Quotessence
Home / Authors / Jerry Z. Muller Biography

Jerry Z. Muller Biography

Author

Related Quotes

“Yet despite...accommodations with commerce, Möser regarded the market as primarily a threat--to the artisanal citizens of the town, to the traditional wants of the peasantry, and to the political structure to society, since it created a growing class of people outside the traditional paternalistic relations of the countryside. Möser's conception of contemporary political and economic trends in Osnabrück was essentialy tragic and tinged with that idealization of the past that would later be called romantic. Möser's heroes were the artisan-citizen and the independent peasant, his villains the shopkeeper and the peddler.”

RomanticTragicIdealization Of The PastMarket Economy As A Threat
Book:The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Create image

“(from Acknowledgments) For some years I have profited from an in-house, informal but ongoing seminar on organizational behavior, a seminar comprising my wife, our three children, and three children-in-law. They have shared their insights into the functions and dysfunctions of the organizational settings in which they have worked, which include government, education, and medicine. I am indebted to all of them, though none are responsible for the uses to which I have put their observations. Eli Muller first drew my attention to the larger themes of The Wire (episodes of which he can quote chapter and verse), and his acute analysis of institutional dynamics finds its echoes in the pages of this book, which he also helped to edit. Thanks go to Joseph Muller, M.D., for orienting me in the literature of medicine and healthcare, as well as his sage advice about the tone and direction of the book. My wife, Sharon, was the first reader and editor of every chapter, and many of the book's ideas were born or refined in our daily conversations (when we weren't talking about the immeasurable pleasures of grandparenthood--but that's the subject of another book). Completion of this book was eased by the support of my parents. I'm saddened to note that this is the last project that I was able to discuss with mt father, Henry Muller, who passed away when the manuscript was nearing completion: his memory is a blessing. My mother, Bella Muller, remains a vigorous source of wisdom, encouragement, and humor in my life.”

ChildrenWifeParentsOrganizational BehaviorAcknowledgmentsSeminar
Book:The Tyranny of Metrics
Create image

“It is all very well to have some internal sense of oneself as an individual, but that sense must correspond to an external reality. Part of that external reality is property. The fact that something belongs to me and not to everyone increases my sense of myself as someone in particular. For Hegel that sense of individual particularity is intrinsic to the modern moral order. Indeed "the right of the subject's particularity to find satisfaction, or--to put it differently--the right of subjective freedom, is the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age." The fact that others do not take my property--that they regard it as mine--is also a way in which they recognize me as an individual. It is precisely this recognition that the slave, the bondsman, and the serf lack. That the right to own private property, to control some corner of the world, is universal in the modern state is for Hegel part of its glory. (p. 155)”

Private PropertyHegelSubjective Freedom
Book:The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Create image

“In the sixteenth century the unity of western European Christendom had been shattered by the rise of Protestantism in its various strands (Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican). While the state was regarded as part of the body of Christ, the concept of sharing a political community with those of differing doctrinal commitments was unthinkable. And so it remained at first. Protestant reformers and their Catholic adversaries all insisted that one of the main aims of government was to maintain "true religion." They disagreed, of course. as to which brand of Christianity was true. Thus European history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became a chronicle of civil war, of massacre, and of the expulsion of religious minorities. The notion of religious toleration grew less out of any particular brand of Christianity than out of the fear and frustration of protracted civil war. (p. 24)”

Civil WarTrue ReligionReligious Toleration
Book:The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Create image

“Arnold's notion of the intellectual as disinterested critic distinguished him from both Marx and Hegel. For Marx, the proper function of the intellectual was to be a partisan on behalf of the proletariat, criticizing bourgeois society for its fundamental, structural oppression. For Hegel, the role of the intellectual was to stand above particular group interests, and to bring to consciousness the ethical basis of modern, capitalist society, in the process creating standards by which to guide politics and culture. Arnold's conception of "aliens" has obvious affinities with this Hegelian image of the intellectual. But "disinterestedness" for Arnold had a rather different meaning. It implied the ability to free oneself from partisanship, to take a distanced enough view to be able to criticize the side of the issue to which one had been committed, as circumstances required. "Living by ideas" he wrote, means that "when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all around you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam-engine and can imagine no other--still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question..." The role of the intellectual, then, was to embody and encourage that quality of mind that allowed individuals to get some distance from their social, political, and economic milieu; to reflect critically, and to be carried away by truth. (p. 227)”

TruthDisinterestedPartisanshipPartisanDisinterestednessCarried Away By Truth
Book:The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Create image

“Burke's admonition--"The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations"--never seems to have occurred to Hayek. The Arnoldian ideal of the disinterested intellectual willing to criticize one side and then the other in order to create balance and counteract the one-sidedness that led toward fanaticism: That, too, was as alien to Hayek as it had been to Marcuse. If it was partisanship that led Hayek to push forward intellectually to new insights, it was also partisanship that kept him from a balanced and rounded philosophy. Perhaps a familiarity with "the best that has been thought and said" about the market will aid us in obtaining a more disinterested and informed perspective. Such a perspective might well begin with Hayek's insights. But it would by no means end with them. p. 387”

LibertyDisinterestedPartisanship
Author:Jerry Z. Muller
Create image

“Most people in the Great Britain of (Adam) Smith's day lived in what most of us would regard as poverty. Hundreds of thousands were willing to risk the possibility of death in transit and years in indentured servitude for the chance to escape to the New World. Yet the population of Britain was probably better off economically than that of any major nation on the globe. To put relative poverty and wealth in perspective, let us take the standards of apparel considered necessary by ordinary day laborers, the lowest of the working poor, as recounted in The Wealth of Nations. In England, Smith reports, the poorest day laborer of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without leather shoes. In Scotland, a rung lower on the ladder of national wealth, it was considered inappropriate for men of this class to appear without shoes, but not for women. In France, a rung rower still, custom held that both men and women laborers could appear shoeless in public. Below France there were many rungs in Europe. And below Europe there were many more rungs still. (p. 56)”

PovertyShoesRelative Poverty And Wealth
Book:The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Create image

“For Burke, almost everything that makes life worthwhile is a result of society, its inherited codes, knowledge, and institutions. These goods are fragile, and when they are destroyed, the result is human misery.... Among the greatest of man's needs, according to Burke, was the need for society and government to provide "a sufficient restraint upon their passions." As far back as his Vindication of Natural Society, Burke had argued that the destruction of inherited institutions and cultural practices would result not in natural harmony, but in barbarism. For Burke, as for Adam Smith, man is preeminently social man who realizes himself morally only under the tutelage of society. (p. 131)”

InstitutionsRestraintMorally
Book:The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Create image

“An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which Smith published in 1776, is the most important book ever written about capitalism and its moral ramifications. Though The Wealth of Nations is in good part about commerce, it was not written for businessmen or merchants. A book focused on the analysis of market processes motivated by self-interest, it was written by one of the most admired philosophers of the Enlightenment, a former professor of logic, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy, in order to influence politicians and rouse them to pursue the common good.”

Self InterestWealth Of NationsThe Common Good
Book:The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Create image

“In the end, there is no silver bullet, no substitute for actually knowing one's subject and one's organization, which is partly a matter of experience and partly a matter of unquantifiable skill. Many matters of importance are too subject to judgement and interpretation to be solved by standardized metrics. Ultimately, the issue is not one of metrics versus judgment, but metrics as informing judgement, which includes knowing how much weight to give to metrics, recognizing their characteristic distortions, and appreciating what can't be measured. In recent decades, too many politicians, business leaders, policymakers, and academic officials have lost sight of that.”

MetricsJudgement Quotes
Book:The Tyranny of Metrics
Create image

“To demand or preach mechanical precision, even in principle, in a field incapable of it, is to be blind and to mislead others," as the British liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted in an essay on political judgement. Indeed what Berlin says of political judgement applies more broadly: judgement is a sort of skill at grasping the unique particularities of a situation, and it entails a talent for synthesis rather than analysis, "a capacity for taking in the total pattern of a human situation, of the way in which things hang together." A feel for the whole and a sense for the unique are precisely what numerical metrics cannot supply.”

JudgementMetrics
Book:The Tyranny of Metrics
Create image