The Industrial Base of "Esthetic Freedom"/ “审美自由”的工业化前提

The "esthetic freedom' of the pre-industrial subject was discovered at the very moment when the pre-industrial methods of production and transportation seemed threatened by mechanization: this is a typical process of romanticization, one that even the young Marx was not entirely immune to. As long as the pre-industrial methods and their forms of work and travel were the dominant ones, a Carlyle or Ruskin or Morris would never have thought of seeing them in an esthetic light. As every travel journal and every social history of artisanship demonstrates, they were quotidian and cumbersome. When industrialization suddenly caused these old forms to be seen from an esthetic and romanticizing viewpoint, we learn less about those forms themselves than about general attitudes towards industrialization.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1987), 121.

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