Laudator Temporis Acti

Albert Jay Nock, A Journey Into Rabelais's France (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1934), p. 27:

Who wants one's country cluttered up and vulgarized by enormous annual irruptions of inquisitive foreigners? Who wants one's city pawed over, nosed into and corrupted by ignorant aliens with more dollars than sense?

Id., p. 31:

This trait also runs back pretty directly to the days of Louis XI. The peasant-bred workman or shopman who detested paper, who could not read or write and had a great horror of any one who could, always knew goods. His idea of business was the very simplest and soundest: the production and exchange of goods. Mere paper-business, credits, stock-transactions, money-changing, underwriting and the like, at which people got rich without handling any goods or doing any real productive work all this he knew nothing at all about and had no love for. To him, goods were made to be used; that was his first thought about them. Only secondarily did he think of them as made to be sold. His successors have the same point of view. The more modern theory of business, on the other hand, seems to be exactly the reverse of this. Goods are made, first and foremost, to be sold, be it by hook or crook. Secondarily they are made to be used, and good salesmanship thinks little about their use if only they may be sold.

Id., pp. 49-50:

Chinon struck us as even more nearly self-sufficing than most French towns we have seen. Pretty nearly everything the inhabitants use is made on the spot, including furniture. There is a shop here that whittles out first-rate handsome furniture all by hand, and of any sort you want, apparently, and it does a good business. The Chinonese raise their own food and drink, doing their own slaughtering in a small abattoir of very up-to-date appearance on the edge of town, instead of bringing their meat in refrigerator-cars from some central stock-yards. It gave us a queer sensation to see so many people who were each capable of doing something all the way through, making a product from beginning to end, like the old Flemish painters who ground their own colours, made their own brushes, cut and prepared the wooden panels on which they painted. Americans seldom have this complete mastery of an art or craft, and one would think that pride of workmanship would suffer considerably as an effect of close specialization.

Here again, as in Tours, though by a different line of approach, we confronted evidence that the doctrine of quantity-production "ain't what it useter be, and it never was." In fact, one would say that if anything worth keeping is ever going to be salvaged out of our civilization, it will be through the dogged French antipathy to modern industrial ideas and practices. What the French really stand out against is the idea that man can live by things alone—things that are made to sell, and sold for profit—and that if he can only have never enough things, and can occupy his mind exclusively with wanting more things and getting more things, he will be really happy. The French and Americans disagree radically about that; they have an entirely different notion of what human happiness consists in. Maybe the French will come around to our way of thinking, but they show no signs of it yet, and events seem to be bearing out their view.