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Responding to David Levy's posting about Dickens and Carlyle: 
 
Please: methinks thou dost protest too much. Is there any logical  
connection between Carlyle's racist position on the Governor Eyre  
case and the  eloquent and trenchant criticisms of laissez faire  
economies and the commercialization of everything that have  
always attracted "progressives" to his work? Dickens was clearly  
indebted to Carlyle for lots of the thinking that went into Hard  
Times, a superb book which had nothing racist or reactionary in it  
that I can tell--I use the book frequently in Intro courses. Who  
doesn't know that Carlyle was a reactionary, for heaven's sakes?  
That doesn't mean he wasn't right in what he had to say about  
capitalism!    
 
This is no syllogism, eg: Carlyle called economics the "dismal science" and 
had many nasty and devastating things to say about it; Carlyle was a 
racist; therefore, economics is not a dismal science and Carlyle's 
criticisms of it are wrong! 
 
Kevin Quinn 
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