The Third Man Quote

[C. G. Estabrook]

In an essay years ago someone neatly turned the tables on this remark by
pointing out that Switzerland also produced the Liberal historian Jacob
Burckhardt, who invented the Renaissance (in his 1860 book Die Kultur der
Renaissance in Italien).  The thoroughly ideologized notion of the
Renaissance as another giant step in the Long March of Freedom that led
from Caesar to Bill Gates misrepresents several generations of frenzied
intellectual reaction and loss of nerve amongst European intellectuals in
response to the breakdown of the medieval mode of production in the 14th
century.  The intellectuals -- later called "Renaissance Humanists" by
their epigoni -- reacted as we have to admit intellectuals usually do, by
sucking up to power, e.g. the Borgias and the Medicis, and the Valois and
the Tudors.  (As for the artists, David Hockney suggests they did it all
with mirrors -- or at least lenses.)  --CGE  

On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, joanna bujes wrote:


> At 09:31 PM 03/18/2002 -0500, Sergio wrote:
> 
> >  Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and
> >bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
> >Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of
> >democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
> >
> >                    Harry Lyme
> 
> This signature bugs me.
> 
> You could argue that warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed produced
> the great renaissance artists, or you could argue that the craft
> system of the middle ages produced the renaissance artists. (Have you
> not noticed how the Renaissance claims credit for ALL the good stuff
> that was laboriously worked out in the high middle ages?)
> 
> Even if peace, brotherly love, and democracy do not produce great art
> (and that's a big "if"), they do produce a life worth living, which is
> a much greater thing than the most perfect object.
> 
> And then consider the speaker of the preceding: Harry Lyme, the
> fictional war profiteer who has sold watered down penicillin in order
> to make money during WWII. True, "Third Man" argues is that no one
> came out of that one with clean hands and that everyone had their
> balance sheets out while "watching those little dots down there" from
> bombing height. -- but except for the extent to which Harry (or the
> movie) exposes the hypocrisy of his accusers, what is that makes this
> man your hero?
> 
> Joanna
> 
>