Academics From France

"The sun, as we have already said, is placed in the middle of our system, as a source of light and heat, to illuminate and vivify all the planets subordinate to it. Without his benign influence the earth would be a mere block, which in hardness would surpass marble and the most compact substances with which we are acquainted ; no vegetation, no motion would be possible: in a word, it would be the abode of darkness, inactivity and death. The first rank therefore among inanimate beings cannot be refused to the sun ; and if the error of addressing to a created object that adoration which is due to the Creator atone could admit of excuse, we might be tempted to excuse the homage paid to the sun by the ancient Persians, as is still the ease among the Guebres, their successors, and some savage tribes in America."

"There is reason, however, to think that the author would have rendered it much more interesting, and have carried it to si higher degree of perfection, had he lived in an age more enlightened and better informed in regard to the mathematics and natural philosophy. Since the death of that mathematician, indeed, the arts and sciences have been so much improved, that what in his time might have been entitled to the character of mediocrity, would not at present be supportable. How many new discoveries in every part of philosophy? How many new phenomena observed, some of which have even given birth to the most fertile branches of the sciences? We shall mention only electricity, an inexhaustible source of profound reflection, and of experiments highly amusing. Chemistry also is a science, the most common and slightest principles of which were quite unknown to Ozanam. In short, we need not hesitate to pronounce that Ozanam's work contains a multitude of subjects treated of with an air of credulity, and so much prolixity, that it appears as if the author, or rather his continuators, had no other object in view than that of multiplying the volumes. To render this work, then, more worthy of the enlightened agt in which we live, it was necessary to make numerous corrections and considerable additions. A task which we have endeavoured to discharge with all diligence"

"John Stephen Montucla, member of the National Institute, and of the academy of Berlin, censor royal for mathematical books, and author of this new-modelled and enlarged edition of the Mathematical Recreations of Ozanam, was born at Lyons, the 5th of September 1725. His father was a banker, by whom he was intended for the same profession; but the science of calculations, to which he was early introduced, soon produced a discovery of the natural bent of his mind. In the Jesuits college at Lyons he laid a good foundation in the ancient languages, as well as in the mathematical sciences, which enabled him afterwards easily to acquire a competent acquaintance with the Italian, the German, die Dutch, and the English, .which he not only read, but also spoke very well."

"The full recognition of the general equilibrium concept can unmistakably be attributed to Walras (1874-1877), although many of the elements of the neoclassical system were worked out independently by W. Stanley Jevons and by Carl Menger. In Walras' analysis, the economic system is made up of households and firms. Each household owns a set of resources, commodities useful in production or consumption, including different kinds of labor. For any given set of prices a household has an income from the sale of its resources, and with this income it can choose among all alternative bundles of consumers’ goods whose cost, at the given prices, does not exceed its income. Thus, Walras saw the demand by households for any consumers’ good as a function of the prices of both consumers’ goods and resources. The firms were — at least in the earlier versions — assumed to be operating under fixed coefficients. Then the demand for consumers’ goods determined the demand for resources; and the combined assumptions of fixed coefficients and zero profits for a competitive system implied relations between the prices of consumers’ goods and of resources. An equilibrium set of prices, then, was a set such that supply and demand were equated on each market; under the assumption of fixed coefficients of production, or more generally of constant returns to scale, this amounted to equating supply and demand on the resource markets, with prices constrained to satisfy the zero-profit conditions for firms. Subsequent work of Walras, J. B. Clark, Wicksteed, and others generalized the assumptions about production to include alternative methods of production, as expressed in a production function. In this context, the prices of resources were determined by marginal productivity considerations."

"I have now... part of the proofs of your work on the Theorie de la Ricliesse Sociale, which you have been so good as to send me... I cannot delay expressing the pleasure with which I find that we have by independent paths reached conclusions which are nearly if not quite the same. I flatter myself with the hope that... we have both reached the truth, which must be one. ...[A]fter seeing a full statement of your mode of arriving at the equations of exchange, I cannot for a moment entertain the least doubt of the entire independence of your own researches... As to the question of priority of publication, it is... of less importance than that of the truth of the theory... I have always... attached much importance to this mathematical theory of economy, believing it to be the only basis upon which an ultimate reform of the science... can be founded and a solution of many difficult problems effected. I cannot, therefore, help accepting your very kind offer to make known in the Journal des Economistes... that I had already gone over part of the same ground... in a different manner. ...I feel it to be most honourable in you, after seeing merely the brief sketch of my theory as printed in the Statistical Journal for 1866, to acknowledge at once my priority on some points; and I shall be glad to learn your opinion of the much fuller statement of my views contained in the Theory of Political Economy, of which I have lately posted you a copy. ...I shall have much pleasure in doing what I can to make known in England your own excellent statement of the theory of exchange ...I trust that the theory ...will thus become the origin ...between us of many friendly letters."

"In my opinion, Walras' theory of exchange and production is not the end and aim of his study but an overture to his general equilibrium theory of capital formation and circulation. Therefore, what we have to do first of all is to elaborate in economic, rather than mathematical terms his theory of growth and money, which in Walras' work was not complete. In reconsidering Walras from such a point of view, he appears as an economist who was comparable with Marx and who anticipated Keynes."

"It took from a hundred to a hundred and fifty or two hundred years for the astronomy of Kepler to become the astronomy of Newton and Laplace, and for the mechanics of Galileo to become the mechanics of d'Alembert and Lagrange. On the other hand, less than a century has elapsed between the publication of Adam Smith’s work and the contributions of Cournot, Gossen, Jevons, and myself."

"The landmark figure in general equilibrium theory was French economist Léon Walras (1834–1910), whose complex simultaneous equations essentially created this branch of economics in the nineteenth century. Back in the eighteenth century, however, another Frenchman, François Quesnay (1694–1774), was groping toward some notion of general equilibrium with a complex table intersected by lines connecting various economic activities with one another. Karl Marx, in the second volume of Capital, likewise set forth various equations showing how particular parts of a market economy affected numerous other parts of that economy. In other words, Walras had predecessors, as most great discoverers do, but he was still the landmark figure in this field."

"I say that things are useful whenever they can be put to any use at all; whenever they are seen to be capable of satisfying a want. In this connection, there is no need to consider the subtle shades of meaning classified in ordinary language under terms ranging from the necessary to the useful, from the useful to the agreeable, from the agreeable to the superfluous. For present purposes, necessary, useful, agreeable and superfluous simply mean more or less useful. Furthermore, we need not concern ourselves with the morality or immorality of any desire which a useful thing answers or serves to satisfy. From other points of view the question of whether a drug is wanted by a doctor to cure a patient, or by a murderer to kill his family is a very serious matter, but from our point of view, it is totally irrelevant. So far as we are concerned, the drug is useful in both cases, and may even be more so in the latter case than in the former."

"L. Walras first formulated the state of the economic system at any point of time as the solution of a system of simultaneous equations representing the demand for goods by consumers, the supply of goods by producers and the equilibrium condition that supply equal demand on every market."

"All I'm doing is putting Brâncuși's 'Endless Column' on the ground, instead of in the sky. Most sculpture is priapic with the male organ in the air. In my work, w:Priapus is down on the floor. The engaged position is to run along the earth."

"[Brancusi] has had more influence on my work than most architects."

"Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.. ..it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single (static) form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole."

"When we are no longer young we are already dead"

"Don't look for mysteries. I give you pure joy."

"Like everything else I've ever done, there was a furious struggle to rise heavenward."

"Modern industrial design has advanced at a rapid pace during the last ten years. Its successes are no longer confined to objects which, like automobiles and airplanes, are themselves the product of new conditions. Modern design has also begun to conquer the traditional arts, and the feeling for abstract form, first expressed in our time in the works of Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Duchamps-Villon in Europe, or Stieglitz, Benton, and Storrs for example in the United States, has finally entered architecture and the decorative arts."

"My conscious tradition is through Constantin Brâncuși, and Brâncuși just strikes me as an infinitely wiser and infinitely more talented, an infinitely stronger figure than [Marcel Duchamp|Duchamp]]. I think I could have done my work if Duchamp had not lived. I could not have done my work if Brâncuși had not lived."

"There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things."

"I ground matter to find the continuous line. And when I realized I could not find it, I stopped, as if an unseen someone had slapped my hands."

"Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god."

"All my life l have sought the essence of flight. Flight — what bliss."

"The tone in which an Englishman expresses anger would, in Italy, be only a mark of surprise."

"It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater value. … If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain, or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation to our wants. What is more to the one is less to the other, and vice versa. … It is not to be assumed that we offer for sale articles required for our own consumption. … We wish to part with a useless thing, in order to get one that we need; we want to give less for more. … It was natural to think that, in an exchange, value was given for value, whenever each of the articles exchanged was of equal value with the same quantity of gold. … But there is another point to be considered in our calculation. The question is, whether we both exchange something superfluous for something necessary."

"We shall not … begin this logic by definitions, axioms, or principles; we shall begin by observing the lessons which nature gives us."

"The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged."

"Our ideas are transformed sensations."

"To the eye of God there are no numbers: seeing all things at one time, he counts nothing."

"Like Transcendentalism, Revel's revolution would encompass "the liberation of the creative personality and the awakening of personal initiative" as opposed to the closed horizons of more repressive societies. The perturbation would come from the privileged classes, he said, because that is the way of revolutions. They are launched by those disenchanted with the culture's ultimate reward system. If a new prototype of society is to emerge, rather than a coup d'etat, dialogue and debate must occur at the highest levels."

"First, anti-Americanism is used as a reflection against which to define French identity. For instance, the French critique of the failures and hypocrisies of American multiculturalism reflect back on the idealized French republican model based on assimilation, integration, and equality. Moreover, anti-Americanism can be mobilized by political entrepreneurs to legitimize certain policies, especially status quo policies. For instance, when politicians discuss implementing affirmative action, opponents of the reform immediately invoke the American model to ensure rejection of the new policy. Similarly, Jean-Francois Revel, one of the few anti-anti-American intellectuals in France, has argued that “the principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation”"

"I read everything he writes."

"[Revel] ...described the United States as the most eligible prototype nation for world revolution. Real revolutionary activity, he noted, consists of transforming reality, that is, in making reality conform more closely to one's ideal. When we speak of "revolution" we must necessarily speak of something that cannot be conceived or understood within the context of old ideas. The stuff of revolution, and its first success, must be the ability to innovate. In that sense, there is more revolutionary spirit in the United States today, even on the Right, than elsewhere on the Left. The relative freedom in the United States would make it possible for such a revolution to occur bloodlessly, Revel said. If that happened, and if one political civilization were exchanged for another, as seemed to be happening, the impact might be felt worldwide by osmosis. This radical transformation would need the simultaneous occurrence of smaller revolutions—in politics, society, international and interracial relations, cultural values, and technology and science."

"As immigration trends suggest, anti-Americanism is not deeply rooted as a popular prejudice. In Europe, anti-Americanism is much more a hobgoblin of the political, cultural, and religious elites. According to a SOFRES survey of May 2000, only 10 percent of French feel dislike for the U.S. After September 11, according to another poll, 52 percent of French people interviewed said they had always felt warmly toward the U.S., against 32 percent who said the opposite. Historian Michel Winock concludes that "anti-Americanism is not an attitude of the average French person; it is typical of a certain segment of the elites.""

"What exactly do the intellectuals want out of their Rococo Marxist mental acrobatics? Is it change they want, change for all the para-proletariats whose ideological benefactors they proclaim themselves to be? Of course not. Actual change would involve irksome toil. So what do they want? It's a simple business, at bottom. All the intellectual wants, in his heart of hearts, is to hold on to what was magically given to him one shining moment a century ago. He asks for nothing more than to remain aloof, removed, as Revel once put it, from the mob, the philistines . . . "the middle class.""

"The success and originality of American integration stem precisely from the fact that immigrants' descendants can perpetuate their ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as Americans in the fullest sense, sharing basic ideals across racial and ethnic barriers. In France, the characteristic attitude of newcomers from North Africa, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly one of alienation, confrontation, rejection, and hatred."

"Europeans firmly believe these sorts of caricatures--because they are repeated every day by the elites."

"Soon, many European elites insinuated that the jihadist attacks had some moral justification. These anti-American views began to circulate well before the campaign to dislodge the Taliban kicked off on October 7. The bombing which became the most frequently invoked reason to take sides against the U.S. had not yet even begun."

"Poverty and inequality like this should cause Europeans to cringe in horror, especially since (we have it on good authority) there is no safety net in America, no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no assistance for the destitute--not the slightest bit of social solidarity. In the U.S. "only the most fortunate have the right to medical care and to grow old with dignity," as one writer recently put it in Libération. University courses are reserved only for those who can pay, which partly explains the "low level of education" in the benighted US."

"There is a big difference between being anti-American and being critical of the United States. Once again: critiques are appropriate and necessary, provided that they rest on facts and address real abuses, real errors and real excesses -- without deliberately losing sight of America's wise decisions, beneficent interventions and salutary policies. But critiques of this kind -- balanced, fair and well-founded are hard to find, except in America herself: in the daily press in weekly news magazines, on television and radio, and in highbrow monthly journals, which are more widely read than their equivalents in Europe."

"Anti-Americanism thus defined is less a popular prejudice than a parti pris of the political, cultural and religious elites."

"The strange thing is that it's always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up, yet it's always America that is "fascist"."

"Not just songs by Madonna and action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; it includes 1,700 symphony orchestras, opera attended by 7.5 million people every year, and museums that are visited by 500 million annually, almost all American museums, where entrance is quite often free, owe their existence and funding to private sponsors."

"This is the message of critics not only in Europe, but also in the United States itself, where anti-Americanism continues to prosper among university, journalistic, and literary elites. But in Europe, these ideological reasons for blaming America first are multiplied by simple jealousy of American power. The current American "hyperpower" is the direct consequence of European powerlessness, both past and present. The United States fills a void caused by our inadequacies in capability, thinking, and will to act."

"The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself."

"What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows: American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U.S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness."

"Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is working to destroy it."

"It is clear that international law must evolve, even if it will be difficult to find the new and appropriate notions that will allow it to … However, it is unlikely that we will ever be capable of building a world that is qualitatively better than we ourselves are."

"The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation. To travesty the United States as a repressive, unjust, racist—almost fascist—society was a way of proclaiming: look what happens when liberalism is implemented!"

"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

"America is the object of their loathing because, for a half-century or more, she has been the most prosperous and creative capitalist society on earth. Ultimately it is liberal democracy - or quite simply liberty itself - that they are eager to destroy, even though they are among its foremost beneficiaries, being free to travel anywhere, anytime in order to hatch their plots. If their diktats were carried out, if frontier barriers were reestablished everywhere, with passports and visas even for tourists, there could have been no Seattle and no Goteborg."