Despotism of Consumption

Montesquieu made an important distinction between commerce ‘ordinarily founded on luxury’ and commerce ‘more often founded on economy’. If the latter rested on ‘the practices of gaining little…. and of being compensated only by gaining continually’, the former sought ‘to procure for the nation engaging in it all that serves its arrogance, its delights, its fancies’. Moreover if Montesquieu associated ‘economical commerce’ with ‘government by the many’, he associated commerce of luxury with ‘government by one alone’. The concern, in short, was that the activity of commerce would so isolate people from one another, would so lead them to be preoccupied with their own private affairs, that a new kind of despotism would emerge. Jeremy Jennings, Despotism after Liberalism.

photo via

prompted by a remark by Kia about business books, over at Gifthub.

Can-Can't

Of the still undetermined fate of Airbus AF 447:

“We can fear the worst,” said France's minister in charge of transport, Jean-Louis Borloo, on Europe-1 radio.

This "can" is so unlike the USian "can," as in "Yes we can." Implied for US speakers always is empowerment, the affirmation that the individual or collective actor has permitted the self to a state of self-directed intervention.

M. Borloo's "can" is the resignation to another kind of permission. An acknowledgment that the grounds to fear our utter disempowerment are in place beyond the self. Not "a" place - is Fate ever localized?

This impersonal permission comes despite all we can do. So unUSian.

Of embodied power

For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the horse, as was plain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman monument. Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so American that, for at least forty years, Adams had never realized that any other could be in sound taste. How many years had he taken to admit a notion of what Michael Angelo and Rubens were driving at? He could not say; but he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres -- perhaps at Lourdes -- possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles -- but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power -- only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. Henry Adams