“Utilitarianism had found [ in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype—the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.”

—  John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 12

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John Carroll 58
Australian professor and author 1944

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