If there is life elsewhere in the universe and its level of development is as backward as its terrestrial counterpart, they will probably have sociologists and political scientists constructing and deconstructing social reality. If and when they finally make contact with earth, these pundits will have great difficulty making sense of American race relations, no matter how many studies the Federation will commission to make sense out of the subject. The earth's most developed country, whose success is largely due to (...) its heterogeneity, pragmatism and common sense, does not seem able to deal with differences in skin pigmentation, to the point that its best intellectuals systematically make fools of themselves in explaining it. (shrink)

The main feature of Whitebook's reply is that he does not give an inch and, more convinced than ever, keeps charging the windmills of redemption and revolution with the same lame theoretical weapons he had previously deployed. Only this time, he seeks reinforcements by appealing to the “heavies”: Habermas, Castoriadis and Heller. Since multiplying zero by any figure still yields zero, no substantive progress has been made. It would be futile to reiterate the same objections once again. Rather, to move (...) the debate beyond dead center it may be helpful to pose new questions, e.g., in terms of the status of the concepts employed and the political consequences they entail. (shrink)

With an unusually well-orchestrated PR campaign worthy of the slickest mass commodity, Tikkun presents itself as a newjewish progressive magazine to challenge Commentary. But it is well known that many progressive U.S. magazines are largely staffed by Jews and most Jewish intellectuals are generally liberal. This striking redundancy immediately raises suspicion about either its Jewish or its liberal pedigree — or both. The obvious clash between the traditional secularism of progressive thought and the archaic religious appeal casts a shadow both (...) ways. Is it really Jewish or is it really liberal? And if it somehow manages to be both, what does it mean for present Jewish and liberal thought? (shrink)

Frustrated radicals who have managed, over the last 20 years of chaotic growth and revolutionary restructuring of higher education, to translate their “revolutionary rhetoric” only into tenured academic positions, tend to have an ambivalent relation to critical theory. On the one hand, they are irresistibly attracted to it. In a sophisticated scholarly fashion especially appropriate to their new professional status, critical theory addresses all those troublesome cultural questions that were becoming increasingly urgent but which traditional brands of Marxism could not (...) readily tackle through standard materialist approaches. But, on the other hand, they were never able to digest critical theory's discouraging political implications which, for all practical purposes, effectively undermined most radical conventional wisdom and assumptions — assumptions that even such critical theorists as Adorno and Marcuse could not always do without. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that there is — or at least there ought to be — a correspondence between theoretical and political positions. But the very labelling of it as conventional wisdom already betrays its falsity. Sure enough, any careful examination of the record readily reveals that this correspondence hardly ever obtains. No such parallel can be drawn for the Hegelians who split into Right and Left wings with qualitatively different positions, e.g., the German Young Hegelians and the British neo-Hegelians (...) at the end of the last century. Nor is that true for Marxists who bifurcated into Social Democrats and Bolsheviks, or for the existentialists who produced Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, as well as Kierkegaard and Marcel. (shrink)