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Christopher Caudwell

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Also known as C. St. John Sprigg, Christopher St. John Sprigg, Christopher Saint John Sprigg, Christopher St John Sprigg

British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer (1907-1937)

Person · Open Library

Works
11

Top works

  • Further Studies in a Dying Culture
  • Concept of freedom
  • Agonía de la Cultura Burguesa
  • Studies In A Dying Culture
  • La agonia de la cultura burguesa

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Music · MusicBrainz

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Quotes

  • The bourgeois never included the ownership of capital as one of the social restraints that should be abolished, for the simple reason that it was not to him a restraint at all. It never therefore entered his head to regard it as such, and he saw nothing inconsistent in calling for the abolition of privilege, monopoly, and so forth, while hanging on to his capital.
  • The bourgeois ... is free not because he is conscious of his causality, but because he is ignorant of the social causes that determine his being.
  • The bourgeois ... conception of freedom really arose as a special case of a group of illusions about domination which has been associated with all forms of society based on dominating classes. This group of illusions has for a common factor the belief that domination secures self-determination.
  • All relations are determining. ... As soon as we realise there is a determining relation, and become conscious of its nature and how it grips us, we are that much freer.
  • Slave-owning culture ... gives rise to the teleological explanation of the Universe, which reaches its subtlest form in Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophies, in which all phenomena are determined by Ideas or Forms. These correspond to the plans formed in the mind of the slave-owner which his slave passively fulfils.
  • The domination inherent in the slave-owning system is not repressed, as with the bourgeois, but is conscious, and the illusion consists, not in supposing that no domination exists, but that society is in fact really determined solely by the will of the master, and does not in turn determine his will.

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Wikidata facts

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C. St. John Sprigg 1938 Alt.jpg
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date of birth
1907-10-20
date of death
1937-02-12
pseudonym
Christopher Caudwell
birth name
Christopher St John Sprigg
name in native language
Christopher Caudwell
Commons category
Christopher Caudwell
Sources (2)

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