“The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.”

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pres…" by Richard M. Weaver?
Richard M. Weaver photo
Richard M. Weaver 110
American scholar 1910–1963

Related quotes

Richard K. Morgan photo

“The past is relevant only as data.”

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 18 (p. 242)

Daniel Kahneman photo

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 3, "The lazy controller", page 46 (ISBN 9780141033570).

“One source of misunderstanding is that many of the commentators have been economists who have looked at the Moral Sentiments simply in order to find some relevance for The Wealth of Nations.”

D. D. Raphael (1916–2015) Philosopher

This gave rise to the so-called Adam Smith problem, a supposed inconsistency between the psychological assumptions of the two books. Another source of error has been a failure to note whether a particular passage was written for the first or for the sixth edition.
The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy (2007), Ch. 1: Two Versions

Cory Doctorow photo

“I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily.”

"A note about this book, February 12, 2004"
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: I released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily.
When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.
It wasn't foolish.

Mick Jackson (director) photo
Francis Escudero photo

“Then as now, the position of Eddie Monteclaro, president of the National Press Club at that time, remains relevant.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Statement: I Stand by the Side of Freedom

Samuel P. Huntington photo

“Cultural and civilizational diversity challenges the Western and particularly American belief in the universal relevance of Western culture.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 12 : The West, Civilizations, and Civilization, § 2 : The West In The World, p. 310
Context: Cultural and civilizational diversity challenges the Western and particularly American belief in the universal relevance of Western culture. This belief is expressed both descriptively and normatively. Descriptively it holds that peoples in all societies want to adopt Western values, institutions, and practices. If they seem not to have that desire and to be committed to their own traditional cultures, they are victims of a “false consciousness” comparable to that which Marxists found among proletarians who supported capitalism. Normatively the Western universalist belief posits that people throughout the world should embrace Western values, institutions, and culture because they embody the highest, most enlightened, most liberal, most rational, most modern, and most civilized thinking of humankind.
In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous. … The belief that non-Western peoples should adopt Western values, institutions, and culture is immoral because of what would be necessary to bring it about. The almost-universal reach of European power in the late nineteenth century and the global dominance of the United States in the late twentieth century spread much of Western civilization across the world. European globalism, however, is no more. American hegemony is receding if only because it is no longer needed to protect the United States against a Cold War-style Soviet military threat. Culture, as we have argued, follows power. If non-Western societies are once again to be shaped by Western culture, it will happen only as a result of the expansion, deployment, and impact of Western power. Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism. In addition, as a maturing civilization, the West no longer has the economic or demographic dynamism required to impose its will on other societies and any effort to do so is also contrary to the Western values of self-determination and democracy. As Asian and Muslim civilizations begin more and more to assert the universal relevance of their cultures, Westerners will come to appreciate more and more the connection between universalism and imperialism.

William Pfaff photo

“It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.”

William Pfaff (1928–2015) American journalist

Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 5, Nationalism, p. 147.

Bart D. Ehrman photo

Related topics