We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
AUDIENCES— POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY became thus intolerable. 'The cry of liberty, which had been raised with such fervour against the Persian invader, had taken on a hollow ring because, though Pericles might clothe it in fine words, the policy for which he stood meant that liberty was to be maintained at home by suppressing it abroad. Democracy has been transformed into the negation of democracy.' Panem et cir censes became the watchword for the Graeco-Roman world.
Dramatic art is the self-interpretation of mature societies. It is always a late form and is intimately related to the class-structure, but, if dramatic art is great art, its artistic message is beyond class and time. Otherwise Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine would be as dead to us to-day as Voltaire's Henriade.
The universal audiences of the great theatrical periods of western civilisation, a fact to which sociology has, if I am not mistaken, so far not paid enough attention, do not necessarily require a democratic State structure. Any generalisation from the Athenian example appears to me misleading (Professor Thomson might, I think, be blamed for being inclined to such a generalisation). Shakespeare's audience, for example, was of a universal character, and so was the audience of Moliere's theatre. And yet neither the Elizabethan nor the society of Louis XIV was a democratic society. This, it seems to me, is a very important sociological fact. Great dramatists like Shakespeare and Moliere do not belong to one class. Their conception is universal; and because it is universal their art speaks to all classes. Thus, their audiences become universal audiences. One can take, for instance, as an example of Shakespeare's universal world conception the fact that Marx, in his early study on Political Economy and Philosophy (1843), demonstrates his idea of money, which at this period of his life-work was more a philosophical-ethical idea than a purely economic concept, by a quotation from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens:
Gold! Yellow, glittering gold! . . . Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair; Wrong, right; base, noble; old,young; coward, valiant; .... What this, you gods? Why this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men' 's pillows from below their heads. This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed; Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves l