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The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.

Zohar Atkins • The Liberal Arts Are Dying Because Liberalism is Dying

Moving on to the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, the English Utilitarian, lost faith in the idea of happiness as our ultimate human goal. What should replace it? What could be more valuable than happiness? His preference was for liberty, which might even come at the expense of our felicity. Instead of adhering to the pious, demanding Calvinis

Derren Brown • Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

Locke’s political philosophy was, on the whole, adequate and useful until the industrial revolution. Since then, it has been increasingly unable to tackle the important problems. The power of property, as embodied in vast corporations, grew beyond anything imagined by Locke.

Bertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy

But today there is something far more ominous, which is the fear of youth’s disorientation.

Alain Badiou • The True Life

I would propose that this was being done, and that it was done at the cost of sociopolitical and cultural capital. So, quite specifically, what I would say is that things like Trump phenomenon and Brexit are directly and linearly connected to the various bailouts that happened in the United States and Europe, that it was a direct subsidy of the pol... See more

Jordan Hall • Four Layer Model of Social Systems | Deep Code Experiment: Episode 1

Some polymaths are best known as intellectual brokers, Hartlib known as the intelligencer was a scholar of Bacon and Comenius and his work was to collect and diffuse the ideas and spread them in newsletters.

Just a moment...

It’s as if the intervention itself—an intervention against the “Great Man” theory of history (that nonetheless regularly praises great men), and against the supposed elitism and obscurantism of the Romantics (that nonetheless tries to re-enchant our everyday existence)—is what the concept of creativity allows people to do.

Samuel W. Franklin • The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

Political theorists such as Robert Putnam use the term ‘social capital’ to describe the wealth of trust and reciprocity that is created within social groups as a result of their networks of relationships.

Kate Raworth • Doughnut Economics: The must-read book that redefines economics for a world in crisis

It was a fear of the economic and social upheaval that might be caused by money losing its value that drove Britain to adopt "sound money" policies nearly 300 years ago. This move coincided with an unplanned switch to using gold instead of silver as the basis of money and, ultimately, to the accidental birth of the gold standard. Its &quo