Daily Inspiration Quote by John Lukacs

Lukacs turns a historian's professional hazard into a housekeeping rule: generalizations are useful only when they are in motion. The broom metaphor is doing double duty. It flatters the reader with common sense (of course you sweep with a broom) while quietly rebuking two familiar vices in intellectual life: hoarding abstractions and refusing them altogether.

For Lukacs, a historian who spent his career resisting grand, deterministic systems, the line reads like a manifesto against corner-standing theory. A generalization that just sits there becomes decor: a slogan, an identity badge, a substitute for looking. But he also rejects the fussy anti-generalizer who pretends every event is too singular for any pattern. The broom isn't a museum piece; it's a tool. Its value is proven by use, by friction with dust. That "as a matter of course" matters: Lukacs is arguing for habits of mind, not heroic insights. Generalizations should be applied, tested, and worn down by the messiness of evidence, then put back to work again.

The subtext is a warning about intellectual laziness disguised as sophistication. It's easy to keep "capitalism", "national character", or "human nature" propped in the corner and let it explain everything from a safe distance. Lukacs insists that the honest generalization is provisional and practical: it sweeps a room, reveals what's underneath, and gets revised when the next pile of dirt doesn't move the same way.