One thing these conservative thinkers I’m reading have in common is that they write beautifully. I love Zygmunt Bauman but his writing is not enjoyable. In contrast, it took me a week to get through a 13-page article by Oakeshott because it was so well-written that I wanted to stop and savor it.
Difference between writing about things you love that are worth keeping, and writing about what must be destroyed?
-ethyl
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And one of these things is language.
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This is what I had to say about Zygmunt Bauman’s Retrotopia:
I understood about half of what this sociologist, philosopher and author wrote. He does not use academic jargon very much but does footnote his writing as they always do. The hardest reading for me was his very complex and sometimes run-on sentences. Read at your own risk.
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And you are right. This is my favorite philosopher but his writing is neither enjoyable nor easy.
Here by the way is my review of Retrotopia from 9 years ago:
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“The hardest reading for me was his very complex and sometimes run-on sentences”
I think Bauman wrote in Polish (mentally at some level) using English words…. an ungainly pairing. The many grammatical endings of Slavic languages mean that very, very long run on sentences are still pretty easy to read, but it’s not a structure that transfers to English at all. When I translate academic Polish into English there are a lot of long sentences that get turned into two or three separate sentences in English (among other changes).
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