Home > Author > Wolfgang Schivelbusch
1 " An der technischen Entwicklung der Dampfmaschine im 18. Jahrhundert läßt sich der Prozess der Emanzipation der modernen Produktionsweise von den Schranken der organischen Natur verfolgen. "
― Wolfgang Schivelbusch , The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space
2 " Opium for tea—a formula which not only explains the successes of English imperialism in the Far East, but which thoroughly typified Europe's relationship to the Third World. "
― Wolfgang Schivelbusch , Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants
3 " Aristocratic society preferred to drink its chocolate at breakfast. Ideally it was served in the boudoir, in bed if possible. Breakfast chocolate has little in common with the bourgeoisie's breakfast coffee. It was quite the opposite, and not only because the drinks were intrinsically different. Whereas the middle-class family sat erect at the breakfast table, with a sense of disciplined propriety, the essence of the chocolate ritual was fluid, lazy, languid motion. If coffee virtually shook drinkers awake for the workday that lay ahead, chocolate was meant to create an intermediary state between lying down and sitting up. "
4 " In other words, to be successful, American “Fascism” had to take on American form. Or to cite a dictum usually attributed to Huey Long: “When America gets Fascism it will call it Anti-Fascism. "
― Wolfgang Schivelbusch , Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939
5 " From Spanish conquistadores to the propagandists for the American Way of Life, the New World has been hymned as a potential paradise. The paradise that the Middle Ages had sought became secularized as the land of unlimited possibilities. "
6 " Half a century after Linnaeus, Samuel Hahnemann, the homeopath, paraphrased the same thought. Coffee creates an "artificially heightened sense of being," according to Hahnemann; "presence of mind, alertness, and empathy are all elevated more than in a healthy natural condition"; but, he goes on, these effects are unhealthy, in that they throw life off its natural rhythm, which consists in an alteration of wakefulness and sleepiness. "
7 " Should soft drugs one day become commonly available for mass consumption in a "postindustrial" society (for want of a better term), this would define the new quality of this society three hundred years ago. The analogy can be taken even further. Just as seventeenth-century prohibitions against coffee and tobacco were desperate rearguard actions on the part of a medieval worldview (which rightly sniffed out the modern, bourgeois dynamic inherent in the new pleasure goods), today's still-enforced prohibition of drugs may be interpreted as a last-ditch effort to maintain the rationality and self-discipline of middle-class life. "
