## Metadata - Author: [[Kevin Birmingham]] - Full Title: The Sinner and the Saint - Category: #books ## Highlights - More than the hunger, the violence, and the instability, the most alarming development of 1848 was the spread of political consciousness. New forms of association—political clubs, secret societies, trade unions—engaged in sophisticated political activities, from petitions to demonstrations. Problems once considered inevitable, such as poverty and famine, now seemed to be the consequence of state mismanagement, and greater state power led to demands for greater accountability. Few things are more threatening to an authoritarian regime than a phalanx of hungry women on the roadways demanding bread and a constitution simultaneously. Ideas did this. Newspapers made Europeans more aware of the wider world, and books detailed the possibilities for that world. The very circulation of ideas created another idea: the idea of a public, the sense that you are a part of a social singularity, and the act of reading, of being addressed by a writer, assumes and strengthens that singularity. Being part of a public encouraged readers to connect personal problems and national problems, the immediate and the abstract, food and a bill of rights. ([Location 1254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WCNZ6WT&location=1254)) - Empires need a myth, and the Russian myth was about the power of obedience to save Christian civilization. ([Location 1301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WCNZ6WT&location=1301)) - human nature came in 1864, with the appearance of the ([Location 3121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WCNZ6WT&location=3121)) - Dostoevsky was determined to remind the world that every perceived law of human nature and every carefully gathered statistic crashes on the shore of innumerable details. “Reality is infinitely diverse compared to all, even the cleverest, conclusions of abstract thought,” Dostoevsky wrote in Dead House. Years of exile in a land where no law reigned and no theory sufficed made this clear. People squander their money on drunken binges. They gamble everything away. They kill for trifles. There were dark mysteries that materialism would never touch, and any path forward for civilization would have to take up those mysteries and carry them forever. ([Location 3132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WCNZ6WT&location=3132)) - The feeling distilled in Pisarev was the feeling of generational bitterness, the feeling of having been dispossessed by decades of failures after the Napoleonic Wars. Everyone had failed—the peasants, the bureaucracy, the military, all the writers and artists. Bitterness that intense is isolating. It is natural, when everyone has failed, to turn inward, to rely upon a tiny elite, at most, or upon yourself, at least, and to smash everything else. And so nihilism spread in the 1860s as a quest for world-historical greatness not through military domination but through a mixture of science and extravagant individualism. ([Location 3456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WCNZ6WT&location=3456)) - Dostoevsky instinctively felt bound and protected by the culture of debt he’d always known—informal agreements built on promises, strengthened by social ties, renegotiated with handshakes, enforced by honor—only to discover that he had slipped into a new realm of formal, anonymous debt built on contracts and legal proceedings and enforced by property seizures and debtors’ prisons. The easy transferability of debt enabled the system’s harshness because enforcement would only begin with a creditor willing to trigger it—likely not someone you’d worked with for years, but perhaps a high-ranking stranger, a dilettante poet who would never be home and who cared nothing for your plight or the plight of your brother’s family. ([Location 3926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WCNZ6WT&location=3926))