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Russell Jacoby Quotes (1945-)
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About Russell Jacoby
Russell Jacoby (born April 23, 1945) is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) an author, and critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are Twentieth Century European and American intellectual and cultural history specifically the history of intellectuals and education.
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“Existentialism is bourgeois ideology in the hour of its defeat.”
“Civilization is a scar tissue from a past of violence and destruction.”
“Multiculturalism is not the opposite of assimilation, but its product.”
“The post-Freudians … have fallen victim to the ravages of the intellectual division of labor.”
“The sundering of a scientific from a poetic truth is the primal mark of the administrative mind.”
“The child ego, once nurtured and scarred by the family is no longer nurtured but simply integrated.”
“Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered.”
“Multiculturalism relies on an intellectual rout, the refusal or inability to address what makes up a culture.”
“The professional philosopher in keen competition with the natural scientist resolves to be more certain about less.”
“Once upon a time leftists and radicals talked of liberation or the abolition of work. Now the talk is about full employment.”
“The story of the rise, fall, and forgetting of the individual is the tale of the rise, fall, and repression of psychoanalysis.”
“As Adorno wrote of Anna Freud’s book, it evinces “the reduction of psychoanalysis to a conformist interpretation of the reality principle.””
“The individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by the relations in which it is enmeshed. “It is a fellow-being before it is a being.””
“The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology.”
“Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In accepting the bourgeois form of reason as Reason itself, Roszak does his bit to perpetuate its reign.”
“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.”
“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.””
“David Bromwich has wondered whether intellectuals today would oppose an economic slavery if it lacked any racial or cultural dimension.”
“The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesia. Rather it is social amnesia—memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society.”
“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.”
“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 Quotes by Topic
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Russell Jacoby on Multiculturalism 3 quotes
“Multiculturalism flourishes as a programme while it weakens as a reality.”
Russell Jacoby on Common sense 2 quotes
“Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.”
Russell Jacoby on Dialectic 2 quotes
“Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.”
Russell Jacoby on Academia 2 quotes
“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 on Critical theory
“Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.”
Russell Jacoby on Social science
“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 on Apology
“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 on Planned obsolescence
“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 on Obsolescence
“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 on Left-wing politics
“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 on Culture
“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 on Behaviorism
“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.”
What Russell Jacoby Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Russell Jacoby shared regarding contemporaries.
Russell Jacoby on Thomas Sowell 2 quotes
“Sowell likes history, but he likes it on Post-it notes. He also prefers to revisit stale arguments rather than intervene in current controversies. In a book about intellectuals and society, he manages to ignore the health-care and financial crises. Instead, he argues that intellectuals have misunderstood Herbert Hoover. Wouldn't VLII help us with the current economic crisis, to find out which ideas "worked"?”
Russell Jacoby on Stanley Fish
Russell Jacoby on Hanns Johst
“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 on Alfred Adler
“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 on Carl Rogers
““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 on Salman Rushdie
“[Published six-months after the near-fatal stabbing of Rushdie in August 2022] As it happens, he had cause to worry. In the intervening years, support for Rushdie and for free expression has narrowed ... An August 19 New York City rally of writers gathered in support of Rushdie reprised a 1989 demonstration against the fatwa in which Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and others participated, but the later iteration "paled in comparison," a Le Monde editorial remarked. Across social media, writers expressed concern for Rushdie's health, but an instinctual solidarity with him and the sense—so strong at the time of the fatwa—that his fate spoke to all of us as members of a liberal society did not materialize. Even among his defenders, free speech took a back seat. Why? One reason is fear. In 2009, the British writer Hanif Kureishi told Prospect Magazine that "nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses." He might have added that no one would have the balls to defend it. Most writers, Kureishi continued, live quietly, and "they don’t want a bomb in the letterbox."”
About Russell Jacoby
Russell Jacoby (born April 23, 1945) is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) an author, and critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are Twentieth Century European and American intellectual and cultural history specifically the history of intellectuals and education.