| | Another blast from the past, sadly relevant today on so many levels.
Translations [of Atlas Shrugged] currently in print include Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Marathi, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
http://atlasshrugged.com/the-author/foreign-translations/
[See anything missing? It is not that no one has made the effort, so much as no one has perceived a market for the effort. -- MEM]
I have written here before about Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma'il Ibn Taqiyya by Nellie Hanna. Ismail ibm Taqiyya was a coffee merchant in Cairo. Coffee had been condemned by clerics as an intoxicant and mobs of fanatics had burned coffeehouses. Finally, a court convened and some volunteers drank coffee and the judges waited for signs of drowsiness and stupidity. We know of Ismail ibn Taqiyya only from court cases and notarized contracts. Among the many telling facts is the court case of a Bosnian slave woman who sued men who entered into a contract with her master and attempted to cut her out of her share. No free woman, not even a noble woman, of London or Paris 1600 had an equivalent right.
What happened to Islam? Nothing. Literally. Meanwhile the West experienced the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. We Objectivists are satisfied that we have a better (if not the best) understand of Truth. But what made the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment was pluralism, many people seeking truth by many paths. If you look at the works and thinkers who influenced the Founders of our Republic, you cannot but be surprised at the wide range of contrary and contradictory opinions: Locke, Hume, and Hobbes... St. Paul, Beccaria, and Montesquieu... Pufendorf and Grotius... Tacitus, Plutarch, and Machiavelli... It was a time of ferment, of different and differing opinions.
Indeed, Cairo of 1600 was something like that... but the Enlightenment never happened there... and the rest is history.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 9/14, 7:34pm)
|
|
