Chris
08-25-2013, 11:38 AM
Did you know Bartholdi first pitched Eqypt, an authoritarian gateway to the African slave trade, for his statue?
Lady Liberty: An Unauthorized Biography (http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/lady-liberty-an-unauthorized-biography#axzz2cjthTlvT)
...For most of my life, I assumed the statue was a gift from the French government to the American government. Haven't we been conditioned to hear “the people” and understand instead “the State”? And didn't this gift to "the people of the United States" end up in the hands of the U.S. government? I always figured there was a national government on both the giving and receiving ends.
But the Statue of Liberty was a private project. The designer was not a fan of the American people, nor was he particularly devoted to the idea of liberty: "The Americans believe that it is Liberty that illumines the world, but, in reality, it is my genius."
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi['s]...first pitch for a giant, torch-bearing statue was to the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, which was, at the time, the single greatest commercial conduit for the international slave trade.
The statue that now stands in New York Harbor is officially called “Liberty Enlightening the World” (La Liberté éclairant le monde). The statue in Egypt was to be called “Egypt Enlightening the World” or, more awkwardly, "Progress Carrying the Light to Asia."
...Failing to close the deal in Egypt, Bartholdi repackaged it for America.
When this bit of backstory reached the American public, Bartholdi denied that one project had anything to do with the other, but the similarity in designs is unmistakable.
Egypt was a vassal state of an authoritarian empire and the gateway for the colossal African slave trade into Asia—whereas the fundraising for the Statue of Liberty proposed a monument not merely to liberty but to the recent abolition of American slavery.
...The original statue was to be an Egyptian woman—a fellah, or native peasant—draped in a burqa, one outstretched arm holding a torch to guide the ships on the great waterway over which she would stand.
...before he could talk "the American people" into receiving his monumental gift, he had to persuade "the people of France" to pay for it. Bartholdi and his confederate, the French politician Édouard René de Laboulaye, formed an organization called the French-American Union in 1875 and sought donations in both countries.
France's national government did not contribute, but thousands of French schoolchildren made small donations. A copper company donated the metal sheets that would form the statue's skin.
But these donations were not enough. More successful was a lottery held by the French-American Union, with prizes donated by Paris merchants....
....Does any of this mean that the Statue of Liberty fails to represent either liberty or the American people? Methodological individualism would require us to say that a group of French individuals funded the construction of the statue, and a different group of American individuals funded the base on which she now stands—its foundation dug into an island given to the project by yet a third group of individuals in the U.S. government. The American government ended up owning the statue, and therefore “the American people” own it in that euphemistic, grammar-school-civics-class sense. But in fact, there is a way in which the Statue of Liberty can legitimately be said to be American, and populist, and maybe even libertarian.
After Bartholdi and Laboulaye failed to get anyone in America especially excited about the project, the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer began a popular campaign for private donations to complete the base of the statue. His campaign attracted more than 120,000 contributors. Most gave less than a dollar.
...The U.S. government provided the island the statue now stands on, but they were stingy with “the people’s money” in a way that warms a libertarian’s heart.
The real people’s money—money voluntarily donated by individual people themselves—made the American monument possible.
...
Briefly, a note on Methodological Individualism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/): "For both Hayek and Popper, the primary motivation for respecting the precepts of methodological individualism was to avoid “grand theory” in the style of Auguste Comte, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Yet the motivation for avoiding this sort of grand theory was not so much that it promoted bad theory, but that it promoted habits of mind, such as “collectivism,” “rationalism,” or “historicism,” that were thought to be conducive to totalitarianism."
Lady Liberty: An Unauthorized Biography (http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/lady-liberty-an-unauthorized-biography#axzz2cjthTlvT)
...For most of my life, I assumed the statue was a gift from the French government to the American government. Haven't we been conditioned to hear “the people” and understand instead “the State”? And didn't this gift to "the people of the United States" end up in the hands of the U.S. government? I always figured there was a national government on both the giving and receiving ends.
But the Statue of Liberty was a private project. The designer was not a fan of the American people, nor was he particularly devoted to the idea of liberty: "The Americans believe that it is Liberty that illumines the world, but, in reality, it is my genius."
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi['s]...first pitch for a giant, torch-bearing statue was to the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, which was, at the time, the single greatest commercial conduit for the international slave trade.
The statue that now stands in New York Harbor is officially called “Liberty Enlightening the World” (La Liberté éclairant le monde). The statue in Egypt was to be called “Egypt Enlightening the World” or, more awkwardly, "Progress Carrying the Light to Asia."
...Failing to close the deal in Egypt, Bartholdi repackaged it for America.
When this bit of backstory reached the American public, Bartholdi denied that one project had anything to do with the other, but the similarity in designs is unmistakable.
Egypt was a vassal state of an authoritarian empire and the gateway for the colossal African slave trade into Asia—whereas the fundraising for the Statue of Liberty proposed a monument not merely to liberty but to the recent abolition of American slavery.
...The original statue was to be an Egyptian woman—a fellah, or native peasant—draped in a burqa, one outstretched arm holding a torch to guide the ships on the great waterway over which she would stand.
...before he could talk "the American people" into receiving his monumental gift, he had to persuade "the people of France" to pay for it. Bartholdi and his confederate, the French politician Édouard René de Laboulaye, formed an organization called the French-American Union in 1875 and sought donations in both countries.
France's national government did not contribute, but thousands of French schoolchildren made small donations. A copper company donated the metal sheets that would form the statue's skin.
But these donations were not enough. More successful was a lottery held by the French-American Union, with prizes donated by Paris merchants....
....Does any of this mean that the Statue of Liberty fails to represent either liberty or the American people? Methodological individualism would require us to say that a group of French individuals funded the construction of the statue, and a different group of American individuals funded the base on which she now stands—its foundation dug into an island given to the project by yet a third group of individuals in the U.S. government. The American government ended up owning the statue, and therefore “the American people” own it in that euphemistic, grammar-school-civics-class sense. But in fact, there is a way in which the Statue of Liberty can legitimately be said to be American, and populist, and maybe even libertarian.
After Bartholdi and Laboulaye failed to get anyone in America especially excited about the project, the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer began a popular campaign for private donations to complete the base of the statue. His campaign attracted more than 120,000 contributors. Most gave less than a dollar.
...The U.S. government provided the island the statue now stands on, but they were stingy with “the people’s money” in a way that warms a libertarian’s heart.
The real people’s money—money voluntarily donated by individual people themselves—made the American monument possible.
...
Briefly, a note on Methodological Individualism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/): "For both Hayek and Popper, the primary motivation for respecting the precepts of methodological individualism was to avoid “grand theory” in the style of Auguste Comte, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Yet the motivation for avoiding this sort of grand theory was not so much that it promoted bad theory, but that it promoted habits of mind, such as “collectivism,” “rationalism,” or “historicism,” that were thought to be conducive to totalitarianism."