Free love
Free love is a social movement that accepts all forms of love. The Free Love movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, adultery, it claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, no one else. Much of the free love tradition reflects a liberal philosophy that seeks freedom from state regulation and church interference in personal relationships. According to this concept, the free unions of adults are legitimate relations which should be respected by all third parties whether they are emotional or sexual relations. In addition, some free love writing has argued that both men and women have the right to sexual pleasure without social or legal restraints. In the Victorian era, this was a radical notion. A new theme developed, linking free love with radical social change, depicting it as a harbinger of a new anti-authoritarian, anti-repressive sensibility. According to today's stereotype, earlier middle-class Americans wanted the home to be a place of stability in an uncertain world.
To this mentality are attributed strongly-defined gender roles, which led to a minority reaction in the form of the free-love movement. While the phrase free love is associated with promiscuity in the popular imagination in reference to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s the free-love movement has not advocated multiple-sexual partners or short-term sexual relationships. Rather, it has argued that sexual relations that are entered into should not be regulated by law; the term "sex radical" is used interchangeably with the term "free lover", was the preferred term by advocates because of the negative connotations of "free love". By whatever name, advocates had two strong beliefs: opposition to the idea of forced sexual activity in a relationship and advocacy for a woman to use her body in any way that she pleases. Laws of particular concern to free love movements have included those that prevent an unmarried couple from living together, those that regulate adultery and divorce, as well as age of consent, birth control, homosexuality and sometimes prostitution.
The abrogation of individual rights in marriage is a concern—for example, some jurisdictions do not recognize spousal rape or treat it less than non-spousal rape. Free-love movements since the 19th century have defended the right to publicly discuss sexuality and have battled obscenity laws. At the turn of the 20th century, some free-love proponents extended the critique of marriage to argue that marriage as a social institution encourages emotional possessiveness and psychological enslavement; the history of free love is entwined with the history of feminism. From the late 18th century, leading feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, have challenged the institution of marriage, many have advocated its abolition. According to feminist critique, a married woman was a wife and mother, denying her the opportunity to pursue other occupations. In 1855, free love advocate Mary Gove Nichols described marriage as the "annihilation of woman," explaining that women were considered to be men's property in law and public sentiment, making it possible for tyrannical men to deprive their wives of all freedom.
For example, the law allowed a husband to beat his wife. Free-love advocates argued that many children were born into unloving marriages out of compulsion, but should instead be the result of choice and affection—yet children born out of wedlock did not have the same rights as children with married parents. In 1857, in the Social Revolutionist, Minerva Putnam complained that "in the discussion of free love, no woman has attempted to give her views on the subject" and challenged every woman reader to "rise in the dignity of her nature and declare herself free."In the 19th century at least six books endorsed the concept of free love, all of which were written by men. However of the four major free-love periodicals following the U. S. civil war, half had female editors. Mary Gove Nichols was the leading-female advocate and the woman most looked up to in the free-love movement, her autobiography became the first argument against marriage written from a woman's point of view. To proponents of free love, the act of sex was not just about reproduction.
Access to birth control was considered a means to women's independence, leading birth-control activists embraced free love. Sexual radicals remained focused on their attempts to uphold a woman's right to control her body and to discuss issues such as contraception, marital-sex abuse, sexual education; these people believed. To help achieve this goal, such radical thinkers relied on the written word, books and periodicals, by these means the movement was sustained for over fifty years, spreading the message of free love all over the United States. A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love; the all-male Essenes, who lived in the Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD shunned sex and slavery. They renounced wealth, lived communally, were pacifist vegetarians. An Early Christian sect known as the Adamites existed in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries and rejected marriage, they believed themselves to be without original sin.
In the 6th century, adherents of Mazdakism in pre-Muslim Persia supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage, like many other free-love movements favored
Classical liberalism
Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on economic freedom. Related to economic liberalism, it developed in the early 19th century, building on ideas from the previous century as a response to urbanisation and to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States. Notable individuals whose ideas contributed to classical liberalism include John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, it drew on the classical economic ideas espoused by Adam Smith in Book One of The Wealth of Nations and on a belief in natural law and progress. The term classical liberalism has been applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from social liberalism. Core beliefs of classical liberals included new ideas—which departed from both the older conservative idea of society as a family and from the sociological concept of society as complex set of social networks.
Classical liberals believe that individuals are "egoistic, coldly calculating inert and atomistic" and that society is no more than the sum of its individual members. Classical liberals agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from each other and that the purpose of government should be to minimize conflict between individuals that would otherwise arise in a state of nature; these beliefs were complemented by a belief that laborers could be best motivated by financial incentive. This belief led to the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which limited the provision of social assistance, based on the idea that markets are the mechanism that most efficiently leads to wealth. Adopting Thomas Robert Malthus's population theory, they saw poor urban conditions as inevitable, believed population growth would outstrip food production and thus regarded that consequence desirable because starvation would help limit population growth, they opposed any income or wealth redistribution, believing it would be dissipated by the lowest orders.
Drawing on ideas of Adam Smith, classical liberals believed that it is in the common interest that all individuals be able to secure their own economic self-interest. They were critical of what would come to be the idea of the welfare state as interfering in a free market. Despite Smith’s resolute recognition of the importance and value of labor and of laborers, classical liberals selectively criticized labour's group rights being pursued at the expense of individual rights while accepting corporations' rights, which led to inequality of bargaining power. Classical liberals argued that individuals should be free to obtain work from the highest-paying employers while the profit motive would ensure that products that people desired were produced at prices they would pay. In a free market, both labor and capital would receive the greatest possible reward while production would be organized efficiently to meet consumer demand. Classical liberals argued for what they called a minimal state, limited to the following functions: A government to protect individual rights and to provide services that cannot be provided in a free market.
A common national defense to provide protection against foreign invaders. Laws to provide protection for citizens from wrongs committed against them by other citizens, which included protection of private property, enforcement of contracts and common law. Building and maintaining public institutions. Public works that included a stable currency, standard weights and measures and building and upkeep of roads, harbors, railways and postal services. Classical liberals asserted that rights are of a negative nature and therefore stipulate that other individuals and governments are to refrain from interfering with the free market, opposing social liberals who assert that individuals have positive rights, such as the right to vote, the right to an education, the right to health care and the right to a living wage. For society to guarantee positive rights, it requires taxation over and above the minimum needed to enforce negative rights. Core beliefs of classical liberals did not include democracy or government by a majority vote by citizens because "there is nothing in the bare idea of majority rule to show that majorities will always respect the rights of property or maintain rule of law".
For example, James Madison argued for a constitutional republic with protections for individual liberty over a pure democracy, reasoning that in a pure democracy a "common passion or interest will, in every case, be felt by a majority of the whole and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party". In the late 19th century, classical liberalism developed into neo-classical liberalism, which argued for government to be as small as possible to allow the exercise of individual freedom. In its most extreme form, neo-classical liberalism advocated social Darwinism. Right-libertarianism is a modern form of neo-classical liberalism. Friedrich Hayek identified two different traditions within classical liberalism, namely the British tradition and the French tradition. Hayek saw the British philosophers Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Josiah Tucker and William Paley as representative of a tradition that articulated beliefs in empiricism, the common law and in traditions and institutions which had spontaneously evolved but were imperfectly understood.
The French tradition included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marquis de Condorcet, the Encyclopedists and the Physiocrats. This tradition believed in rationalism and sometimes showed hostility to religion. Hayek conceded that the national labels did not correspond to those belonging to each tradition since he saw the
Laozi
Laozi rendered as Lao Tzu and Lao-Tze, was an ancient Chinese philosopher and writer. He is the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching, the founder of philosophical Taoism, a deity in religious Taoism and traditional Chinese religions. A semi-legendary figure, Laozi was portrayed as a 6th-century BC contemporary of Confucius, but some modern historians consider him to have lived during the Warring States period of the 4th century BC. A central figure in Chinese culture, Laozi is claimed by both the emperors of the Tang dynasty and modern people of the Li surname as a founder of their lineage. Laozi's work has been embraced by Chinese Legalism. In traditional accounts, Laozi's personal name is given as Li Er and his courtesy name as Boyang. A prominent posthumous name was Li Dan. Laozi itself is a honorific title: 老 and 子, it has been romanized numerous ways. The most common present form is Laozi or Lǎozǐ, based on the Hanyu Pinyin system adopted by Mainland China in 1958 and by Taiwan in 2009. During the 20th century, Lao-tzu was more common, based on the prevalent Wade–Giles system.
In the 19th century, the title was romanized as Lao-tse. Other forms include the variants Lao-tsu; as a religious figure, he is worshipped under the name "Supreme Old Lord" and as one of the "Three Pure Ones." During the Tang dynasty, he was granted the title "Supremely Mysterious and Primordial Emperor". In the mid-twentieth century, a consensus emerged among scholars that the historicity of the person known as Laozi is doubtful and that the Tao Te Ching was "a compilation of Taoist sayings by many hands". Alan Watts urged more caution, holding that this view was part of an academic fashion for skepticism about historical spiritual and religious figures and stating that not enough would be known for years – or ever – to make a firm judgment; the earliest certain reference to the present figure of Laozi is found in the 1st‑century BC Records of the Grand Historian collected by the historian Sima Qian from earlier accounts. In one account, Laozi was said to be a contemporary of Confucius during the 6th or 5th century BC.
His surname was Li and his personal name was Er or Dan. He was an official in the imperial archives and wrote a book in two parts before departing to the west. In another, Laozi was a different contemporary of Confucius titled Lao Laizi and wrote a book in 15 parts. In a third, he was the court astrologer Lao Dan who lived during the 4th century BC reign of Duke Xian of the Qin Dynasty; the oldest text of the Tao Te Ching so far recovered was written on bamboo slips and dates to the late 4th century BC. According to traditional accounts, Laozi was a scholar who worked as the Keeper of the Archives for the royal court of Zhou; this allowed him broad access to the works of the Yellow Emperor and other classics of the time. The stories assert that Laozi never opened a formal school but nonetheless attracted a large number of students and loyal disciples. There are many variations of a story retelling his encounter with Confucius, most famously in the Zhuangzi, he was sometimes held to have come from the village of Chu Jen in Chu.
In accounts where Laozi married, he was said to have had a son named Zong who became a celebrated soldier. The story tells of Zong the Warrior who defeats the enemy and triumphs, abandons the corpses of the enemy soldiers to be eaten by vultures. By coincidence Laozi and teaching the way of the Tao, comes on the scene and is revealed to be the father of Zong, from whom he was separated in childhood. Laozi tells his son that it is better to treat respectfully a beaten enemy, that the disrespect to their dead would cause his foes to seek revenge. Convinced, Zong orders his soldiers to bury the enemy dead. Funeral mourning is held for the dead of both parties and a lasting peace is made. Many clans of the Li family trace their descent to Laozi, including the emperors of the Tang dynasty; this family was known as the Longxi Li lineage. According to the Simpkinses, while many of these lineages are questionable, they provide a testament to Laozi's impact on Chinese culture; the third story in Sima Qian states that Laozi grew weary of the moral decay of life in Chengzhou and noted the kingdom's decline.
He ventured west to live as a hermit in the unsettled frontier at the age of 80. At the western gate of the city, he was recognized by the guard Yinxi; the sentry asked the old master to record his wisdom for the good of the country before he would be permitted to pass. The text Laozi wrote was said to be the Tao Te Ching, although the present version of the text includes additions from periods. In some versions of the tale, the sentry was so touched by the work that he became a disciple and left with Laozi, never to be seen again. In others, the "Old Master" journeyed all the way to India and was the teacher of Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha. Others say. A seventh-century work, the Sandong Zhunang, embellished the relationship between Yinxi. Laozi pretended to be a farmer when reaching the western gate, but was recognized by Yinxi, who asked to be taught by the great master. Laozi was not satisfied by being noticed by the guard and demanded an explanation. Yinxi expressed his deep desire to find the Tao and explained that his long study of astrology allowed him to recognize Laozi's approach.
Yinxi was ac
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926, she had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 and 1936. After two early novels that were unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982. Rand rejected faith and religion, she rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including property rights. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism, she was critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and classical liberals.
Literary critics received Rand's fiction with mixed reviews and academia ignored or rejected her philosophy, though academic interest has increased in recent decades. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both in academic settings, she has been a significant influence among American conservatives. Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, to a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg, she was the eldest of his wife, Anna Borisovna. Her father was upwardly mobile and a pharmacist and her mother was ambitious and religiously observant. Rand said she found school unchallenging and began writing screenplays at the age of eight and novels at the age of ten. At the prestigious Stoiunina Gymnasiumru, her closest friend was Vladimir Nabokov's younger sister, Olga; the two girls shared an intense interest in politics and would engage in debates at the Nabokov mansion: while Olga defended constitutional monarchy, Alisa supported republican ideals. She was twelve at the time of the February Revolution of 1917, during which she favored Alexander Kerensky over Tsar Nicholas II.
The subsequent October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the life the family had enjoyed. Her father's business was confiscated, the family fled to the Crimean Peninsula, under control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. While in high school, she realized that she was an atheist and valued reason above any other human virtue. After graduating from high school in the Crimea in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd, where they faced desperate conditions, on occasion nearly starving. After the Russian Revolution, universities were opened to women, allowing her to be in the first group of women to enroll at Petrograd State University. At the age of 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy. At the university she was introduced to the writings of Aristotle and Plato, who would be her greatest influence and counter-influence, respectively, she studied the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Able to read French and Russian, she discovered the writers Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, Friedrich Schiller, who became her perennial favorites.
Along with many other bourgeois students, she was purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many of the purged students were allowed to complete their work and graduate, which she did in October 1924, she studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment she wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri, which became her first published work. By this time she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand because it is graphically similar to a vowelless excerpt Рзнб of her birth surname in Cyrillic handwriting, she adopted the first name Ayn, either from a Finnish name Aino or from the Hebrew word עין. In late 1925, Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, she departed on January 17, 1926. When she arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926, she was so impressed with the skyline of Manhattan that she cried what she called "tears of splendor". Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives, one of whom owned a movie theater and allowed her to watch dozens of films free of charge.
She left for Hollywood, California. In Hollywood, a chance meeting with famed director Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra in his film The King of Kings and a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on The King of Kings, she met Frank O'Connor, she became a permanent American resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. Taking various jobs during the 1930s to support her writing, she worked for a time as the head of the costume department at RKO Studios, she made several attempts to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they were unable to acquire permission to emigrate. Rand's first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn to Uni
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and author as well as a moral philosopher, a pioneer of political economy and a key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment known as"The Father of Economics" or"The Father of Capitalism". Smith wrote two classic works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; the latter abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. In his work, Adam Smith introduced his theory of absolute advantage. Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, where he was one of the first students to benefit from scholarships set up by fellow Scot John Snell. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow, teaching moral philosophy and during this time and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
In his life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith laid the foundations of classical free market economic theory; the Wealth of Nations was a precursor to the modern academic discipline of economics. In this and other works, he developed the concept of division of labour and expounded upon how rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity. Smith was controversial in his own day and his general approach and writing style were satirised by Tory writers in the moralising tradition of William Hogarth and Jonathan Swift. In 2005, The Wealth of Nations was named among the 100 best Scottish books of all time. Smith was born in the County of Fife, Scotland, his father Adam Smith, was a Scottish Writer to the Signet and prosecutor and served as comptroller of the customs in Kirkcaldy. In 1720, he married Margaret Douglas, daughter of the landed Robert Douglas of Strathendry in Fife, his father died two months after he was born.
The date of Smith's baptism into the Church of Scotland at Kirkcaldy was 5 June 1723 and this has been treated as if it were his date of birth, unknown. Although few events in Smith's early childhood are known, the Scottish journalist John Rae, Smith's biographer, recorded that Smith was abducted by gypsies at the age of three and released when others went to rescue him. Smith was close to his mother, who encouraged him to pursue his scholarly ambitions, he attended the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy—characterised by Rae as "one of the best secondary schools of Scotland at that period"—from 1729 to 1737, he learned Latin, mathematics and writing. Smith entered the University of Glasgow when he was 14 and studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson. Here, Smith developed his passion for liberty and free speech. In 1740, Smith was the graduate scholar presented to undertake postgraduate studies at Balliol College, under the Snell Exhibition. Smith considered the teaching at Glasgow to be far superior to that at Oxford, which he found intellectually stifling.
In Book V, Chapter II of The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote: "In the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether the pretence of teaching." Smith is reported to have complained to friends that Oxford officials once discovered him reading a copy of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, they subsequently confiscated his book and punished him for reading it. According to William Robert Scott, "The Oxford of time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework." Smith took the opportunity while at Oxford to teach himself several subjects by reading many books from the shelves of the large Bodleian Library. When Smith was not studying on his own, his time at Oxford was not a happy one, according to his letters. Near the end of his time there, Smith began suffering from shaking fits the symptoms of a nervous breakdown, he left Oxford University in 1746. In Book V of The Wealth of Nations, Smith comments on the low quality of instruction and the meager intellectual activity at English universities, when compared to their Scottish counterparts.
He attributes this both to the rich endowments of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which made the income of professors independent of their ability to attract students, to the fact that distinguished men of letters could make an more comfortable living as ministers of the Church of England. Smith's discontent at Oxford might be in part due to the absence of his beloved teacher in Glasgow, Francis Hutcheson, well regarded as one of the most prominent lecturers at the University of Glasgow in his day and earned the approbation of students and ordinary residents with the fervor and earnestness of his orations, his lectures endeavoured not to teach philosophy, but to make his students embody that philosophy in their lives, appropriately acquiring the epithet, the preacher of philosophy. Unlike Smith, Hutcheson was not a system builder. Smith began delivering public lectures in 1748 in Edinburgh, sponsored by t
Human rights
Human rights are "the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled" Examples of rights and freedoms which are thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and property, freedom of expression, pursuit of happiness and equality before the law. All human beings are born equal in dignity and rights, they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Ancient peoples did not have the same modern-day conception of universal human rights; the true forerunner of human-rights discourse was the concept of natural rights which appeared as part of the medieval natural law tradition that became prominent during the European Enlightenment. From this foundation, the modern human rights arguments emerged over the latter half of the 20th century.17th-century English philosopher John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, identifying them as being "life and estate", argued that such fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract.
In Britain in 1689, the English Bill of Rights and the Scottish Claim of Right each made illegal a range of oppressive governmental actions. Two major revolutions occurred during the 18th century, in the United States and in France, leading to the United States Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen both of which articulated certain human rights. Additionally, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 encoded into law a number of fundamental civil rights and civil freedoms. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life and the pursuit of Happiness. Philosophers such as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill and Hegel expanded on the theme of universality during the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison wrote in a newspaper called The Liberator that he was trying to enlist his readers in "the great cause of human rights" so the term human rights came into use sometime between Paine's The Rights of Man and Garrison's publication.
In 1849 a contemporary, Henry David Thoreau, wrote about human rights in his treatise On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, influential on human rights and civil rights thinkers. United States Supreme Court Justice David Davis, in his 1867 opinion for Ex Parte Milligan, wrote "By the protection of the law, human rights are secured. In Western Europe and North America, labour unions brought about laws granting workers the right to strike, establishing minimum work conditions and forbidding or regulating child labour; the women's rights movement succeeded in gaining for many women the right to vote. National liberation movements in many countries succeeded in driving out colonial powers. One of the most influential was Mahatma Gandhi's movement to free his native India from British rule. Movements by long-oppressed racial and religious minorities succeeded in many parts of the world, among them the civil rights movement, more recent diverse identity politics movements, on behalf of women and minorities in the United States.
The foundation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the 1864 Lieber Code and the first of the Geneva Conventions in 1864 laid the foundations of International humanitarian law, to be further developed following the two World Wars. The League of Nations was established in 1919 at the negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles following the end of World War I; the League's goals included disarmament, preventing war through collective security, settling disputes between countries through negotiation and improving global welfare. Enshrined in its Charter was a mandate to promote many of the rights which were included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the League of Nations had mandates to support many of the former colonies of the Western European colonial powers during their transition from colony to independent state. Established as an agency of the League of Nations, now part of United Nations, the International Labour Organization had a mandate to promote and safeguard certain of the rights included in the UDHR: the primary goal of the ILO today is to promote opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work, in conditions of freedom, equity and human dignity.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a non-binding declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 in response to the barbarism of World War II. The UDHR urges member nations to promote a number of human, civil and social rights, asserting these rights are part of the "foundation of freedom and peace in the world"; the declaration was the first international legal effort to limit the behavior of states and press upon them duties to their citizens following the model of the rights-duty duality....recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom and peace in the world The UDHR was framed by members of the Human Rights Commission, with Eleanor Roosevelt as Chair, who began to discuss an International Bill of Rights in 1947. The members of the Commission did not agree on the form of such a bill of rights, whe
H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. He commented on the social scene, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements, his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial" gained him attention. As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States; as an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of religion and representative democracy, the latter of which he viewed as systems in which inferior men dominated their superiors. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress, was critical of osteopathic and chiropractic medicine, he was an ardent critic of economics. Mencken opposed both American entry into World War I and World War II, his diary indicates that he was a racist and antisemite, who used coarse language and slurs to describe various ethnic and racial groups.
Mencken at times seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism, though never in its American form. "War is a good thing," he once wrote, "because it is honest, it admits the central fact of human nature... A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid."His longtime home in the Union Square neighborhood of West Baltimore was turned into a city museum, the H. L. Mencken House, his papers were distributed among various city and university libraries, with the largest collection held in the Mencken Room at the central branch of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 12, 1880, he was August Mencken, Sr. a cigar factory owner. He spoke German in his childhood; when Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street facing Union Square park in the Union Square neighborhood of old West Baltimore. Apart from five years of married life, Mencken was to live in that house for the rest of his life. In his best-selling memoir Happy Days, he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure and happy."When he was nine years old, he read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he described as "the most stupendous event in my life".
He became determined to read voraciously. In one winter while in high school he read Thackeray and "proceeded backward to Addison, Pope, Swift and the other magnificos of the Eighteenth century", he became an ardent fan of Kipling and Thomas Huxley. As a boy, Mencken had practical interests and chemistry in particular, had a home chemistry laboratory in which he performed experiments of his own devising, some of them inadvertently dangerous, he began his primary education in the mid-1880s at Professor Knapp's School on the east side of Holliday Street between East Lexington and Fayette Streets, next to the Holliday Street Theatre and across from the newly constructed Baltimore City Hall. The site today is the War Memorial and City Hall Plaza laid out in 1926 in memory of World War I dead. At fifteen, in June 1896, he graduated as valedictorian from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, at the time a males-only mathematics and science-oriented public high school, he worked for three years in his father's cigar factory.
He disliked the work the sales aspect of it, resolved to leave, with or without his father's blessing. In early 1898 he took a writing class at the Cosmopolitan University; this was to be the entirety of Mencken's formal education in any other subject. Upon his father's death a few days after Christmas in the same year, the business reverted to his uncle, Mencken was free to pursue his career in journalism, he applied in February 1899 to the Morning Herald newspaper and was hired part-time, but still kept his position at the factory for a few months. In June he was hired as a full-time reporter. Mencken served as a reporter at the Herald for six years. Less than two and a half years after the Great Baltimore Fire, the paper was purchased in June 1906 by Charles H. Grasty, the owner and editor of The News since 1892, competing owner and publisher Gen. Felix Agnus, of the town's oldest and largest daily, The Baltimore American, they proceeded to divide the staff and resources of The Herald between them.
Mencken moved to The Baltimore Sun, where he worked for Charles H. Grasty, he continued to contribute to The Sun, The Evening Sun and The Sunday Sun full-time until 1948, when he stopped writing after suffering a stroke. Mencken began writing the editorials and opinion pieces. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel, poetry, which he revealed. In 1908, he became a literary critic for The Smart Set magazine, in 1924 he and George Jean Nathan founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf, it soon developed a national circulation and became influential on college campuses across America. In 1933, Mencken resigned as editor. In 1930, Mencken married Sara Haardt, a German American professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author eighteen years his junior. Haardt had led efforts in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment; the two met in 1923. The marriage made national headlines, many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and, well known for mocking relatio
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