Poverty, not affluence, defines the twentieth century’s modern sensibility.

Evidence

In his essay Experience and Poverty', which was published at the end of 1933 in the journal Die Welt im Wort, edited in exile in Prague by Willy Haas, Benjamin wrote: It is all the same whether Brecht remarks that communism is not the just distribution of wealth but of poverty, or whether the forerunner of modern architecture, Adolf Loos, declares: I only write for people who are in possession of a modern sensibility … I do not write for people who pine away in yearning for the Renaissance or the rococo.’ … Artists as complex as the painter Paul Klee, or as programmatic as Loos, both reject the traditional, celebratory, noble image of humanity, which is decorated with all the offerings of the past, in order to turn to their naked contemporary, who lies screaming like a new-born baby in the dirty nappies of this epoch. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 226

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Brecht’s and Loos’s rejection of the humanist tradition — useful for mapping the Frankfurt School’s own break with bourgeois aesthetics. — connects to: Austerity’s core principles predate the twentieth century by a century of classical economics — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 718; Twentieth-century ideologies differ in valuing individual freedom versus social equality. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2288; Poverty is inherent to developed capitalism, not a Global South condition — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 88 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Austerity’s core principles predate the twentieth century by a century of classical economics — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 718; Twentieth-century ideologies differ in valuing individual freedom versus social equality. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2288; Poverty is inherent to developed capitalism, not a Global South condition — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 88 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The mid-twentieth-century welfare state extended middle-class access to the previously excluded #complicates (0.73) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1740
• Austerity’s core principles predate the twentieth century by a century of classical economics #complicates (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 718