"Man is everywhere still in chains"
About this Quote
A compact twist on Rousseau, the line turns a revolutionary lament into a modern diagnosis. The bite of the word "still" is crucial: after revolutions, constitutions, and the rhetoric of progress, subjection persists. Herbert Read, the English poet, art critic, and anarchist, saw those chains not as medieval shackles but as the fine-meshed net of modern life. A decorated survivor of the First World War, he watched command structures and machines reduce persons to functions. Later, as a theorist of art and society, he argued that bureaucracies, mass education, wage labor, and nationalist mythologies continue the work of constraint, often with the subjects' consent.
The chains he names are both external and internal. There are laws, police, prisons, and the blunt apparatus of the state. But there is also the soft power of conformity: standardized curricula that train obedience rather than sensibility, propaganda that narrows the imagination, careers that reward compliance, consumption that pacifies desire. Read distrusted both capitalist and communist utopias when they hardened into centralized control. He favored an organic order, a federation of free associations, where creativity and responsibility grow from the ground up.
Art, for Read, was not decoration but a discipline of freedom. Education through art could develop whole persons capable of judgment, empathy, and inventive action. Such formation loosens the inner chains that make outer domination easy. He believed that a society which fosters imagination and mutual aid can generate a spontaneous order more humane than any imposed plan.
The line is therefore more than a complaint. It is a warning that modernity can deepen control while promising liberation, and a call to recognize the subtle bonds that bind thought and feeling. It also hints at a remedy: cultivate sensibility, build decentralized communities, practice autonomy in daily life. Freedom is not guaranteed by institutions alone; it must be learned, exercised, and continually renewed.
The chains he names are both external and internal. There are laws, police, prisons, and the blunt apparatus of the state. But there is also the soft power of conformity: standardized curricula that train obedience rather than sensibility, propaganda that narrows the imagination, careers that reward compliance, consumption that pacifies desire. Read distrusted both capitalist and communist utopias when they hardened into centralized control. He favored an organic order, a federation of free associations, where creativity and responsibility grow from the ground up.
Art, for Read, was not decoration but a discipline of freedom. Education through art could develop whole persons capable of judgment, empathy, and inventive action. Such formation loosens the inner chains that make outer domination easy. He believed that a society which fosters imagination and mutual aid can generate a spontaneous order more humane than any imposed plan.
The line is therefore more than a complaint. It is a warning that modernity can deepen control while promising liberation, and a call to recognize the subtle bonds that bind thought and feeling. It also hints at a remedy: cultivate sensibility, build decentralized communities, practice autonomy in daily life. Freedom is not guaranteed by institutions alone; it must be learned, exercised, and continually renewed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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