Status Updates From Modernity and Its Disconten...

“In the great bourgeois period, it is the writers and explainers who have become the new ruling class. Knowledge has become power. Writers and demagogues like Rousseau, Marat, Saint-Just, and Marx made it possible for people with nothing more than ‘mental capital’ and the power of language to achieve influence over millions…” p. 354

“… [E]ven Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo played Bach and Handel—representatives of the Old World—while sitting in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean. Apparently, the desire for the new can never completely forsake the old.” p. 353

“The fulfillment of the Enlightenment’s promise of a free, open, and prosperous society has produced a new kind of barbarism combining the ‘luxurious inventiveness of Versailles with the hibiscus-covered erotic ease of Samoa.’ “ p. 348

“The prince’s passion for astronomy displays a yearning for eternity, for what transcends the transitory and vulgar. It is not a form of escapism—although it has something of this about it—but an expression of an elevated spirit who seeks satisfaction in the realm of pure thought.” p. 334

“If philosophy cannot rationally demonstrate its superiority to revelation, if every proof against revelation turns out to be hypothetical, or to rest upon ‘unevident premises,’ then one must accept that the philosophical life is itself based on faith, that is, an act of will, or on a decision that cannot in the last instance be rationally grounded.“ p. 325

“Moral purity is the privilege of philosophers and monks; everyday life demands compromises and an acceptance of a degree of moral incoherence.” p. 301

“What the philosophers vainly called “the principle of sufficient reason”—the belief that everything must have a reason or cause—is simply a castle built on sand. The belief that everything has a cause is just that: a belief or an act of faith, which precedes all reason.” p. 299

“If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.” -Irving Berlin p. 285-286

“It is only disagreement over what is right—the moral question—that justifies the division of humanity into friends and enemies.” p. 281

“We live with a sense of time, and it is our awareness of the coming into being and passing away of all things that is the source of human discontent. Memory is as much a blessing as a curse. A person incapable of forgetting would be the most miserable of beings…” p. 261

“There may come a time, Tocqueville warns, when ‘the taste for material enjoyments develops . . . more rapidly than enlightenment and the habits of freedom.’ “ p. 228 🤨

“The danger of democracy was precisely that it represented the self-interested rule of one class of the community, the majority, over the minority. Democracy was thus always potentially a form of class rule of the poor over the rich, often egged on by populist demagogues.” p. 219

“Philosophy or science in the wrong hands is a loaded weapon. It all depends on who has access to it.” p. 194

“Kant hoped, as we all do, that increased communication between peoples will dampen the flames of nationalist, religious, and other vainglorious enthusiasms, but history has shown the opposite is just as likely to occur.” p. 165

“To recognize a paradox is not to resolve it.” p. 123

“One can say of religion what Karl Kraus famously said of psychoanalysis: it is the disease that believes itself to be the cure.” p.90

“There is no country in the civilized world,” Tocqueville declares, “where they are less occupied with philosophy than in the United States.” p.80

Still 100% true today…

I enjoyed the section toward the end on Bellow's Sammler, and I began the early section on Hobbes only to get hit with too many memories of my undergraduate days as a political philosophy minor or intellectual history student within an English major or whatever I was then. The Smith is accessible academic writing, not difficult if you have a basic knowledge of the writers and thinkers. . . he includes many.