Allen Roberts’s Reviews > Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow > Status Update

“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

“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 🤨