Posted on 12/15/2011 7:29:44 AM PST by Academiadotorg
The authors who are read most widely are those who are no longer around. Former Accuracy in Academia executive director Dan Flynn pays homage to a quartet of them in his latest book, Blue Collar Intellectuals.
America may never again see the likes of Will and Ariel Durant, Mortimer Adler, Milton Friedman and Eric Hoffer. For one thing, all ascended to intellectual heights from modest means, if not actual penury.
Moreover, although their political viewpoints spanned the ideological spectrum, all shared a love of country, namely the one in which they lived and worked. For example, Will and Ariel Durant, authors of The Story of Civilization, came away from their first European jaunt something less than enamored.
“Seeing the basket-case states of postwar Europe made Durant pine for home rather than rail against it,” Flynn writes. “We had compared our country not with other nations of this earth but with some perfect state which we had pictured in our dreams,” Will Durant admitted.
What really set him apart from the intelligentsia, though, was his disparagement of the Soviet Union. They never quite forgave him for that even though he spent most of his nine decades on the planet as a fairly liberal Democrat.
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
I was around 20 years old in the early 1960s when I started reading his books. If one has never read his works, I highly recommend them, they are profound.
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