Russell Jacoby Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

Once upon a time leftists and radicals talked of liberation or the abolition of work. Now the talk is about full employment.

Russell Jacoby
[Carl] Rogers's Encounter Groups … is copy for the campaign of self-manipulation in an age of mass manipulation. … The notion here is simple: the real person is locked within the artificial, the role, and needs a little encouragement to step out into the fresh air. As with the neo-Freudians, society is conceived as an external factor, an outside force acting on the individual, but not decisively casting the individual from without and from within. The mechanical conception, severing within and without, and presupposing that only the outside is prey to social forces, is assumed or stated throughout the post-Freudian writings.

Russell Jacoby
What must be acknowledged, for example the prevalence of anxiety, is grafted onto man's essence as if it grew there. Such is the tried and tested method of the apologist: what is social in origin is presented as natural.

Russell Jacoby
In the name of a new theory past theory is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud and Marx—or appreciate their limitations—and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought.

Russell Jacoby
The disdain for culture expressed by Johst and Fanon is not identical, however. Both despise the deceit of culture, but for opposite reasons. For Johst, culture is in itself a fraud, the cheap talk of weaklings; for Fanon, culture deceives by reneging on its promises. Johst and the Nazis hated culture itself; Fanon hated its hypocrisy, a very different notion.

Russell Jacoby
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.

Russell Jacoby
The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist.

Russell Jacoby
To fasten on the facts while forgetting the social content is to fall prey to a mystifying immediacy. In an antagonistic society, appearance and essence, immediacy and mediacy, diverge; things are not what they seem to be.

Russell Jacoby
The story of the rise, fall, and forgetting of the individual is the tale of the rise, fall, and repression of psychoanalysis.

Russell Jacoby
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.

Russell Jacoby
Freud's link to a Hegelian tradition—with which he otherwise shares little—is in the deliberate renunciation of common sense. A person who professes to believe in commonsense psychology, Freud is reported saying once, and who thinks psychoanalysis is 'far-fetched' can certainly have no understanding of it, for it is common sense which produces all the ills we have to cure.

Russell Jacoby
The free market in ideas has never been free, but always a market. To undo this necessitates not commissars and censors but critical intelligence loyal to an objective notion of truth. If there is a repressive tolerance, then there is also a liberating intolerance.

Russell Jacoby
The concept of human existence suggests an abstract human condition; class existence indicts bad conditions. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. … The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished.

Russell Jacoby
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.

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

Russell Jacoby
[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.

Russell Jacoby