Quotes from Arnold Hauser

Absolute parallelism of stylistic approach in the different arts and genres presupposes a level of development on which art no longer has to wrestle for the means of expression, but is able, to a certain extent, to choose freely among the different possibilities of formal treatment.

Aristocracy in general does not favour individualism; it bases its claim to privilege upon virtues which are common to the whole class or at least to whole clans.

The Tyrants who, at the end of the seventh century, had everywhere gained control, first in the leading Ionian states and then on the mainland, signify a decisive victory for individualism over the ideology of kinship. In this respect, as in others, they form the bridge to democracy, many of whose conquests they anticipate, for all their own undemocratic character.

Every honest attempt to discover the truth and depict things faithfully is a struggle against one's own subjectivity and partiality, one's individual and class interests; one can seek to become aware of these as a source of error, while realizing that they can never be finally excluded.

The most inexplicable paradox of the work of art is that it seems to exist for itself and yet not for itself; that it addresses itself to a concrete, historically and sociologically conditioned public, but seems, at the same time, to want to have no knowledge at all of a public.

Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

But if Cravaggio really is the first master of modern age to be slighted by reason of his artistic worth, then the baroque signifies an important turning point in the relationship between art and the public - namely, the end of the "aesthetic culture" which begins with the Renaissance and the beginning of the more rigid distinction between content and form in which formal perfection no longer serves as excuses for any ideological lapse.