The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
by Louis Menand
13 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War:
“Trilling believed, in other words, that philosophical coherence is not a notable feature of most people’s politics. Their political opinions may be rigid; they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to float up out of some mix of sentiment, custom, moral aspiration, and aesthetic pleasingness. People hold certain views because it feels good or right to hold them (which is why they have an answer for pollsters even when they have never given an issue serious thought). Trilling thought that this does not make those opinions any less potent. On the contrary, it is unexamined attitudes and assumptions—things people take to be merely matters of manners or taste, and nothing so consequential as political positions—that demand critical attention.”
“culture is a blob of mercury. Whenever you try to put a finger on it, it takes a different shape.”
“It was one of those moments when the universe is poised to plunge down a different path.”
“Every thing is what it is” is a famous phrase in British philosophy, and the essence of the empirical view.44*”
“And this is what liberal education is designed to do—to have students see not that the domain of human values is illusional, for it’s as real as it could be, but that it is founded on nothing. That is what Arnold thought criticism could do. It is what Richards thought poetry could do. Many liberal educators worried that deconstruction was destabilizing. It was. So is liberal education. It is meant to enable students to see that the world they were born into is not natural or inevitable.”
“Sartre’s preface was called “Orphée noire,” and it is directed at the white reader who stands on the brink of decolonization. “I want you to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen,” Sartre says. … For the white man has, for three thousand years, enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen. He was pure gaze … We, who were once divine-right Europeans, were already feeling our dignity crumbling beneath the gaze of the Americans and Soviets … At least we were hoping to recover a little of our grandeur in the menial eyes of the Africans. But there are no menial eyes any longer: there are wild, free gazes that judge our earth. 102”
“The subject of Cahier is the cultural dislocation of a French-educated Black man from the islands. The poet finds himself between two worlds, belonging completely to neither, and the poem is the record of his struggle to recover his native identity.”
“Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world,” Kennan explained, “is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points,”
“It can of course be suggested that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper, and indeed the act—even by the logic of the psychopath—is not likely to prove very therapeutic for the victim is not an immediate equal. Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act it is not altogether cowardly.”
“i. e. a society in which the largest number of persons are allowed to pursue the largest number of ends as freely as possible, in which these ends are themselves criticised as little as possible and the fervour with which such ends are held is not required to be bolstered up by some bogus rational or supernatural argument to prove the universal validity of the end.”46”
“The mob was made up of the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. They were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were embodiments of the politics of resentment. Arendt thought that the leadership of totalitarian movements came from this group.”
“On the contrary: she thought that the conditions that had made Hitler possible were still present, and that the West needed to be reborn. The European tradition had destroyed itself. “The whole of nearly three thousand years of Western civilization with all its implied beliefs, traditions, and standards of judgment has come toppling down over our heads,” she wrote.47”
“chiliastic”
