FDR’s first inaugural address was a bold assertion of public authority over the banking sector and a nakedly populist attack on the titans of high finance. “Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply,” Roosevelt said. “Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men….They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”
Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
“Truth, for Goethe, is “a revelation emerging at the point where the inner world of man meets external reality.... It is a synthesis of world and mind, yielding the happiest assurance of the eternal harmony of existence.”
39. 2. I will now conclude this theoretical account of civilization with some remarks gathered up under two heads: the first ‘Law and Order’, the second ‘Peace and Plenty’. 39. 21. Both are familiar phrases. Each is a name for civilization in one of its main aspects. The first is a name for civilization as a task: it is a name for what you have to do to be civilized. The second is a name for civilization as a product: it is a name for what you get by being civilized, the fruits of the civilized life.
There is a considerable conceptual affinity, indeed, between reason of state and Pascal’s wager in that both involve action on opinions whose low probability is compensated for by a high payoff; deceit for reason of state is justified in terms of the allegedly overriding consideration of the safety of the realm, while acting as if one believed in God is recommended by the wager on account of the infinite gain to be expected, and loss to be avoided, if religion is true.
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