Sublime

gregarious.

At the Freedom School, Charles became particularly enamored of the work of two laissez-faire economists, the Austrian theorist Ludwig von Mises and his star pupil, Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian exile, who visited the Freedom School. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom had become an improbable best seller in 1944, after Reader’s Digest published a

Assuming Weber’s central insight to have been correct, then in the face of the dramatic transformation in the forms of contemporary capitalism, some new ethos ought to be unfolding right before our eyes.

This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink in the night.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us. Making us a nation of ass kissers. Only way, or virtually the only way, to get ahead these days. Deadly. Change the title of manager of sales to the Duke of Schenectady, and you start wondering if maybe the Revolutionary War was

The truly moral man,” writes Daniel Rodgers in The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920, “was at once a person of strength and a perpetuum mobile,” whose days, as Bishop Henry Potter put it at the time, “are so crowded full of honest and healthy tasks that he has no room for dreaming.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This