Mounier

While I was in Boston a couple weeks ago, I read Mounier's Personalist Manifiesto, one of Peter Maurin's favorite works. I couldn't help but see the SBL meeting - with its massive book displays, self-important bearded suits, rampant insecurity, social climbing, and comfortable cultural critics - written into page 151.

Except in heroic instances, the world of money has perverted both the intellectual and the artist. They have no place in bourgeois society unless they serve it, unless they renounce honesty of work for a strict propriety of thought, unless they cater to a minority art of class and snobism that is destined for the salons and the chapels of the financiers. Bourgeois society is indulgent to them, even at its own expense, as long is they amuse it and do not become too dangerous in their audacity. As to the others, the bourgeois ejects them from his life as so much wasted effort and ignores them.