Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ’68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.
It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word ‘evil’ as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.
It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
The most compelling confirmation of Marx’s theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world.
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.