Russell Jacoby

"The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left …"

"Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them."

"In accepting the bourgeois form of reason as Reason itself, Roszak does his bit to perpetuate its reign."

"The individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by the relations in which it is enmeshed. “It is a fellow-being before it is a being."

"What must be acknowledged, for example the prevalence of anxiety, is grafted onto man’s essence as if it grew there. Such is the tried and tested method of the apologist: what is social in origin is p…"

"Freud’s link to a Hegelian tradition—with which he otherwise shares little—is in the deliberate renunciation of common sense. “A person who professes to believe in commonsense psychology,” Freud is re…"

"What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic struc…"

"The application of planned obsolescence to thought itself has the same merit as its application to consumer goods; the new is not only shoddier than the old, it fuels an obsolete social system that st…"