Abstract
The scene is Paris; the year, 1777. Dramatis personae: Benjamin Franklin and Edward Gibbon. Franklin is the United States envoy to France. Gibbon is the newly acclaimed author of the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and a member of the British Parliament on vacation. Franklin sends a note to Gibbon, requesting that they meet socially despite their respective nations being at war. Gibbon replies that although he greatly admires Franklin as an individual, it would be inappropriate for him to converse socially with a British subject in rebellion. Franklin ripostes that he greatly admires Gibbon as a historian, and that if Gibbon ever decides to write on book on the decline and fall of the British Empire, he will provide some relevant material.1 Franklin’s estimate of Gibbon has been ratified by history; Gibbon’s masterpiece is still widely read. Franklin’s implied prophecy was also correct—the decline and fall of the British Empire.
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, nor to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
—Spinoza
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Notes
Durant, Rousseau and Revolution, p. 802.
Based on a 1990 Harris poll as reported in Newsweek, June 3, 1991, pp. 40–42. The comparative figures were 47 percent in 1977 and 79 percent in 1990.
In French: “Inavait ete a la peine, c’etait bien raison qu’il fut Yhonneur.”
Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selesnick, The History of Psychiatry ( New York: Harper & Row, 1966 ), p. 100.
Ibid., p. 14. A few sentences later, the authors wrote: “The integration of brain chemistry with psychology is the principal task which psychiatry is facing in our present era.”
William Kornblum, Sociology in a Changing World ( Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994 ), pp. 18–23.
Abraham Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (New York: New American Library, 1961), pp. 36, 37, 39, 48–49.
Ibid., pp. 54, 55, 57–60.
Ibid., pp. 99, 100–102,107–109.
Ibid., pp. 121–124,128, 134.
Ibid., pp. 145, 148, 150–151.
Ibid., pp. 169–172,175.
Ibid., pp. 180–182, 186.
This may be changing. The study of motivational leadership has gained some academic respectability, to include the memory of Abraham Lincoln. For example, see Donald T. Phillips, Lincoln on Leadership ( New York: Warner Books, 1992 ).
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1992, vol. 9, p. 160.
The depicted spectrum of governments was derived from the “Great Ideas” in the Syntopicon of the Great Books of the Western World set.
The term metaeconomics was often used in the 19th century to describe “critiques” of economic theory, for example, by Marx and Weber. However, that meaning has fallen into disuse and is seldom found in economic texts (except as historical notes).
Broadus Mitchell, Great Economists and Their Times (Totowa, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1966), pp. 16–39, 60, 75, 97–114, 176, 191, 213–230.
George W. Baer, “U.S. Naval Strategy 1890–1945,” Naval War College Review, Winter 1991, pp. 6–33.
See Richard B. Morris, Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), p. 458. Apparently, the remark was first made by the director of the U.S. Census (Herman Hollerith) in 1890, then repeated without credit by Turner in 1894.
Hawaii was needed as a coaling station for naval control over the Philippines.
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© 1997 George M. Hall
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Hall, G.M. (1997). Insight from the Social Sciences. In: The Ingenious Mind of Nature. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6020-7_6
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