Here are the nominees for great books with bad arguments.
The nominees are:Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan;
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto;
and Plato, for the Republic.
A little about the nominees; Plato was an Athenian nob, connected via his mother, Perictione, to several of the Thirty Tyrants.
Hobbes spent virtually all his adult life in the service of the Cavendish family, of the earldom (now duchy) of Devonshire.
Even Marx, a Rhineland Jew, managed to cop off with the daughter of the Baron von Westphalen.
If that does not make you feel a bit déclassé then nothing will.
So there! But why are their arguments poor?
The Republic ‘turns out to be confused in formulation, illogical in exposition and implausible in application’.
Hobbes goes one better, failing ‘twice over’ by his inability to explain co-operation without a sovereign, or dissension with one; his contentions are variously ‘weak’, ‘simply not true’ and ‘absurd’.
Meanwhile, over in the British Library, Marx is making a pig’s ear of the history paper. His analysis of class societies proves ‘flawed’, ‘naive’ and ‘ludicrous’.
So what led people to think that these three supposed classics were so marvellous in the first place?
Various explanations, such as Myles Burnyeat’s suggestion that a great text lends itself to multiple interpretations, are summarily entertained and dismissed. However commendable a lack of clarity may be in fiction or verse, Runciman points out, it ill serves these authors’ avowed aim of writing a how-to guide for aspirant guardians, autocrats or proletarian revolutionaries.
Nor are they to be read primarily as religion, or literature. Given the title of Runciman’s book, a subversive thought suggests itself. Might it not be the hallmark of a classic text that it serves to edify later generations, or at any rate flatters their amour-propre, (self-love) just by bungling but bungling memorably?
No. Or, at least, Runciman doesn’t think so, and probably rightly. Since the 'greats' have hardly cornered the market in non sequiturs, the question remains: what is it that makes these 'great' blunders stick in the memory?
The nominees are:Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan;
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto;
and Plato, for the Republic.
A little about the nominees; Plato was an Athenian nob, connected via his mother, Perictione, to several of the Thirty Tyrants.
Hobbes spent virtually all his adult life in the service of the Cavendish family, of the earldom (now duchy) of Devonshire.
Even Marx, a Rhineland Jew, managed to cop off with the daughter of the Baron von Westphalen.
If that does not make you feel a bit déclassé then nothing will.
So there! But why are their arguments poor?
The Republic ‘turns out to be confused in formulation, illogical in exposition and implausible in application’.
Hobbes goes one better, failing ‘twice over’ by his inability to explain co-operation without a sovereign, or dissension with one; his contentions are variously ‘weak’, ‘simply not true’ and ‘absurd’.
Meanwhile, over in the British Library, Marx is making a pig’s ear of the history paper. His analysis of class societies proves ‘flawed’, ‘naive’ and ‘ludicrous’.
So what led people to think that these three supposed classics were so marvellous in the first place?
Various explanations, such as Myles Burnyeat’s suggestion that a great text lends itself to multiple interpretations, are summarily entertained and dismissed. However commendable a lack of clarity may be in fiction or verse, Runciman points out, it ill serves these authors’ avowed aim of writing a how-to guide for aspirant guardians, autocrats or proletarian revolutionaries.
Nor are they to be read primarily as religion, or literature. Given the title of Runciman’s book, a subversive thought suggests itself. Might it not be the hallmark of a classic text that it serves to edify later generations, or at any rate flatters their amour-propre, (self-love) just by bungling but bungling memorably?
No. Or, at least, Runciman doesn’t think so, and probably rightly. Since the 'greats' have hardly cornered the market in non sequiturs, the question remains: what is it that makes these 'great' blunders stick in the memory?
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