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The Athens of Pericles, a mere sixty thousand free voters, ill-housed, ill-clad, economically dependent on slavery and imperialist war, created a gre… - Peter Viereck
" "The Athens of Pericles, a mere sixty thousand free voters, ill-housed, ill-clad, economically dependent on slavery and imperialist war, created a greater cultural flowering than all the prosperous free democracy of a thousand-times-more numerous America. The social democracy of Sweden does not have the world's highest cultural flowering; it does have the world's highest social progress, highest economic security, and highest suicide rate. Let us imagine a society whose ideal is not social progress but an ever-increasing poverty, with the poorhouse bed as the final, sweetly desired goal. Such a society would lack all social progress; it need not lack—consider the religious and literary achievements of Saint Francis—religious progress and cultural freedom.
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About Peter Viereck
Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006) was an American poet and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the collection Terror and Decorum. In 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florence.
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Peter Robert Edwin Viereck
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Peter R. Viereck
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Peter Robert Viereck
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Additional quotes by Peter Viereck
That whole inconsistent spectrum of Goldwater intellectuals and right-radical magazines. Most of them are so muddled they don't even know when they are being 19th-century liberal individualists (in economics) and when they are being 20th-century semi-fascist thought-controllers (in politics). Logically, these two qualities are contradictory. Psychologically, they unite to make America's typical pseudo-conservative rightist […] Indeed, this new American right seems a very successful concern. On every TV station, on every mass-circulation editorial page, the word "conservatism" in the 1960s has acquired a fame, or at least notoriety, that it never possessed before […] Which is it, triumph or bankruptcy, when the empty shell of a name gets acclaim while serving as a chrysalis for its opposite? The historic content of conservatism stands, above all, for two things: organic unity and rooted liberty. Today the shell of the "conservative" label has become a chrysalis for the opposite of these two things: at best for atomistic Manchester liberalism, opposite of organic unity; at worst for thought-controlling nationalism, uprooting the traditional liberties (including the 5th Amendment) planted by America's founders.
In Nietzsche and [Jakob] Burckhardt the German language had its last great voices of the old Goethean individualism amid the triumphant Bismarck era of statism and mechanized material power. . . . Nietzsche remains unequaled in anticipating out ever-increasing need today for the full, unmechanized personality.
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Unfortunately the European concept "massman" came to America not from its great originators, Burckhardt and Nietzsche, but via its popularizer, the brilliantly learned but oversimplifying Ortega y Gasset. "Massman" is a valid enough term for the American Overadjusted Man but only on the condition that the middleclass nature of the American masses is first recognized and that "massman" is not made synonymous with workingman. Wealthy would-be conservatives, above all the prissy suburban "despisers of the mob," flatter themselves handsomely by assuming that "mass" means only manual worker and that they themselves are not massmen but rugged individualists. Hence the snobbish illusion that individualism is best protected from the mass by an anti-worker, narrowly commercialist politics and economics.
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