Quote:
Originally Posted by Glenzig
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Still haven't told us which book we should start with. I'm pretty disappointed.
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I'm always happy to recommend literature, but I feel like I'd be overreaching to say which books anyone
should read. One thing I realized about myself when concerning the consumption of literature is I pretty much only read things written by people I'm familiarized with in some way. I have to be interested in their ethos or their logos before I can really get comfortable turning the pages of something they've written. That's not to say that I only read things that I agree with - quite to the contrary, I like getting inside the mind of people who can procure compelling arguments against something that I'm morally or ethically invested in.
In any case, here are a couple I've finished recently:
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I'd imagine one of the things that makes Jefferson hard to write about, especially in a short form, is that he takes part in the enlightenment moment. In the American presidential election of 1796, the election had its choice between two candidates: one was the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the other was the founder of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The candidacy seems to have shriveled a bit since then. Not only that, but under the 1796 rules you could vote for both of them, because the runner-up would be your vice president, and that's what the electorate did. Some might say it was a looted electorate, but it had a rather handsome choice.
Not only taking part in this extraordinary moment of the enlightenment, not only rewriting John Locke's words when he came to compose the Declaration of Independence, changing "life, liberty, and property" - Locke's trivium, or triad, or triaca of ideas - into a formulation I know you don't need me to tell you about. Not only after that leading Virginia through a very perilous period of revolutionary war, and then becoming minister to France, but he's almost continuously in power afterwards for 25 years. And that's before he helped provide us with a vaccination for cholera, and before he founded the University of Virginia, and before he takes a razor to the New Testament to produce the Jefferson Bible, cutting out everything mythical or stupid, leaving himself with a very short edition.
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A brilliant evocation of a pre-First World War Britain when the old system, which was basically a liberal system, came under tremendous shocks from the movement for women's suffrage, the movement to disengage from Ireland and the rise of organized labor. In the chapter on the rise of women's suffrage he describes beautifully all the morbid symptoms that appear when the long-repressed - especially sexually repressed - group begin to take their own measures.
The suffragette movement simply for women's franchise, for the right of women to vote, was attacked by all kinds of people for its weirdness. For the way the women started to dress as men, to neglect their families and to behave promiscuously. Many of these symptoms, up to and including suicide on some occasions, were indeed present but when the air cleared it was obviously the result of the original repression. It was a phase through which the movement had to pass.