Reviews for Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

The average rating for Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-16 00:00:00 Mrs C Phillipps After spending four hours relabelling books and re-shelving them at Prahran Mechanics Institute, I come away with another 15 to read. Of these I begin with Orwell's Australia. In the author's biography I find reference to Glenn Patmore as a co-editor of New Voices for Social Democracy. I read the first couple of pages of the introduction and am already revisiting old territory and the edges of conversations I could not acceptably relate to. The continuing sense I have that the world presents itself as a foregone conclusion of which I am to accept my own part in, resounds. I am aware of the limitations of my own narrow reading when it comes to communism or socialism. I am even more aware of the limitations of pat phrases by those who have espoused these ideologies to me, yet failed to present anything OF the ideology beyond the pat phrases. Nothing they have said has given me enough insight to understand what they have been offering to me. Instead I have watched the way these people live and drawn my own conclusions about their failure to appreciate themselves and make their own choices. I have seen their fatalism as an alternative to a fatalism they believe others would impose upon them if they did not at least open their mouths in protest. But the clarity of anything other than protest for protest's sake has escaped me. So I have been seen in the presence of such people, and assumed by others that I am somehow in agreement with them simply for this reason. Yet I have also been in the presence of staid members of society dutifully carrying out their employment tasks, and I have not been regarded by those members of society as if I were among their number. Yet I have been judged and feared by "the protesters" as if I were. Not until I began reading and discussing the work of Rudolf Steiner within a reading group of older women did I begin to clarify my own thoughts about a broader perspective of economics and politics and social conditions. But even here I encountered limitations. I was still expected to accept and hold the prejudices of others without being able to understand just what they meant with their own unstated opinions. So I begin to write a piece called Up and Coming in Prahran and Reservoir as a personal testimony to current conditions around me and within me around the time of the centenary of George Orwell's (nee Eric Blair's) birth. I feel the need to read Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London if I am to use it as a metaphor underlying my own piece and intentions of deeper considerations. By the time I locate it and read it I am too busy with other aspects of living to finish writing the piece, let alone offering it for publication in the directions I had considered might be interested. I am just not part of these circles to be easily included in their on-going conversations. But I have been on the edges of such conversations for such a long time. Why have I not found it possible to make deeper contact, voice an idea or opinion or even a question adequate of response? Why do I feel flattened by the expectation that I "follow their lead" when it only goes around in circles, and another pile of references gets added to my reading list while they still ignore the references they rely upon and yet have not read themselves? So I find this approach inadequate and eventually give up on it. Am I not then as bad as they are in allowing "entrenched" ideas to continue? Perhaps. But then I am working on my own ideas in other ways. I am talking to other people who do not tend to read at all, or only absorb flickers from television screens and headlines from newspapers with their own reinforcement of their own conclusions embedded within the language they find there. I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. No wonder I differ so obviously from everyone around me. This refusal on my behalf is more in line with Orwell's intention than with his presentation. Big Brother is a television programme taking its name directly from his writing. His protest has become so quotable that people easily see themselves in the framework he was protesting against. And so I even recognise the Culture of Complaint that has so clearly developed in the suburb where I now live. Words that pass power over to those who will apply their own solutions, and continue to feed peoples' need to have their say without doing their do. They will never reach the outcomes they want but they will feed the mill of complaint and at least feel they have taken part. Here Orwell's examination of language becomes important. To take part could be construed as being within the whole and therefore a contribution to something bigger and greater than oneself. Or to take part could be acceptance of a lesser than whole picture that is distributive to individuals despite the failure to create the bigger whole dreamed of. Both of these interpretations fulfil a short-term realisation of partnership. They allocate some level of adequacy. When that sense of adequacy wears off, the return to the Culture of Complaint drives the next phase of presumed development, or standard of maintenance. Nothing ever changes but it changes nothing. If there was nothing to complain about nothing would have been achieved. Because there is something to complain about something must have been changed or achieved despite our lack of awareness of what it is. The Illusion of Change becomes the perpetuator of the Culture of Complaint. Whether you are for or against change you can still be part of the Culture of Complaint, and this participation precludes your right to any greater say than to register your complaint. Interpretation continues elsewhere. Action is outsourced further than interpretation. Limits have been set by the nature of the structure of the process of complaint, and while it persists nothing else is of any consequence. The right to complain becomes the persistence of complaint. The rest is the domain of experts. Then comes "the spoils". Redistribution occurs where complaint lingers too long and what has been given then gets taken away again. Silent acceptance is to live within the means of such limitation. Loud protest reinforces the limitation of the perception that nothing offered will ever be adequately and thankfully received. I have now fallen into the perversions of the English language Orwell was lamenting, viz. inappropriate metaphors, unclear imagery and passive voice. They are the inadequacies of our culture that has lead to the inner dissatisfaction that build the Culture of Complaint in the first place. I am a person of my time, and still in my place. My protest, if indeed this is one, will continue to be unheard. I am a victim of the process I am trying to examine with inadequate tools and skills.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-15 00:00:00 Claude Mathess Illuminated Orwell's fiercely social democratic side and belief in state aid for the poor. It was interesting to see Orwell beyond the frame of his anti-communist and anti-fascist stance. Had some very good points around how detached many of the 'elite' on both the left and right have come with respect to many Australians on the lower end of the income ladder, and how Orwell spent time trying to bridge this distance and the political insights this gave him. Ultimately Glover is far too enamored by distortitive interventions for my liking, but I found the analysis if not the prescriptions interesting enough.