Word: socials
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that sometimes appears to have half a dozen plots, and sometimes none at all. Dozens of sharply drawn characters move through it, their lives intertwined in frantic quests for visas, underground resistance, concentration-camp ordeals, involved political discussions and harried interludes of personal life. With a strong awareness of social gradations, Author Malaquais shows Marseille under the Vichy regime as divided into four groups: the scum, the innocents, the resisters, and the victims...
...Scum. Top specimen of social scum is Adrien de Pontillac, French aristocrat and Vichyite ruler of Marseille. His instincts refined to a delicate dimension of amorality, De Pontillac is one of the lovely brutes who classifies women by zoological categories, and has made indifference to other people into an art of living. When orders come from Vichy to round up all Jews into internment camps, he sets about his task with the precision of an official in an abattoir...
Yesterday's harried "freethinkers" produced a flood of radical literature, most of which is now as dull and dead as the social grievances it attacked. Of the countless contributors to this literature, Thorstein Veblen is one of the very few who does not give the impression of being just a cut off the old red jelly...
Veblen approached social criticism as if he were some expert envoy-extraordinary sent from a distant planet to report on human behavior. Under this bland mask of anthropological detachment he hid his passionate conviction that man, in being forced to labor in the sweat of his brow, was not paying a divine penalty for sin but simply giving vent to his most powerful natural passion : "the instinct of workmanship...
...While the road of social criticism must always be lonely," pontificates glib Pundit Max Lerner in the introduction, "it need not be made bitter as Dante's exile." But Veblen-who was as different from Dante as Bernard Shaw is from Pope Pius-was not an easy man to employ or encourage. His conspicuous love of lechery caused him to be fired first from the University of Chicago, then from Leland Stanford. Hired as an economist by the U.S. Food Administration in World War I, he coolly proposed, says Lerner, "to do away with the merchants in the country...