You Can Quote Me

Back in 1993, in the pre-internet days, I reviewed the 16th edition ofBartlett ’s Familiar Quotations for Liberty magazine. I ’ve just gotten around to tracking down that article andgetting it posted. One of my complaints then was thatThe dozen years since the fifteenth edition have been marked by a worldwide turn toward markets, from Reagan and Thatcher to the New Zealand Labor Party ’s free-market reforms to the fall of Soviet communism.  This historical trend seems to have escaped editor [Justin] Kaplan, of Cambridge, Mass., who has given usmore quotations from Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Robert Heilbroner, while virtually eliminating F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, the intellectual gurus of the free-market revolution.   A bust of Hayek now sits in the Kremlin, but Cambridge is holding out against the tide… . One might assume that these curiosities don ’t represent any conscious bias on Kaplan’s part, just a blindness to the political and economic changes going on in the world.  Dictionaries of quotations are perforce behind the times; they represent the distilled wisdom, or at least memorabilia, of centuries.  As market liberalism sweeps th e world in the 21st century, its architects will get their due.  Still, it’s disappointing to see a 1992 edition offeringfewer selections from thinkers such as Friedman and Hayek.As I went over the old article, I decided to check my prediction. Results were mixed. Reagan now gets 10 citations instead of 3, inclu...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs