a state depends on any man’s good faith, and its affairs cannot be administered properly unless its rulers choose to act from good faith, it will be very unstable,” Spinoza notes.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“On the contrary, as we know, our ideas are always imperfect or confused insofar as they derive from the external experience of things—and our ideas of our own body, our desires, and our very minds are certainly external in this sense. So we fall in love with the wrong person, fly into impotent rage over events that are beyond our control, and indulge ourselves in habits that can only hasten our own destruction. Our very own actions, just because they come from us, are not always explained through our essence, or that which accounts for our persistence in being. Which is to say, we often don’t know what we really want at all or who we really are. And when that happens, we are not free.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“The present is an age of philosophy; and America, the empire of reason,” said the American revolutionary Joel Barlow. 5 I aim to show that he was mostly right about that.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“It turns out that maybe breeding bonsai-tree children to become résumé zombies isn’t so good for their mental health.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“Small clients, by contrast, are intellectually challenging, enjoyable to work for, and miserably unprofitable.”
― Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong

“Inequality was, as it always has been in human history, the enemy of reason.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“THE timeless truth that debates about the nature of the lord in heaven are, at bottom, debates about who is entitled to rule on Earth.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“When the hero of Ticonderoga returned from thirty-two very hard months as America’s first celebrity prisoner of war, George Washington himself was there to welcome him back with honors. “His fortitude and firmness seemed to have placed him out of the reach of misfortune. There is an original something about him that commands admiration, and his long captivity and sufferings have only served to increase, if possible, his enthusiastic Zeal,” Washington told the Continental Congress.6”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“Consider, for example, Jefferson’s essay, penned in 1764 at the age of twenty-one, on the question, “Whether Christianity is part of the Common Law?”63 His answer was confident and unequivocal: “We may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“The history of ideas matters because ideas make actors out of human beings, and they make actors out of us precisely insofar as they occupy this open, uncontrollable, and inherently unlimited universe of explanations, not the stultifying dogma of a supposed conceptual scheme, not the inert, always epiphenomenal utterances we call doctrines or first principles.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“The impious man is not he who denies the gods of the many,” Epicurus writes to a friend, “but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many about them.”126 Lord Bacon repeats the message for the benefit of readers like Jefferson: “There is no profanity in refusing to believe in the gods of the vulgar: the profanity is in believing of the gods what the vulgar believe.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“The “Right Hegelians” took up the side of God and country; the “Left Hegelians” put their chips on freedom and progress.”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“In his highly controversial Account of Denmark of 1694, for example, Molesworth argues that “it has been a general mistake” to think “that the popish religion is the only one of all the Christian sects proper to introduce and establish slavery in a nation . . . Other religions, and particularly the Lutheran, has succeeded as effectually in this design as Popery every did . . . It is not popery as such but the doctrine of a blind obedience, in what religion soever it be found, that is the destruction of liberty and consequently of all the happiness of any nation.”215”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“The mark of a well-constituted state is that it makes it possible “to avoid the follies of appetite and to keep men within the bounds of reason, as far as possible, that they may live in peace and harmony.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“Human beings are not built to function in a radically unequal world.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“America’s mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is “one nation under God” is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now--and for that we should be grateful.” p 426”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“The Christian nationalist vision that emerged from the battle of the Bible was future minded, not backward looking. It was self-consciously illiberal and authoritarian in a way that clearly anticipates the fascist and neo-fascist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries”
― Matthew Stewart, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“And the civil state is the actual state that results from the attempt to build a bridge from the state of nature to the state of reason. Its aim is to induce naturally rebarbative human beings to behave as if they were reasonable.”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic