Speech by Tony Judt, Director of the Remarque Institute at NYU, printed in The New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009 (sorry, I only have the print edition):
The "disposition to admire and almost to worship the rich and the powerful and to despise or at least to neglect persons of poor and mean condition...is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us.
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