“What, finally, are the functions of reason and rationality in human behaviors? They are the functions, respectively, of the prince’s tutor and his councilor. The tutor teaches the prince to promote the public good in the long term. The councilor tells him how to act in order to achieve his goals, whatever they might be, in the most efficient way. It is not incumbent upon the councilor to impose the demands of reason; but if the tutor has done his job well, the prince will make them his own.”
Reason and Rationality (2009)
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Jon Elster 12
Norwegian academic 1940Related quotes
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 18; translated by Peter Bondanella
The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Timber: or Discoveries
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 15; translated by W. K. Marriot
Source: The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 12: "Concerning Individual Freedom" [In this passage "transforms the prosaic achievements of society into Promethean tasks, glorious defeats, tragic epics" is a quotation of Raymond Aron from The Opium of the Intellectuals (1957), p. xiv]
Context: In exceptional cases, like Puerto Rico and Israel, where capital and skills are available, rapid modernization is not incompatible with a considerable measure of individual freedom.
To some extent, the present dominant role of the intellectual in the modernization of backward countries also militates against the prevalence of individual freedom. Not only does the intellectual's penchant for tutoring, directing, and regulating promote a regimented social pattern, but his craving for the momentous is bound to foster an austere seriousness inhospitable to the full play of freedom. The intellectual "transforms the prosaic achievements of society into Promethean tasks, glorious defeats, tragic epics." The strained atmosphere of an eternal drama working up toward a climax and a crisis is optimal for heroes and saints but not for the autonomous individual shaping his life to the best of his ability. The chances are that should an advanced country come into the keeping of the intellectual it would begin to show many of the hectic traits which seem to us characteristic of a backward country in the throes of awakening.
George Horne (bp. of Norwich.) (1799). Discourses on several subjects and occasions. Vol. 1,2, p. 357; As quoted in Allibone (1880)
