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Quote by Elizabeth Hardwick

“The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner--all of this was accomplished by Bloomsbury in the lightest, most spontaneous and good-natured manner.”

Quote by Elizabeth Hardwick

Work

Seduction and Betrayal

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Author

Elizabeth Hardwick
Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick was an American novelist known for her profound psychological insights and portrayals of the female experience. Her works often explore love, marriage, and art, and how these themes affect individuals and society. more

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“The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group (Bell, Forster, Fry, Keynes, Strachey, Sydney-Turner) were members of the elite and secret society of Cambridge Apostles. Woolf’s aesthetic understanding, and broader philosophy, were in part shaped by, and at first primarily interpreted in terms of, (male) Bloomsbury’s dominant aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, rooted in the work of G. E. Moore (a central influence on the Apostles), and culminating in Fry’s and Clive Bell’s differing brands of pioneering aesthetic formalism. ‘The main things which Moore instilled deep into our minds and characters,’ Leonard Woolf recalls, ‘were his peculiar passion for truth, for clarity and common sense, and a passionate belief in certain values.’ Increasing awareness of Woolf’s feminism, however, and of the influence on her work of other women artists, writers and thinkers has meant that these Moorean and male points of reference, though of importance, are no longer considered adequate in approaching Woolf’s work, and her intellectual development under the tutelage of women, together with her involvement with feminist thinkers and activists, is also now acknowledged.”

“Critics often say that DDLJ, with its emphasis on patriarchal permission for young love, discourages dissent. This argument narrows the space for dissent by legitimizing it only in its most blatant, combative form, demanding that dissent always be obvious and 'out there' in full view of TV cameras and Twitter. So, no act of protest short of elopement, short of the most radical rejection of family, would suffice. Demanding such all-or-nothing actions doesn't account for the costs that eloping and actively abandoning their families would impose on women from any economic strata. The way we express resistance is subject to our own personal calculus of risk and reward.”

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”

“With the growth of market individualism comes a corollary desire to look for collective, democratic responses when major dislocations of financial collapse, unemployment, heightened inequality, runaway inflation, and the like occur. The more such dislocations occur, the more powerful and internalized, Hayek insists, neoliberal ideology must become; it must become embedded in the media, in economic talking heads, in law and the jurisprudence of the courts, in government policy, and in the souls of participants. Neoliberal ideology must become a machine or engine that infuses economic life as well as a camera that provides a snapshot of it. That means, in turn, that the impersonal processes of regulation work best if courts, churches, schools, the media, music, localities, electoral politics, legislatures, monetary authorities, and corporate organizations internalize and publicize these norms.”

“Zwolennicy rynku używają niekiedy argumentu, że korupcja występująca w gospodarce centralnie planowanej niweczy w istocie wszelkie przewagi, które system ten mógłby posiadać. Ci sami dyskutanci nie rozpatrują jednak na ogół wpływu, jaki wywierają standardy moralne na funkcjonowanie gospodarki rynkowej. Nie może nas to dziwić, ponieważ gdyby zajęli się bliżej tą sprawą, to musieliby dojść do przekonania, że ograniczenie jednostkowych egoizmów jest zasadniczym spoiwem społeczeństwa. Zwolennicy Hayka i Miltona Friedmana wierzą, tak samo jak marksiści, iż jedno lekarstwo może zwalczyć wszelkie choroby; własność prywatna i wolny rynek spełniają w ich doktrynie taką samą rolę, jaką w marksizmie pełni kolektywizacja i centralne planowanie. (Maxa Webera olśnienia i pomyłki, ss. 174-175)”

“But if those coming forward with elaborate plans for the “reformation” of society are not really interested in the cause of humanity, what does motivate them? Simply the desire for power: On this point Lewis is in emphatic agreement with both Hayek and Mises. Hayek: “[T]he desire to organize social life according to a single plan itself springs largely from a desire for power.” Mises: “Every dictator plans to rear, raise, feed and train his fellow citizens as the breeder does his cattle. His aim is not to make them happy but to bring them into a condition which renders him, the dictator, happy.”

“The everyday practice of what is right is not derived from a rule, not only because the custom is inarticulable /in toto/, but also because a rule not summoned from custom cannot anticipate the unknowable local circumstances under which it might conflict with another rule subsumed within the larger community practice of what is right (69).”