for example the stunning ‘nonsense machine’ invented by Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, the scorched-earth attack on our ‘colonial’ inheritance by Edward Said, and the recent revival of ‘the communist hypothesis’ by Badiou and Žižek.Read more at location 154
there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it.Read more at location 175
The modern use of the term ‘left’ derives from the French Estates General of 1789, when the nobility sat on the king’s right, and the ‘third estate’ on his left.Read more at location 184
Why, therefore, use the word ‘left’ to describe the writers considered in this book? Why use a single term to cover anarchists like Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Žižek and American-style liberals like Dworkin and Rorty? The reason is twofold: first the thinkers I discuss have identified themselves by that very term. Second, they illustrate an enduring outlook on the world, and one that has been a permanent feature of Western civilization at least since the Enlightenment, nourished by the elaborate social and political theories that I shall have occasion to discuss in what follows.Read more at location 190
Within a decade the left establishment was back in the driving seat, with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn renewing their intemperate denunciations of America, the European left regrouped against ‘neo-liberalism’, as though this had been the trouble all along, Dworkin and Habermas collecting prestigious prizes for their barely readable but impeccably orthodox books, and the veteran communist Eric Hobsbawm rewarded for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union by his appointment as ‘Companion of Honour’ to the Queen.Read more at location 204
As a result, books critical of market economics began to enjoy a new popularity, whether reminding us that real goods are not exchangeable (Michael Sandel: What Money Can’t Buy) or arguing that markets, in current conditions, cause a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest (Joseph Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality, and Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-first Century).Read more at location 211
And from the ever-fertile source of Marxist humanism thinkers extracted new arguments to describe the moral and spiritual degradation of humanity in the condition of free exchange (Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde: vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste; Naomi Klein, No Logo; Philip Roscoe, I Spend, Therefore I Am).Read more at location 214
Leftists believe, with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class. They define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed.Read more at location 223
This literature, seen at its most fertile in the writings of Foucault, represents as ‘structures of domination’ what others see merely as the instruments of civil order. Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void.Read more at location 232
The liberation of women from male oppression, of animals from human abuse, of homosexuals and transsexuals from ‘homophobia’, even of Muslims from ‘Islamophobia’ – all these have been absorbed into the more recent leftist agendas,Read more at location 235
The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?Read more at location 254
Marx dismissed the various socialisms current in his day as ‘utopian’, contrasting ‘utopian socialism’ with his own ‘scientific socialism’ that promised ‘full communism’ as its predictable outcome. The ‘historical inevitability’ of this condition relieved Marx of the necessity to describe it.Read more at location 269
There will be no division of labour and each person will live out the full range of his needs and desires, ‘hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending cattle in the evening and engaging in literary criticism after dinner’, as we are told in The German Ideology.Read more at location 275
The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.Read more at location 287
Marx’s theory of history had been put in question by Maitland, Weber and Sombart;2 his labour theory of value by Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, and many more;3 his theories of false consciousness, alienation and class struggle by a whole range of thinkers, from Mallock and Sombart to Popper, Hayek and Aron.4 Not all those critics could be placed on the right of the political spectrum, nor had they all been hostile to the idea of ‘social justice’. Yet none of them, so far as I could discover when I came to write this book, had been answeredRead more at location 301
But for whatever cause, left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture.Read more at location 308
This Gnostic revelation was so clear that no argument was necessary, and no argument possible, that would provide it with a justifying proof. All that mattered was to distinguish those who shared the vision from those who dissented.Read more at location 322
the communist conviction that you could change reality by changing words.Read more at location 330
They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument.Read more at location 339
‘to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things’.Read more at location 343
Newspeak prefers to speak of forces, classes and the march of history, and regards the actions of Great Men as acceptable subjects for discussion only because Great Men, like Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler, are really the expression of abstract forces, such as imperialism, revolutionary socialism and fascism.Read more at location 348
Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.Read more at location 397
Institutions like Parliament and the common law courts; spiritual callings associated with churches, chapels, synagogues and mosques; schools and professional bodies; private charities, clubs, and societies; Scouts, Guides and village tournaments; football teams, brass bands and orchestras; choirs, theatre-groups and philately groups – in short all the ways in which people associate, and create from their consensual intermingling the patterns of authority and obedience through which they live, all the ‘little platoons’ of Burke and Tocqueville – are missing from the leftist worldview or, if present (as they are present in Gramsci and E. P. Thompson, for example), both sentimentalized and politicized, so as to become part of the ‘struggle’ of the working class.Read more at location 408
Marx’s alleged science undermined the beliefs of his opponents. The theories of the rule of law, the separation of powers, the right of property, and so on, as these had been expounded by ‘bourgeois’ thinkers like Montesquieu and Hegel, were shown, by the Marxian class analysis, to be not truth-seeking but power-seeking devices:Read more at location 434
Since the class-theory is a genuine science, bourgeois political thought is ideology. And since the class-theory exposes bourgeois thought as ideology, it must be science. We have entered the magic circle of a creation myth.Read more at location 439
It offers proof of the elite’s enlightened knowledge and therefore of its title to govern. It is this feature that justifies the charge made by Eric Voegelin, Alain Besançon and others, that Marxism is a kind of Gnosticism, a title to ‘government through knowledge’.Read more at location 442
Looked at with the superman superciliousness of Nietzsche, resentment may seem like the bitter dregs of the ‘slave morality’, the impoverished loss of spirit that comes about when people take more pleasure in bringing others down than in raising themselves up.Read more at location 445
I call to mind the words of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, when called upon to explain himself: Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint – I am the spirit who always denies, the one who reduces Something to Nothing, and who thereby undoes the work of creation. This essential negativity can be perceived in many of the writers whom I discuss.Read more at location 466
And when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had ‘capitalism’ as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.Read more at location 474
