ABSTRACT
Fyodor Dostoyevsky did not visit the Great Exhibition of 1851, but that did not stop him from expressing an opinion about it when, in his Notes from Underground, he invoked the ‘Palace of Crystal’ as a hymn to the virtues of liberal political economy: a world governed by logic and classification, by the calm and reasoned calculations of self-interest, but one that is soon brought tumbling down wherever the arbitrary force of will asserts itself.
One’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness – that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it will not fit into any classification, and the omission of which always sends all systems and theories to the devil.
(Dostoyevsky, 1972 [1864]: 33–4)