Russell Jacoby quotes
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
"When material needs are largely satisfied,” writes Carl Rogers, "as they tend to be for many people in this affluent society, individuals are turning to the psychological world, groping for a greater degree of authenticity and fulfillment.” The clear distinction between material and psychic needs is already the mystification; it capitulates to the ideology of the affluent society which affirms the material structure is sound, conceding only that some psychic and spiritual values might be lacking. Exactly this distinction sets up "authenticity” and "fulfillment” as so many more commodities for the shopper. Rather it is the fissure itself which is the source of the ills-between work and "free” time, material structure and psychological "world,” producers and consumers.
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 does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society-call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy-stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia.
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
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
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
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
