Russell Jacoby - Thought Quotes

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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
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 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 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