Russell Jacoby Quotes

David Bromwich has wondered whether intellectuals today would oppose an economic slavery if it lacked any racial or cultural dimension.

The professional philosopher in keen competition with the natural scientist resolves to be more certain about less.

Endless discussions of multiculturalism proceed from the unsubstantiated assumption that numerous distinct “cultures” constitute American society. Only a few historians or observers even consider the possibility that the opposite may be true: that the world and the United States are relentlessly becoming more culturally uniform, not diverse.

Freudian concepts exposed the fraud of the existence of the “individual.” To be absolutely clear here: the Freudian concepts expose the fraud, not so as to perpetuate it, but undo it. That is, unlike the mechanical behaviorists, the point was not to prove that the individual was an illusion; rather it was to show to what extent the individual did not yet exist. To critical theory, psychoanalysis demonstrates the degree to which the individual is de-individualized by society.

Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.

As Comte wrote, the task of positivism was to “imbue the people with the feeling that … no political change is of real importance.” … As Marx wrote, to it “everything that exists is an authority.”

[Freud’s] concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society. … Freud exposed the lie that subject was inviolate; he showed that at every point is was violated.

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 structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia.

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.”

“Rebelling acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs,” writes Rollo May, as if one could struggle through to one’s own identity without rebelling.

Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.

Society has lost its memory, and with it, its mind. The inability or refusal to think back takes its toll in the inability to think.

The inner connection between a positivism of numbers and quantities and one of human values and qualities is the excision of a critical distance and theory. Both surrender to different faces of reality—its facts or its ideology—and both stay clear and clean of antagonisms and contradictions.

Those seeking to work out the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis have not been immune to the intellectual division of labor that severs the life nerve of dialectical thought.

The sundering of a scientific from a poetic truth is the primal mark of the administrative mind.