Sublime

“Yet,” thought Jacob, seeking to see the whole truth, “there is the other side, which always exists. They say of New York that it is like an apartment hotel. And they say: ‘It’s fine for a visit, but I would not want to live here.’ They are wrong. It’s fine to live here, but exhausting on a visit. “Once New York was the small handsome self-containe

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untrammelled money-grubbing was a way of life – nay, a raison d’être. Furthermore it didn’t matter how the rich made their pile: waste disposal, trailer parks, sex toys, plastic forks, rubber doorstops, pornographic magazines, torture equipment, edible goldfish, mines, contraceptive sheaths, trading in widows and orphans, it . . . just . . . didn’t

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‘You’re our longest-serving contributor,’ said Carleton, flinching at the bang. ‘Our most admired. Indeed I should say our most popular.’ I’m beginning to speak like him, he thought: Thomas Hart is catching, that’s the trouble. ‘I’ve often heard it said that it’s a consolation – that’s the general feeling, as I said to the board – to wake on Thursd

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Mandeville’s thesis shocked his initial audience (as he intended it to), but it went on to convince almost all the great economists and political thinkers of the eighteenth century and beyond. In his essay Of Luxury (1752), Hume repeated the Mandevilleian argument in favour of the pursuit of riches and of expenditure on superfluous goods on the gro

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The most direct method for comprehending a world in which not all human beings are homo economicus would therefore appear to involve a return to some version of the older tradition. However, why did the older tradition fail in the first place? After all, it seemed to ask some obvious and important questions. How could these questions simply be aban... See more

It was the consumption of what Mandeville called ‘fripperies’ – hats, bonnets, gloves, butter dishes, soup tureens, shoehorns and hair clips – that provided the engine for national prosperity and allowed the government to do in practice what the Church only knew how to sermonize about in theory: make a genuine difference to the lives of the weak an

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Sullivan and Weiss weren’t merely the victims of some ethereal struggle between the forces of free speech and ideological censorship: they were the collateral damage of shifting media business models. And there will be lots more of them before this drama finishes.