Commonplacing

Aug 19

“[M]an … is moulded by society just as effectively as society is moulded by him. You can no more have the egg without the hen than you can have the hen without the egg… . It is not that the view of man as an individual is more or less misleading than the view of him as a member of the group; it is the attempt to draw a distinction between the two which is misleading.” Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 39, 57–58.

Jun 5

“When Blair or Bush offered Churchillian echoes [in 2003], it was presumably not the Churchill of Gallipoli and the Russian Civil War that they had in mind. They were providing history as answers, not the history as questions offered by scholars alive to the difficulties and dangers of predicting outcomes.” Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (New York: Routledge, 2004), 242.

Oct 26

“Well into the 1940s, Americans wondered whether the hard times had really ended. They spent the next few decades behaving as if the country’s prosperity depended on their actions. They saved money, which provided the capital for the great postwar boom and also paid for their retirement. Then came the change, and many of us began to assume that prosperity was an inalienable part of life, regardless of what we did. We failed to be sufficiently afraid of the alternative. A little fear can often be a healthy thing.” David Leonhardt, “The Price of Optimism,” The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2008, referring to the economic behavior of Americans after the Great Depression.

Oct 5

“Poverty was not understood as a problem to be fixed. It was a spiritual condition. Work-houses weren’t supposed to help children prepare for life; they were supposed to save their souls.” Gordon Bigelow, “Let there be markets: The evangelical roots of economics,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2005.

“Evangelicals interpreted the mental anguish of poverty and debt, and the physical agony of hunger or cold, as natural spurs to prick the conscience of sinners. They believed that the suffering of the poor would provoke remorse, reflection, and ultimately the conversion that would change their fate. In other words, poor people were poor for a reason, and helping them out of poverty would endanger their mortal souls. It was the evangelicals who began to see the business mogul as an heroic figure, his wealth a triumph of righteous will. The stockbroker, who to Adam Smith had been a suspicious and somewhat twisted character, was for nineteenth-century evangelicals a spiritual victor.” Gordon Bigelow, “Let there be markets: The evangelical roots of economics,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2005.

Commonplacing

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