The Ideas Are in the Air, and They Are Shared

Ideas have an impact because they clear out certain spaces of action for human beings. And to some degree, ethan allan became a kind of representative of this unconscious side of the american revolution. Even though he claimed he never read an any of these daist books, he was repeating a lot of their tropes and arguments without necessarily grasping all their interconnections and a implications. So they were in the air, as it were. But i guess i'm getting at this other point, which is that i don't think it's right to conceive of these influential ideas as just some set of prejudices or, you know, weird things that british colonials in north America happen

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