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Title: Maxims (Penguin Classics) by Francois LA Rochefoucauld, Leonard Tancock ISBN: 0-14-044095-X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1982 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The 'Maxims' as a Classic of 'Crooked Wisdom.'
Comment: The famous Indian classic, Kautilya's 'Arthasastra,' a treatise which deals with the attainment of worldly ends, distinguishes between two kinds of wisdom - Straight and Crooked. To the former belong (to use Western examples) such works as 'The Imitation of Christ' by Thomas a Kempis, a work which teaches how, ideally, the virtuous should live, while overlooking the fact that often it would be extremely impractical and socially disastrous to live in such a way.
The second class of books, those which teach the art of 'Crooked Wisdom,' is exemplified in the East by Kautilya's 'Arthasastra' itself, and in the West by such works as Balthasar Gracian's 'The Art of Worldly Wisdom,' Francesco Guicciardini's 'Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman' (Ricordi), and by the present collection of Maxims by La Rochefoucauld.
These books are both highly realistic and extremely practical, for they depict, not man as he is supposed to be, but man as he is with all his selfishness, stupidity, ambition, arrogance, malice, laziness and other imperfections, and they teach the art of how, not merely to survive, but even to thrive in the midst of our far from perfect fellow men and women. And, certainly in the case of La Rochefoucauld, this teaching is done with great precision and wit.
'Crooked Wisdom,' then, should not be understood as the product of a crooked mind, but as the clear-sighted wisdom one needs to survive in a world teeming with such minds, a world, as Tancock says, involved in a "sordid struggle of self-interests, a scramble for power, position, and influence in which the foulest motives and methods [are] decked with labels such as duty, honor, patriotism, and glory."
La Rochefoucauld seems to provoke two very different kinds of reaction. Fully paid up members of the rose-tinted spectacles club, are shocked and horrified by his portrait of man and society, and they tend to dislike both the man and his book.
The more realistically inclined, however, will savor his bite and wit and will readily acknowledge the self-evident truth of much if not all of what he says. The man was undoubtedly brilliant, not only in terms of the many profound insights he gave us - particularly those having to do with 'amour propre' or self-love - but also in terms of the skill with which he translated those insights into pithy and memorable maxims.
Tancock defines the maxim as the expression of "some thought about human motives or behavior in a form containing the maximum of clarity and TRUTH with the minimum of words arranged in the most striking and memorable order" (my caps). La Rochefoucauld's aim, in short, was simply to tell the truth, and to tell it for our benefit.
The maxim as a literary genre was cultivated in his milieu, and La Rochefoucauld's were polished to a high state of perfection, for they had to satisfy a critical and sophisticated audience. Seven years were devoted to refining them, during which the circle of his aristocratic friends and fellow habitues of Mmme de Sable's salon repeatedly offered advice and criticism.
The 'Maxims,' then, although the product of an individual sensibility, also become in a sense the product a collective effort, having emerged from a serious and civilized salon whose interests were psychological, literary, and linguistic. Anyone who feels inclined to dismiss them might keep this in mind.
I discovered La Rochefoucauld many years ago, and have always been a great admirer of his Maxims. Once read, they are never forgotten. They have a way of burrowing deeply into the mind, and the fact that they tend to recur in those moments when we are reflecting on life and mulling over our experiences seems to me a kind of proof of their veracity.
One that has always struck me as particularly significant is Maxim 22 : "Philosophy easily triumphs over past ills and ills to come, but present ills triumph over philosophy." Or, in the words of the Red Queen : "Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but no jam today." If such truths are not exactly cheering, this in no way detracts from their being true.
There is an enormous amount to be learned by the honest and open-minded reader from La Rochefoucauld's 'Maxims,' especially if they also have a sense of humor. But the 'Happy Days! Happy Sky!' school, whose main requirement of a writer would seem to be that he should confirm them in their beautiful illusions, would be wiser to look elsewhere for edification. La Rochefoucauld is not a writer for the faint of heart, nor for those without a sense of humor.
Rating: 5
Summary: La Rochefoucauld is Very Important
Comment: FERDINAND-DREYFUS, Un philanthrope d'autrefois: La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, 1747-1827 (Paris, 1903). Translated to English. WJH (François-Alexandre-Frédéric).
Born at La Roche-Guyon, on 11 January, 1747; died at Paris, 27 March, 1827.
Opposed during the last years of the reign of Louis XV to the government of Maupeou, and the friend of all the reformers who surrounded Louis XVI, he owed to the influence of these economists the favour of the king. Having little liking for the military profession he devoted himself to scientific agriculture. During the rage for rural life which characterized the last years of the old regime, La Rochefoucauld made his estate at Liancourt an experimental station, whishing to improve both the soil and the peasantry. He introduced new methods of farming, founded the first model technical school in France (intended for the children of poor soldiers), and started two factories. Politically, he was a partisan of a democratic regime of which the king was to be the head, and throughout his life was faithful to this dream. Deputy for the nobility of Clermont in Beauvaisis at the States-General, he voted unhesitatingly for the "reunion of the three orders". it was he who in the night which followed the taking of the Bastille (14 July, 1789) roused Louis XVI, saying: "Sire, it is not a revolt, it is a revolution." He presided at the Constituent Assembly from 20 July to 3 August, 1789. On the night of 4 August he was one of the most enthusiastic in voting the abolition of titles of nobility and privileges. As grand master of the wardrobe he accompanied Louis XVI from Versailles to Paris on 5 and 6 October, 1789. As president of the committee of mendicancy, he made a supreme effort at the Constituent Assembly to organize public relief; he determined the extent and the limits of the rights of every citizen to assistance, determined the obligations of the State, and established a budget of State assistance which amounted annually to five millions and a half of francs, and which implied the national confiscation of hospital property, of ecclesiastical charitable property, and of the income from private foundations.
Liancourt is one of the most undiscerning representatives of the tendency which led the revolutionary state to destroy all collective forms of charity. Absolutely devoted to the person of Louis XVI as well as to the doctrines of the Revolution, he secured for himself in 1792 the lieutenancy of Normandy and Picardy, so as to prepare for the flight of the king as far as Rouen; but Louis XVI refused to place himself in the hands of constitutional deputies. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt emigrated shortly after 10 August, and resided in England until 1794, afterwards in the United States (1794-7). He took advantage of his residence in that country to write eight volumes on the United States to induce Washington to interfere in favour of Lafayette, and to gather ideas upon education and agriculture which he attempted later to apply in France. After 18 Brumaire, Napoleon authorized him to return to his Liancourt estate, which was restored to him. This former duke and peer gloried in being appointed, during the first Empire (1806), general inspector of the "Ecole des arts et métiers" at Châlons, of which his Liancourt school had been a forerunner. The book "Prisons de Philadelphie" which he composed in American and published in 1796, was meant to initiate a penitentiary reform in France at the Restoration in 1814 he begged but one favour-to be appointed prison inspector. In 1819 he became inspector of one of the twenty-eight arrondissements into which France was divided for penitentiary purposes. Louis XVIII gave him back neither the blue ribbon nor the mastership of the wardrobe, and in the House of Peers he sat with the opposition.
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt was the Franklin of the Revolution. An aristocrat by birth, a liberal in his views, in touch with all the representatives of the new commerce, he availed himself of this concurrence of circumstances to become the leader of every campaign for the people's protection and betterment; improvement of sanitary conditions in hospitals and foundling asylums, reorganization of schools according to the theories of Lancaster, whose book he had translated (Système anglais d'Instruction). He brought into use the methods of mutual instruction, and the pupils between 1816 and 1820 increased from 165,000 to 1,123,000. In 1818 he established the first savings bank and provident institution in Paris. On 19 Nov., 1821, he founded the Society of Christian Morals, over which he presided until 1825. It was at times looked upon with suspicion by the police of the Restoration. At its meetings were such men as Charles de Rémusat, Charles Coquerel, Guizot the Pedagogue, Oberlin, and Llorente, historian of the Inquisition. Broglie, Guizot, and Benjamin Constant were chairmen in turn, and Dufaure, Tocqueville, and Lamartine made there their maiden speeches. In these meetings provident institutions, rather than charitable ones, were discussed; slavery, lottery, gambling were combatted, and the matter of prison inspection was taken up. When La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt died, the Restoration would not permit the students of Châlons to carry his coffin, and the two chambers were much concerned over such extreme measures. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt was a typical philanthropist, with all that this word implies of generous intentions and practical innovations; but also with a certain naïve pride, inherited from the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which led him to mistrust the charitable initiative of the Church, and to forget that the Church, the most perfect representative of the spirit of brotherhood, is still called in our modern society to win the victory for this spirit by putting it to practical uses, as she alone can.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Truth Hurts
Comment: These maxims, though brief, speak volumes about their author and the human condition. Francois duc do La Rouchefoucauld was cursed with a double nature which led him in his career as a courtier to, as Leonard Tanner puts it in his introduction "romantic self-dedication followed by bitter disillusion." After the fighting in Paris of 1652 he retired to a quiet life of contemplation and the society of such friends as Mme de Sevigne, who's letters give us such a vibrant window upon that age. It was during the many meetings he had with these friends that the first maxims evolved, and which he would continue to compose and perfect until his death in 1680. Nothing quite like them had ever existed before in European literature, and their precision and bleak though biting wit would shape the style of French letters for centuries to come. Essential reading for the student of the school of hard knocks.
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Title: Maxims and Reflections by Guicciardini ISBN: 0812210379 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1972 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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Title: The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle by Baltasar Gracian Y Morales, Christopher Maurer, Baltasar Gracian ISBN: 0385421311 Publisher: Currency Pub. Date: 01 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Lord Chesterfield's Letters (Oxford World's Classics (Paperback)) by Lord Chesterfield ISBN: 019283715X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims (Great Books in Philosophy) by Authur Schopenhauer, T. Bailey Saunders ISBN: 1573920339 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1995 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Oxford Book of Aphorisms by John Gross ISBN: 0192804561 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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