Gertrude Stein’s Great Depression

Abstract

The New Deal challenged American proponents of free-market capitalism by attempting to penetrate what had traditionally, or at least since the nineteenth-century advent of industrial capitalism, been the sphere of ‘private life’. For these classical liberals, among whom I will provisionally include Gertrude Stein, what Pound calls the determination of ‘the border between public and private affairs’ was exclusively an economic, not a political matter. For Pound, on the other hand, the most dangerous threat to justice was the invasion of the public sphere by private interests. The modern form of the ‘political’, according to Pound, was more often than not a disguise for private, more properly ‘economic’, interests. In his effort to distinguish the truly ‘political’ from these economic interests, Pound looked to various historical sources, assured as he was that a model for their proper relation was not, until the glaring exception of Mussolini‘s politics, to be found in the twentieth century.

Quantity is one of the things to think about and how much do you use.

She complains that some who do not live on flat lands do not know how much of anything they use.

What has this to do with money. Nothing at all really and now I will explain all about money.

How do you do all about money.

Money is what they know that they give and take.

Oh yes yes. .. .

Money is very important because anybody can think about that and it has nothing to do with the human mind…

Human nature can mix itself up with it but that is another matter. Really money really has to do with the human mind. (GHA 169)