David Akin’s On The Hill

The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of the imagination.
– Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism, p. 347 (Noted Dec. 10, 1990)
No society can plan for its own culture unless it restricts the output of culture to socially predictable standards.
– Frye, ibid., p. 347
Frye says Mill and Milton argue, in the Essay on Liberty and Aeropagitica respectively, that true intellectural liberty can only begin with an immediate and present guarantee on the autonomy of culture.
– Fry ibid., p. 348

Noel Annan reviews David Cannadine's The Decline and Fall of British Aristocracy and notes that in 1870, 7,500 families owned 4/5 of the land in the British Isles. (56% of England and 93% of Scotland).
“And yet, the classes have certainly changed their shape in Britain. The aristrocracy has diversified their range of jobs. Cannadine has identified a movie producer, an auctioneer, a professor of ceramics, a landscape gardener, a bookbinder, and a mining engineer. Some have slid down the social scale. They number a bus conductor, a police constable, an assistant in a deli, and the director of a chain of sex shops.”
– Noel Annan, “The Death of Society” in The New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 1990. (Noted Dec. 9, 1990).
Interestingly, I just finished reading a review of Cannadine's latest book, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire in the Nov. 7, 2002 issue of the New York Review. Ornamentalism — intentionally titled just so to draw a comparison to the late Edward Said's Orientalism — makes the case that the British ran that great empire not so much on a racist dynamic as a class dynamic.

Cannadine . . . deals with the race question without prejudice and without misconceptions. [He] concludes that racial considerations were not the predominant force in the ordering of the Empire. Too many people looked for affinities among the hierarchies of native societies. Too many were like Lady Gordon, welcoming the Fijian chiefs as men of equivalent rank while looking down on her nanny and the other whites of inferior class.
-David Gilmour, “Nobs and Nabobs” in the New York Review of Books, Nov. 7, 2002

The example of Mesoamerica shows once more that a civilization is not to be measured, or at least not exclusively, by its production techniques but by its thought, its art, and its achievements in the moral and political spheres.
– Octavio Paz, “The Power of Ancient Mexican Art”, in The New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 1990. (Noted Dec. 8, 1990).

The greatest crimes are committed not for the sake of necessities, but for the sake of superfluities. Men do not become tyrants in order to avoid exposure in the cold.
– Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism +/- p. 208, noted Dec. 6, 1990

Culture [means] . . . those cognitive structures and social institutions that affectively instruct us with alternatives to violence as a means of resolving conflict and violence. Period.

-Brian Fawcett, Public Eye, noted Dec. 3, 1990

Suppose for a moment that there was no involuntary exercise of the creative imagination through memory. Suppose we had a perfect, impartial, scientific record of what really happened. Even then, we would still have almost nothing — and much too much. To study five years of the French Revolution in just one corner of Paris you would have to sit for five years in front of the screen.
– Timothy Garton Ash “On the Frontier” in The New York Review of Books, Nov. 7, 2002, p. 61

… The light of day is often the darkness of desire.
– Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism, p. 159, noted Nov. 26, 1990

Culture . . . may be provisionally [defined] as the total body of imaginative hypothesis in a society and its tradition.
– Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism p. 127