State the author and title of the reading from which the quotation was taken. Then, offer an interpretation and/or explanation of why the ideas expressed in the quotation idea is important within the broader argument of that readings and/or the author’s overall approach. A good paragraph or two is all it should take.
- All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
- It is in fact impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one reintroduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognized by economic theory.
- The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
- The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the films seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production.
- Before going any further, we should emphasize that the idea of an ethical imperative, of a ‘model’ of what ‘ought’ to exist is to be carefully distinguished from the analytical construct, which is ‘ideal’ in the strictly logical sense of the term.
- The concern for material goods, according to Baxter, should lie on the shoulders of his saints like ‘a lightweight coat that one can throw off at any time.’ Yet fate allowed this coat to become a steel-hard [iron] casing. To the extent that asceticism undertook to transform and influence the world, the world’s material goods acquired an increasing, and, in the end, inescapable power over people – as never before in history.
- It does not owe this to any vague mysterious virtue but simply to the fact that according to the well-known formula, man is double. There are two beings in him: an individual being which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation—I mean society.
- The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be. For to the extent that asceticism moved out of the monastic cell and was carried over into the life of work in a vocational calling, and then commenced to rule over this-worldly morality, it helped to do its part to build the mighty cosmos of the modern economic order – namely, an economy bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanized, machine-based production.
- Even the most favourable situation for the working class, the most rapid possible growth of capital, however much it may improve the material existence of the worker, does not remove the antagonism between his interests and the interest of the bourgeoisie, the interests of the capitalists.
- Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.
- In general, we understand by “power” the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action.
- The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to act as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.
- Society is a reality sui generis; it has its own particular characteristics, which are not found elsewhere and which are not met with again in the same form in all the rest of the universe.
- It is obvious how powerfully the exclusive striving for the kingdom of God – through fulfillment of duty to work in a vocational calling and through strict asceticism, which church discipline naturally imposed in particular on the propertyless classes – must have promoted the ‘productivity’ of work in the capitalist sense of the word. For the modern worker, the view of work as a ‘vocational calling’ became just as characteristic as the view of gain as a ‘vocational calling’ became for the modern employer.
- So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use value of objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use value of objects is realized without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects of man, this is, by means of a social process.
- The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
- No living being can be happy, or even exist, unless his needs are adequately related to his means. In other words, if his needs require more than can be allocated to them, or even merely something of a different sort, they will be under continual friction and can only function painfully. Now an action which cannot be effected without suffering tends not to be reproduced. Unsatisfied tendencies atrophy, and as the impulse to live is merely the result of all other motivations, it is bound to weaken as the others lose their hold.
- Man is born free; and everywhere is in chains. […] But the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions.
- The habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present.
- For our definition of the sacred is that it is something added to and above the real: now the ideal answers to this same definition; we cannot explain one without explaining the other. In fact, we have seen that if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity.
- Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations go ‘against nature’, interrupting the process of ‘normalization’. As such, they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the ‘silent majority’, which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion which contradicts the myth of consensus. Our task becomes like Barthes’, to discern the hidden messages inscribed in’ code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as ‘maps of meaning’ which obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal.
