“McManus draws a historical trajectory that sees conservatives responding to the challenges of socialism, communism, and fascism by hardening Burke’s pragmatic project into an ideology: what we now call neoliberalism.”
“It does not take an expert logician to deduce that if climate catastrophe were really upon us, we would also observe people giving extreme warnings, and it could even be the case that they still would not support, for example, nuclear power.”
“While this may be a fair criticism of socialist intellectuals, it isn’t obvious to me that all socialists were as myopically economistic as Honneth suggests.”
“That was one of the things the campaign was good at: trying to get as much controversy as possible by provoking conflicts. It’s not an honorable way to go through campaigning, but it worked. Better than you could say for Tim Ryan.”
“In his book, Žižek analyzes why Kant and his progeny have been struggling philosophically in recent years, while offering a partial defense of their views.”
“Žižek observes that while many thought this kind of politician was an anachronistic oddity in mid-2000’s neoliberal societies, Berlusconi may actually have been an archetype of the future.”
“McManus…is much closer to the analytic tradition represented by authors such as John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum. Yet, his work is much richer thanks to his engagement with Marxist class analysis and post-structuralist philosophy…”
“There have been several assaults on this conceit before in the Western world; the philosopher Slavoj Žižek directs our attention to three in particular.”
“Lendvai believes that we should never underestimate the role that ‘personalities’ play in politics.”
“First of all, I think we should make [the census] a fun process, where people, families engage in it [together], particularly in hard to count districts and communities.”
“The paradox of believing in conspiracy theories is that—despite the distrust and paranoia reflected in them—adherents often deeply desire a sense of order in the world.“
“[Some of my students] couldn’t do all three: commute, work, and schoolwork. So, I saw the affordability problem growing and growing in that setting, but I hear it also from my constituents in every higher education setting.”
“The totalitarian movements offered the promise of not just belonging, but total belonging. The individual would be swallowed into the movement, becoming a single homogenous mass with one’s fellows.”
“For Ortega y Gasset, the elite has nothing to do with class or any other kind sociocultural factors. The elite are simply those who make great demands of themselves.”
“In the case of our current crisis of meaning, it was only in the 19th century that sensitive figures truly began to grasp the profound changes which had transformed societies.”
