Sorel wrote prolifically, but he is remembered chiefly for Réflexions sur la violence (Reflections on Violence, 1906) and Illusions du progrès (Illusions of Progress, 1908). The first was a collection of essays on liberalism and socialism, the second a history of progress as a political idea. They shared powerful common themes: politically, the derision of liberal-democratic trust in public reason, elections, and parliamentary government; and socially, the castigation of middle-class flabbiness on which liberal-democratic politics rested. In the hostility of the working class, Sorel saw both a means for unmasking the liberal-democratic sham and an energy-source to reinvigorate a decadent society.
N.B. This received a highlight because I wrote two undergrad papers about Sorel, one of which was a comparison of him and Frantz Fanon (of Wretched of the Earth fame). Both saw violence as a means of purgation, cleansing, & energizing. The 20th century displayed how well that plan worked. (#irony, #sarcasm).
Another way of dealing with a tangled problem is simply to do nothing, or at least nothing large, centralized, and carefully planned.
And how well does this work? (Not that THD is endorsing it.)
Capitalists had to listen to clerics during sermons, and courts could find a loan usurious and declare that it need not be repaid. The many deathbed “restitutions” of profits show at least a partial acceptance of the content of the sermons. It is a further question whether the usury laws impeded or assisted the economy. A number of the many discussions of this topic have been vitiated by the assumption that any attempts to restrict business for moral reasons must impede the development of capitalism. Plainly this is not so in general: if everything is for sale, then bribery, slavery, the sale of judicial decisions, of industrial secrets and misinformation, and so on, will flourish, none of which is likely to encourage economic growth.
[Addressed to Arendt's teacher & friend Karl Jaspters] What I have personally never forgotten is your attitude—so difficult to describe—of listening, your tolerance that is constantly ready to offer criticism but is as far removed from skepticism as it is from fanaticism; ultimately, it is simply the realization of the fact that all human beings are rational but that no human being’s rationality is infallible.
The Stoic system overall is like a miniature version of Brahminical Hinduism. Still, there are differences: The Stoics did not teach reincarnation; their successive cycles of manifestation, unlike those of India, are exact repetitions; they did not teach a period of quiescence exactly equal in length to the period of cosmic activity (for when the cosmos ends, in the Stoic view, there is no longer anything to measure); finally, and most importantly, the Stoics seem no more than other Greek schools to have taught meditation and bodily discipline in anything like the Indian yogic manner.
The parallelism between these traditions in Greece and in India is intimate and thoroughgoing. The cumulative heritage of seven hundred years of Greek dialectic was summed up in handbooks in and before the time of Sextus, and the contents of such a handbook, or their equivalent, may all be found in the Madhyamika texts.
Wealth, pleasures, rank, and power are all sought for the sake of happiness. But as we strive, we forget the goal and spend our time pursuing the means for their own sake. In so doing, we miss the point and remain deeply unsatisfied. This substitution of means for ends is one of the main traps lying across the pursuit of a meaningful life.
“Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.”
— Anton Chekhov
— Anton Chekhov
