Maggie's Farm

I suppose this is a companion piece to my post last week, Beauty and Transgressive Ugliness. From a review of John Armstrong's important new book, In Search of Civilization - Remaking a Tarnished Idea:

Greeks’ and theologians’ dour double disapproval of money has been the hideous inheritance of the West. Reinforced by aristocratic and would-be aristocratic disdain for work, hostility to wealth had, by the mid-19th century, torn free of its intellectual roots and become one of those ideas accepted without thought by a certain kind of intellectual, whatever his relationship to Greeks or theologians. Marx was heir to this prejudice, and the millions killed by Marx’s followers its victims. So pervasive was this idea that even 19th-century Utilitarianism, whose principle of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” should have made its followers leading advocates of economic liberty (as, indeed, they began), evolved over time a hostility to getting and spending; John Stuart Mill ended his life a socialist.

The book review here.