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

The neat division between roles and real selves reduces society to a masquerade party. Yet not even plastic surgery can heal the psychic disfigurements. The social evil reaches into the living fibers; people not only assume roles, they are roles.

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.