"In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of "freedom," like a bastard brother of reform"
About this Quote
Lewis is doing what he does best: taking a cherished modern word, putting it in quotation marks, and then peeling it like bad wallpaper. The line is built to wound. “Democratic western countries” arrives with the bureaucratic blandness of a civics textbook, only to be undercut by “so-called capitalism,” a phrase that refuses the polite consensus that capitalism is either natural or synonymous with democracy. Then comes the slap: capitalism doesn’t merely permit freedom; it stages a “saturnalia” of it - a festival of sanctioned excess where the point is not liberation but intoxication.
“Freedom” in scare quotes is the whole trick. Lewis implies it’s less a right than a costume, something worn loudly and briefly, then traded back in. “Saturnalia” matters because it was historically a temporary inversion of order: masters serve slaves, rules loosen, chaos is tolerated because it’s contained. That’s Lewis’s cynicism about Western “freedom”: a managed release valve that keeps the underlying hierarchy intact while advertising itself as emancipation.
The closing sting - “like a bastard brother of reform” - frames capitalism as reform’s illegitimate kin: similar rhetoric, none of the moral lineage. It borrows reform’s aura of progress while remaining opportunistic and unaccountable. Contextually, this is Lewis the early-20th-century modernist polemicist, disgusted by mass society and the commercialized “new” culture. He’s not praising democracy; he’s warning that its capitalist version can turn liberation into spectacle, and politics into branding.
“Freedom” in scare quotes is the whole trick. Lewis implies it’s less a right than a costume, something worn loudly and briefly, then traded back in. “Saturnalia” matters because it was historically a temporary inversion of order: masters serve slaves, rules loosen, chaos is tolerated because it’s contained. That’s Lewis’s cynicism about Western “freedom”: a managed release valve that keeps the underlying hierarchy intact while advertising itself as emancipation.
The closing sting - “like a bastard brother of reform” - frames capitalism as reform’s illegitimate kin: similar rhetoric, none of the moral lineage. It borrows reform’s aura of progress while remaining opportunistic and unaccountable. Contextually, this is Lewis the early-20th-century modernist polemicist, disgusted by mass society and the commercialized “new” culture. He’s not praising democracy; he’s warning that its capitalist version can turn liberation into spectacle, and politics into branding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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