"The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others"
About this Quote
A historian of art turning his gaze from canvases to character, Berenson delivers a line that lands like a slap: “free” isn’t presented as a right, but as a sensation some Europeans only trust once it’s been verified by someone else’s subjugation. The phrasing is surgical. “Does not seem to feel” shifts the claim from legal philosophy to psychology: freedom as an internal insecurity, soothed not by autonomy but by hierarchy. It’s less a thesis about constitutions than a diagnosis of a cultural habit.
“Average European” is doing deliberate work, too. Berenson isn’t indicting a particular monarch or party; he’s calling out the supposedly ordinary citizen who benefits from empire while treating domination as normal weather. The verb “succeeds” adds a nasty twist: oppression becomes an achievement, a benchmark of competence. The line mocks the self-flattering European story of enlightenment and progress by tying it to colonial extraction, racial ranking, and the everyday prestige economies of class.
Context matters. Berenson lived through the age when Europe’s empires were not side projects but central engines; he also watched nationalist fervor harden into fascism. Read against that backdrop, the quote isn’t abstract moralizing. It’s an explanation for how “civilization” talk coexists with brutality: when identity is built on superiority, equality feels like loss, and freedom feels unearned unless it can be contrasted with someone else’s unfreedom.
The intent is provocation with a historian’s chill: to force readers to notice that domination can function as emotional infrastructure, not just political policy.
“Average European” is doing deliberate work, too. Berenson isn’t indicting a particular monarch or party; he’s calling out the supposedly ordinary citizen who benefits from empire while treating domination as normal weather. The verb “succeeds” adds a nasty twist: oppression becomes an achievement, a benchmark of competence. The line mocks the self-flattering European story of enlightenment and progress by tying it to colonial extraction, racial ranking, and the everyday prestige economies of class.
Context matters. Berenson lived through the age when Europe’s empires were not side projects but central engines; he also watched nationalist fervor harden into fascism. Read against that backdrop, the quote isn’t abstract moralizing. It’s an explanation for how “civilization” talk coexists with brutality: when identity is built on superiority, equality feels like loss, and freedom feels unearned unless it can be contrasted with someone else’s unfreedom.
The intent is provocation with a historian’s chill: to force readers to notice that domination can function as emotional infrastructure, not just political policy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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