1. So I have some thoughts on @rossdouthat, Edmund Burke, Anthony Powell, meritocracy, Perry Anderson, & Karl Marx's love for Balzac.
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10. But another factor is that capitalist society has long had a curious duality, combining a public culture that celebrates civic duty (sometimes in aristocratic form) and a commercial culture celebrating private greed. These novelists are the ones that notice this duality.
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11. Tory and reactionary novelists (as well as theorists like Burke) are super-sensitive to how the ideological justifications of national cohesion are in tension with the reality that money dominates. That's a theme that Marxists are also interested in.
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12. So as with Marx on Balzac or Anderson on Powell, the proper response to
@DouthatNYT is not rejection but asking what he gets right. I think his critique of meritocracy (or really pseudo-meritocracy) is spot on.Show this thread -
13. I explore some of these themes here:https://newrepublic.com/article/152533/death-wasp-elite-greatly-exaggerated …
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For all of Balzac’s personal political affiliations, his novels revealed how the cogs of society worked, the sexual politics, the maneuvering. He didn’t idealize & wasn’t sentimental. His characters wouldn’t have lamented the passing of the old preppy ways except as a bitter joke
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Orwell
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And because Marxists had more sympathy for the Old Order than for the new money. Marx's description of life under Communism in Das Kapital sounds an awful lot like the life of a rural English gentleman.
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