Peter Gatti’s Reviews > The Leopard > Status Update

Reference to the Odyssey/Polyphemus’ reply to Odysseus in The Prince’s big culminating speech to the Italian emissary? “They (Piedmontese) arrived to teach us good manners, and we will ignore them because we think we are gods”

… the sale of huge tracts of land to upwardly mobile citizens. And also (this is either directly from him or my own extrapolation), because the Church was responsible to some extent for the poor, it cut them adrift as well, freeing up more cheap labour. I’m going to bed but I’ll finish this thought later.

I’ve still got Capital on the brain so I’ve been thinking about primitive accumulation throughout this, and how it appears in the text. Marx forwards a theory for the link between capitalism and Protestantism that I think is more compelling than the Weber “work ethic” stuff— that expropriation of Church lands is crucial in capital formation because it’s means….

“‘And after dinner, at nine o'clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends." For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the Prince, who had found Donnafgata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.”