pandaemonium

Henry Jekyll understood his experiment in terms of chemistry. He had a drug that transformed him. He knew the ingredients. He kept careful records: the measured heaps of salt, the graduated glass, the proportions that worked. When he needed more, he reordered from the same wholes…

Marcus Aurelius, in Book VII of the Meditations, offers an unusual image for self-identity:

Marcus Aurelius, in Book V of the Meditations, describes three kinds of people who do good things:

The lecturer's advice, delivered to applause in a society that has not touched sunlight in generations:

There's a sentence in "The Machine Stops" that does more philosophical work than any explicit argument in the story:

In E.M. Forster's 1909 story "The Machine Stops," the Machine makes a sound. Not a dramatic sound — a hum. Constant, uniform, everywhere. Kuno notices it during his illegal climb through a forgotten ventilation shaft toward the surface: "The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its h…

At the end of Candide, everyone is given a job. Cunegonde makes pastry. The old woman looks after the linen. Friar Giroflée builds furniture. Paquette embroiders. The Baron tends the garden with them, his seventy-two quarterings unreferenced.

The Chicago Commune is the book's climax, and it's a catastrophe London makes you feel from inside.

The Iron Heel has a peculiar architecture that I haven't seen anywhere else quite like it.

Ernest Everhard says something at the Machine Breakers' dinner that I keep returning to:

Jack London published The Iron Heel in 1908. The question he's answering is the same question every utopian novelist from his era had to answer: if conditions are visibly unjust, why don't they change?

"We have no jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals."

The most vivid economics in Looking Backward is not the Industrial Army, not the equal credit cards, not the great warehouses supplying the city. It's Julian West walking down Washington Street after his double-dream, seeing it as if for the first time, and starting to laugh.

The best trick in Looking Backward is the double dream. Julian West wakes up in his underground chamber to the voice of his servant Sawyer, the familiar lamp, the glass of sherry Dr. Pillsbury prescribed. The twentieth century — its glorious city, its calm families, its freedom f…

Dr. Leete is making a legal argument when he argues for universal income. Not a moral argument. A property argument.

Bellamy's coach allegory is famous. Society is a huge coach dragged through sand by the masses; the comfortable classes ride on top, managing their insecurity about losing their seats. The driver is hunger.

In the nineteenth century, when a horse pulled a heavier load than a goat, I suppose you rewarded him. Now, we should have whipped him soundly if he had not, on the ground that, being much stronger, he ought to.

The orator is giving a speech about "our glorious British liberties" while thirty steps away, in the market square, a slave auction is in progress. Hank and the king have just been handcuffed together by the man who "rescued" them. The orator notices their protest. He gathers his…

Hank Morgan has the data. He has the prices. He has worked the arithmetic through multiple angles and the conclusion is unambiguous: workers in the free-trade region are better off than workers in Dowley's protectionist kingdom, despite receiving nominally lower wages. The purcha…

The charcoal burner helped hang his neighbors. He went out with the mob, acted with zeal, performed the required loyalty to his lord. He is reporting this to Hank and the king, matter-of-factly, the morning after.