Russell Jacoby Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology.

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

Russell Jacoby
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 staves off its replacement by manufacturing the illusion that it is perpetually new.

Russell Jacoby
The child ego, once nurtured and scarred by the family is no longer nurtured but simply integrated.

Russell Jacoby
The laws of social development are not identical with the laws in the natural sciences. The content of the social laws is not nature but second nature: coagulated history. They are manmade, but they also make men; they are dialectical, at once subject and object.

Russell Jacoby
Existentialism is bourgeois ideology in the hour of its defeat.

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

Russell Jacoby
Civilization is a scar tissue from a past of violence and destruction.

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

Russell Jacoby
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.

Russell Jacoby
Though the ancient world understood that work was a curse, modern industrial society spreads its gospel. The working class, Lafargue hopelessly hoped, must reject the work fetish.

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

Russell Jacoby
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.

Russell Jacoby
No group is able, and few are willing, to stand up to the potent homogenizing forces of advanced industrial society. All Americans, from African Americans to Greek Americans, buy the same goods, look at the same movies and television, pursue the same activities and have—more or less—the same desires for success.

Russell Jacoby
Multiculturalism is not the opposite of assimilation, but its product.

Russell Jacoby
The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesia. Rather it is social amnesia—memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society.

Russell Jacoby
Multiculturalism relies on an intellectual rout, the refusal or inability to address what makes up a culture.

Russell Jacoby
As Adorno wrote of Anna Freud's book, it evinces the reduction of psychoanalysis to a conformist interpretation of the reality principle.

Russell Jacoby
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.

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.

Russell Jacoby
The Adlerians, in the name of individual psychology, take the side of society against the individual. … Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. Our science … is based on common sense. Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Russell Jacoby
No matter how heretical the neo- and post-Freudians imagined they were in theorizing about the values, insecurities, goals of the individual, they were safely following the official ideology of the private and autonomous individual and consumer.

Russell Jacoby
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.

Russell Jacoby
The post-Freudians … have fallen victim to the ravages of the intellectual division of labor.

Russell Jacoby
Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … The greatness of Freud, wrote Adorno, consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality. … A parallel can be established between Marx's judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over.

Russell Jacoby
Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered.

Russell Jacoby
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.

Russell Jacoby
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.

Russell Jacoby
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.

Russell Jacoby
Skinner … decrees … the abolition of freedom by way of behavior modification and a souped-up environment, in the name of a new scientific value—survival. The irony is that freedom and individuality have only existed in their mangled bourgeois form; to propose junking them in the name of survival is to propose the very society we now have, one that subsists exactly by an ethos of survival, paying lip service to freedom and the individual while rewarding the victors and punishing the victims. Freedom and individuality have never been more than adornments for an ugly environment of survival of the fittest.

Russell Jacoby