Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Mankh's avatar

Good to learn that the schizophrenia is being challenged. For a while i noticed the schizophrenia baked into the US consciousness, thus rather amazing to me to learn of Justice Thomas identifying as such. Walt Whitman, considered the father of free verse and one of America's most influential poets, was a populist imperialist, as he championed the common people and was one of the few to even mention Natives, yet he touted the so-called New World. Another schizophrenic example is Thomas Jefferson's "empire of liberty."

Expand full comment
Steven Schwartzberg's avatar

Lee Hester’s work is both philosophical and rigorously factual. Both he and Peter d’Errico touch on the question of the possible reach and influence of such work. So did John Maynard Keynes. As Keynes’ view is somewhat different, I thought that I would share it: “At the present moment people are unusually expectant of a more fundamental diagnosis; more particularly ready to receive it; eager to try it out, if it should be even plausible. But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

Expand full comment
16 more comments...

No posts