Abstract

Terminally associated with drugs, unbridled hedonism and general irresponsibility, since the late 1960s “radicalism” has been systematically discredited. Today no one thinks of it as having anything to do with “going back to roots” but, at best, as a youthful indiscretion, usually pushed into oblivion by a 30-year mortgage, a couple of kids or, for academics, tenure. Yet the re-examination of foundations remains essential to any critical perspective seeking to transcend the immediacy of the given and to avoid a comfortable conformism which distorts the present by idealizing and hypostatizing it to the level of a universal standard against which all other possible alternatives are judged