Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
Literacy and curiosity led to speculation, experiment, discovery and the formulation and spread of ideas. The product of these forces was science, which had had a long period of gestation in North Africa and Asia. Dark Ages of localism, with landlords, priests and soldiers directing public affairs led to the concentration of wealth and power in the landed aristocracy and the church.
But I find nothing in the manly sentiment and true tenderness of Irving to warrant the sentimental gush of his followers, who missed his corrective humor as completely as they failed to catch his literary art. Whatever note of localism there was in the Knickerbocker School, however dilettante and unfruitful it was, it was not the legitimate heir of the broad and eclectic genius of Irving.
And yet it is clearly evident that before the real import of American Democracy can be divined the forest must be explored and the underbrush cleared away. This is not a plea for localism or particularism. On the contrary, it suggests the possibility of a broader view of our National life. It points to the source of our political ideals.
Thereupon the Swiss departed, and I neither saw nor heard anything farther of him during the time that I continued at Saint James. The bookseller was never weary of showing me about his native town, of which he was enthusiastically fond. Indeed, I have never seen the spirit of localism, which is so prevalent throughout Spain, more strong than at Saint James.
Had he been born in lowland Virginia, he would have imbibed the intense localism and individualism of the great plantation, and with his turn of mind might well have filled the role of Calhoun instead of that very different role he actually did fill.
From one angle, localism seems selfishness and weakness; from another, it shows the vigorous life of separate communities, each self-centred and jealous of its authority because the local instinct is so vitally active. It only needed time to broaden the outlook and give the English colonies a sense of their common interest.
Generation by generation and century by century it has professed and proclaimed the advantages of universality while it yielded to the persistent demands of nationalism, regionalism and localism. Throughout the latter years of the nineteenth century the will to unify gained much ground. The tide turned with the turn of the century.
In every instance of which history provides a legible record, centralized, universalized institutions and practices have fragmented into diversity and stubborn localism. Western civilization is part and parcel of this generalization.
It is limited by geography; by the means of transportation and communication; by overhead costs that increase geometrically as the civilization expands arithmetically; by the means of delegating responsibility; by accounting devices, available raw materials and labor power; by power struggles inside the ruling oligarchies; by the failure to maintain a balance between centerism and localism; by growing local demands for self-determination; by the invasion of nomads seeking to plunder the tempting honey pot at the nucleus of the civilization.
It is applied to the divine reality of Bethlehem itself, as when sceptics still sneer at the littleness, the localism, the provincial particularity and obscurity of that divine origin; as if Christians could be confounded and silenced by a contrast which Christians in ten thousand hymns, songs and sermons have incessantly shouted and proclaimed.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking