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From Thomas Mann - "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man"

 "For more than a century and a half, everything that has been understood in a more intellectual sense by politics goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and he is the father of democracy because he is the father of the political spirit itself, of political humanity. I met this New Passion, then as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of every ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinaire intolerance consisted - I experienced them personally - in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. "Mankind" as humanitarian internationalism: "reason" and "virtue" as the radical republic: intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the serve of social "desirability"; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it. But my destiny was to experience it in this way; and then, as I have already said, it is always at any moment on the verge of assuming this form: "active intellect," that is: an intellect that is "resolved" to be active in favor of enlightened world liberation, world improvement, world happiness, does not long remain "politics" in the more abstract, figurative sense..." - Thomas Mann, (1918) - from the New York Review of Books Edition, pages 21-22.

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