As the age old adage goes.. ” Put 50 equal men on an island.. One will find the water, and sell it to others, a couple will be able to best build the shelter, a few will pick the fruit, in order to pay for their shelter….” plus ca change.. it’s human nature: all the creation of equality achieves is starting the next race to front the next hierarchical structure, as it has been and always will since the dawn of time itself, the postcript perhaps being that those who create egalitarianism start and stay at the top?
Mark Falcoff
1 year ago
I was a student of Kennan at Princeton. With all his faults, he was a thrilling lecturer and his works of history are stunning in their insights. I purposely chose not to read the books cited in this article because they reveal a very unlovely side of the man. But not the only one.
Sam Sky
1 year ago
“Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer specializing in tax law, a descendant of impoverished Scotch-Irish settlers from 18th-century Connecticut and Massachusetts, who was named after the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth (1802–94), and Florence James Kennan”
One of the things I find interesting about the American elite is how most of them were only a few generations back plebs, relatively speaking. Maybe this is what makes this kind of elitist aire that much more insecure and pugnacious than the more lacksidasical and unreflective type you find among the British upper class.
Dermot O'Sullivan
1 year ago
Very good. Thank you.
LCarey Rowland
1 year ago
gThanks, Phil, for this informative sketch of an amazingly well-placed life. In the wide array of my novelizing historical research, Kennan pops up repeatedly.
To discover some backstory sketches of his life and his perspectives is . . . satisfying . . . filling in a few gaps of the historical narrative.
The genteel perspectives of this long-gone aristocrat provides, nevertheless, a profoundly insightfull–and surprisingly empathetic– worldview that ought not disappear into the mists of history.
Thanks to you and George, there will be no such disappearance.
As the age old adage goes.. ” Put 50 equal men on an island.. One will find the water, and sell it to others, a couple will be able to best build the shelter, a few will pick the fruit, in order to pay for their shelter….” plus ca change.. it’s human nature: all the creation of equality achieves is starting the next race to front the next hierarchical structure, as it has been and always will since the dawn of time itself, the postcript perhaps being that those who create egalitarianism start and stay at the top?
I was a student of Kennan at Princeton. With all his faults, he was a thrilling lecturer and his works of history are stunning in their insights. I purposely chose not to read the books cited in this article because they reveal a very unlovely side of the man. But not the only one.
“Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer specializing in tax law, a descendant of impoverished Scotch-Irish settlers from 18th-century Connecticut and Massachusetts, who was named after the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth (1802–94), and Florence James Kennan”
One of the things I find interesting about the American elite is how most of them were only a few generations back plebs, relatively speaking. Maybe this is what makes this kind of elitist aire that much more insecure and pugnacious than the more lacksidasical and unreflective type you find among the British upper class.
Very good. Thank you.
gThanks, Phil, for this informative sketch of an amazingly well-placed life. In the wide array of my novelizing historical research, Kennan pops up repeatedly.
To discover some backstory sketches of his life and his perspectives is . . . satisfying . . . filling in a few gaps of the historical narrative.
The genteel perspectives of this long-gone aristocrat provides, nevertheless, a profoundly insightfull–and surprisingly empathetic– worldview that ought not disappear into the mists of history.
Thanks to you and George, there will be no such disappearance.