/lit/ - Literature

Toqueville only kept 3 books and red them over and over. I want to reduce my list of essential non-fiction to 3 books like Toqueville did. These books were Pensées by Pascal, The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu and The Social Contract by Rousseau. He argue that reading too much is harmful because it is alienating and can prevent developing your own original thought.

He also liked travel literature.

How the fuck was de Tocqueville able to predict our present reality 2 centuries ago already?

>Alexis de Tocqueville warned that, “Variety is disappearing from the human race; because of the rise of liberal democracy the men of each country, more and more completely discarding the ideas and feelings peculiar to one caste, profession, or family, are all the same getting closer to what is essential in man, and that is everywhere the same.”

>In those conditions of bland sameness, “All those turbulent virtues which sometimes bring glory but more often trouble to society will rank lower,” in liberal society. For Tocqueville, there was a real danger in the loss of those “turbulent virtues”: “What frightens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.”

>>14100684
>someone who never studied politics talks about it
origami

I really liked it when I was a kid and honestly haven't thought about this series for 15 years until I saw your thread today.

I owned like 5 books in the series and read them cover to cover but can't really remember anything. I was really into the lore of the world and enjoyed looking up maps of it online.

>>4950725
>>4950564
Both of you should read Alexis Tocqueville.