HES: Re: QUERY--Hayek References

Yuri Tulupenko YGT at nm.ru
Fri May 18 02:58:56 EDT 2007


Mason Gaffney wrote:
> I apologize to Yuri if this looks like a criticism aimed at him - that is
> not my intent at all. I just like to raise consciousness of semantic
issues.

This is precisely how I understood Professor Gaffney's comment.

> [...] I wonder if "vandalism" is the best word?

Again, this is not my characterization. I alluded to books which have
"revolutionary vandalism" in the title. See http://tinyurl.com/2fz9uz.

> I grant that burning old chains of title
> is a sort of vandalism per se, but I don't think that is the major point.

Probably it was a very big point to people like Edmund Burke or Alexander
Pushkin. I happen to have, at hand, a quotation from the latter:

"An enlightened Frenchman or Englishman values any single line written by an
ancient chronicler, with the mentioning of the name of his ancestor, an
honourable knight who fell in a certain battle or returned in a certain year
from Palestine, but the Kalmyks [Pushkin uses a handy ethnonym to denote
those who lack Burkean "prejudices"] have neither nobility nor history.
Savagery, baseness and ignorance have no reverence for the past, but only
grovelling before the present." (Translation is mine.)

Yuri Tulupenko




More information about the HES mailing list