Jean-Jacques Rousseau's role in the creation of romanticism has been exaggerated in some circles, says Isaiah Berlin. In making this case, he says that there isn't as sharp a break between the canonical Enlightenment figures on the one hand and Rousseau on the other as is sometimes thought, at least if we look to actual content. "If we consider what it is that Rousseau actually said, as opposed to the manner in which he said it -- and the manner and the life are what are important -- we find that it is the purest milk of the rationalist world....Rousseau's actual doctrine is not all that different from that of the Encyclopaedists. He disliked them personally, because temperamentally he was a kind of dervish from the desert. He was paranoiac, savage, and gloomy in some respects ... he did not have much in common with the people at Holbach's rather irreverent table or at the elegant receptions with Voltaire held at Ferney. But this was to a certain degree a per...
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"Color itself is a degree of darkness." German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said that, and much else, in his publication Theory of Colors. Brain pickings recently ran an appreciation of this Treatise, calling it "an absorbing account of the philosophy and artistic experience of color." It was also part of the romantic rebellion against classicism -- Goethe was taking on boring clockworks-loving old Newton. Here's a link to the Amazon page which will allow you to look inside Goethe's text if you're so inclined. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262070375/braipick-20
She (my friend) then added her own comment: There were a lot of things wrong with the 50's, but one parent working with another one staying home (which they owned) was doable when the onus of taxes wasn't on citizens. The onus of taxes wasn't on the citizens because it was on the "corporations" you see. She seemed to be agreeing with the Sanders quote she attached that we ought to get back to that. But what does it mean to tax corporations exactly? Is it a free lunch for the "citizens"? Of course not. Depending on a variety of circumstances, a corporate tax gets money into the Treasury from one of three sources: the shareholders of the corporation in question; the consumers of the products and services it creates; the employees. If the labor market for the sort of labor a particular corporation needs will allow, the corporation (a legal form for the interactions of natural people) will pass the cost of the tax that way. If the labor market does...
Jacques Barzun died last week, just a month short of his 105th birthday. I've written of Barzun before: here for example, and here . I had the honor of a long, though epistolatory, friendship with Prof. Barzun, and it now seems incumbent upon me to donate his letters to some appropriate scholarly repository. I do think that some of this correspondence will help shed some light on his thought, for future researchers. I'm certain that his reputation is bound to grow over the coming decades. Perhaps the definitive biographer, the one who can do for Barzun what Barzun did for Hector Berlioz , is still 81 years away. Berlioz, after all, died in 1869, and Barzun's two-volume work on his life and times appeared in 1950. And it did so in no small part because Barzun heard Berlioz's "Ballet of the Sylphs " performed when he was only four or five years, a memory that never left him. Perhaps we can best pay tribute to Barzun in his passing with some words h...