1 It is not observed, for example, by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf in the Asian hunter-gatherer tribes describe in Morals and Merit: A Study of Values and Social Controls in South Asian Societies, London 1967, Chapter 1.
2 Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage, Paris 1909.
3 Such, very briefly, is Durkheim’s external account of the ‘elementary forms of the religious life’: see bibliography.
4 A line rightly criticised by Eliot (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd Edn., London 1964, p. 107), who nevertheless concurs in Arnold’s thought.
5 CP. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge 1960, and F.R. Leavis, ‘Two Cultures? the Significance of Lord Snow’, in F.R. Leavis, Nor Shall my Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope, London 1972.
6 Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’: see bibliography.
7 I am simplifying, of course. The full and noble picture is given by Kant himself, in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
8 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887.
9 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen, 1922.
10 Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law, Oxford, 1861.
11 Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, London 1992.
12 Although the chronology of such things cannot be precisely defined, it is significant that in 1751 Adam Smith was already including Belles Lettres in his lectures as Glasgow Professor of Logic, and that by 1762 a Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres had been founded in Edinburgh, with Hugh Blair as tenant.
13 That which is, to my mind, most enduring in Marx’s contribution to the study of political economy, is his recognition of the hallucinogenic character of a money-economy, as exemplified by what he called ‘commodity fetishism’; see Capital, vol. 1, ch. 1, section 4.
14 I take the term ‘imagined community’ from Benedict Anderson, whose book is devoted to another but closely related question – the question of nationalism. (See Bibliography.)
15 Jacques Chailly, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera, London 1972, and Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, London 1992, Chapter 18.
16 Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung: see bibliography.
17 The locus classicus here is Goethe’s Italienische Reise, and the character of Mignon in Wilhelm Meister. It is interesting to note that Goethe projected, but never finished, a drama on the theme of Elpenor (the unwitting hero of my Chapter 2, where I give a modern anthropological version of what Schiller and Goethe were getting at).
18 I am here trying to summarize a phenomenon described in another but related way by Mario Praz, in The Romantic Agony.
19 Commodity fetishism: see Marx, Capital, vol. 1; conspicuous consumption: see Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, Chicago 1899; affluent society: see J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, New York 1958.
20 Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, London 1967, p. 501.
21 Coleridge’s distinction is between ‘fancy’ and imagination, and is delivered here and there in Biographia Literaria.
22 Ibid., Ch. 14.
23 Whether this was always so may be doubted. The Church did not describe marriage as a sacrament until the Renaissance, when the other forms of sacramental life – the monastic and the priestly – were on the wane: see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, London 1977, p.31. However, the idea of marriage as a ‘vow before God’ precedes the ceremonial recognition of this status.
24 See the illuminating discussion of Le nozze di Figaro, in Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, London 1992, pp 140–171.
25 See especially ‘Reality and Sincerity’ and ‘Thought and Emotional Quality’, reprinted from Scrutiny, in F.R. Leavis, ed., Selections from Scrutiny, vol. 2, Cambridge 1966.
26 Michael Tanner, Wagner, Princeton 1996.
27 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, section 9, in Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, tr. Walter Kaufmann, New York 1967.
28 Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If, tr. C.K. Ogden, London 1932.
29 Here is a wonderful subject for speculation, approached with characteristic loquacity by George Steiner, in Real Presences, London 1990.
30 Selected Essays, London 1932, p. 426.
31 See T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood, London 1920, and A. Schoenberg, Harmonielehre, 3rd edition, Vienna 1932, p. 28 8f, the argument of which is summarised in R. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford 1997, pp 285–294.
32 For example in The Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. A.G. Mitchell and W.V. Blomster, New York 1973 – a book relentlessly criticised in R. Scruton, op. cit.
33 Readers will have their own examples. For doodles try Cy Twombly; for bombast Richard Serra or Julian Schnabel. The cultural impact of abstract art in America is a subject for the satirist, effectively undertaken by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word, and, with dead-pan penetration, by William Boyd, in Nat Tate: American Artist.
34 ‘Einigen Bemerkungen zum Problem des Kitsches’, in Dichten und Erkennen, Frankfurt 1976.
35 ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review 1939, reprinted in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, New York 1961.
36 Perhaps it is unnecessary to refer at this point to the collection of Charles Saatchi, recently seen in New York.
37 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, etc., ed Barrett, p. 7.
38 S. Frith, ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music,’ in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: the politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, Cambridge 1987.
39 See Grail Marcus, Dead Elvis, New York 1991. In referring the fan-star relation to totemism I am of course thinking analogically. Totemism has been a hotly disputed subject, ever since Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, tried to summarise what was known about it. Freud’s absurd book, Totem and Taboo, at least connects totemism to the conflict between generations. But it leaves the problem untouched. For an illuminating summary, see Arnold van Gennep, ‘Qu’est-ce que le totemisme?’ in Religions, moeurs et légendes, Paris 1912.
40 See the lyrical account by Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch, London 1992.
41 See especially George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place, Verso 1994.
42 Arnold van Gennep, Les Rites de passage, Paris 1909.
43 See R. Scruton, ‘Man’s Second Disobedience’, in The Philosopher on Dover Beach, Manchester, UK, 1990; South Bend, Ind., 1998.
44 For a penetrating account of the spiritual reality of party membership, see Czeslaw Milosz: The Captive Mind, London 1953.
45 I have examined a few of them in Thinkers of the New Left, London 1985.
46 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon, Brighton 1982, p. 100.
47 The ‘master and slave’ argument occurs in The Phenomenology of Spirit, IV.A.3. The direct influence on Foucault, however, is Sartre, specifically the Sartre of Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, Paris 1952.
48 The principal debunkers of the aesthetic, as a part of ‘bourgeois ideology’ are two: Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction, and Terry Eagleton, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic. See Bibliography.
49 Positions, p. 71.
50 Positions, p. 6.
51 ‘White Mythology’, in Margins of Philosophy, p. 271.
52 Positions, p. 42
53 Who are these disciples? you ask. Try Christopher Norris, Derrida, Fontana Modern Masters, London 1987.
54 Positions, p. 29.
55 This has been effectively shown by John Ellis, in Against Deconstruction, Princeton 1989.
56 Positions p. 12.
57 Ibid., p. 49.