Sublime

his description of humanity in his seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) appears to be as somber as it was prophetic: “Narrow specialists without minds, pleasure seekers without heart; in their conceit, these nullities imagine they have climbed to a level of humanity never before attained.”

John Milton—later the author of Paradise Lost—published a pamphlet in which he argued against a law passed by Parliament requiring printers to secure licenses from the government for everything they printed. No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be establ

The legacy was truly amazing. His work on fish, the initial research on glaciers, the impact of his writing on the Ice Age, the zest and glamour he brought to American culture at a critical moment, were all contributions of the first order. His beloved Museum of Comparative Zoology—the Agassiz Museum, or simply the Agassiz, as it came to be known i

But Dewey, born in 1859 (the same year as Henri Bergson, who shared many of these concerns), was part of a generation whose intellectual formation occurred when it was still possible, if not excusable, for the idea of novelty to be explored independently of the logistics of capitalist production and circulation.

who has access to and control over the legal code and its masters:

Liberalism is also hard to place. It makes little sense to speak of when it began or how it developed, even though we can name philosophers who have articulated its essence, most of whom lived in the West in modern times. These thinkers include Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Bacon, Thomas Paine, and man

History can weigh like a millstone; archaic distinctions and practices can drag upon our freedom and agency. But detachment from the past has its own pitfalls. It means that the past that survives is a default genealogy, a mere reflection of the status quo, fixed and irrelevant. It loses its living value, its capacity to help the current generation