“What is the purpose in this context of appealing to opinion and semantic relativism? The purpose is to get your opponent off your back and to get some breathing space. If your opponent accepts that the debate is a matter… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share Image
“Nasty political correctness as a tactic then makes perfect sense. Having rejected reason, we will not expect ourselves or others to behave reasonably. Having put our passions to the fore, we will act and react more crudely and range-of-the-moment. Having lost our sense of ourselves as individuals, we will seek our identities in our groups. Having little in common with… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share
“Marxism was and is a class analysis, pitting economic classes against each other in a zero-sum competition. In that competition, the stronger parties would… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share Image
“Deconstruction as an educational strategy Here is an example. Kate Ellis is a radical gender feminist. Ellis, as she writes in Socialist Review,… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share Image
“Yet mere membership as a matter of duty is not enough for Hegel, given the grandeur of the state’s divine historical purpose: “One must… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share Image
“In a “secret speech” to the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev made a sensational revelation of the crimes of Stalin’s era. In the name of the future of socialism, Stalin had had millions of his own citizens tortured, subjected to inhuman deprivations, executed, or sent to die in Siberian labor camps. What had… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share
“That is my second hypothesis: Postmodernism is a response to the crisis of faith of the academic far Left. Its epistemology justifies the leap… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share Image
“Given the pervasiveness of capitalism’s domination, the revolutionary vanguard can come only from those outcast intellectuals—especially among the younger students[282]—those who are able to “link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception”[283] and who thereby can see through the appearance of peace to the reality of oppression, who have retained enough of their humanity not to have been… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share
“A variation on this strategy was implicit in a new definition of “poverty” that the Left began to offer in the early 1960s: the… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share Image
“Postmodernism is the first ruthlessly consistent statement of the consequences of rejecting reason, those consequences being necessary given the history of epistemology since Kant.” — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share Image
“From the postmodern anti-realist metaphysics and anti-reason epistemology, the postmodern social consequences follow almost directly. Once we set aside reality and reason, what are we left with to go on? We can, as the conservatives would prefer, simply turn to our group’s traditions and follow them. Or we can, as the post-modernists will prefer, turn to our feelings and follow… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share
“The empirical evidence has been much harder on socialism. Economically, in practice the capitalist nations are increasingly productive and prosperous, with no end in sight. Not only are the rich getting fantastically richer, the poor in those countries are getting richer too. And by direct and brutal contrast, every socialist experiment has ended in dismal economic failure—from the Soviet Union… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share
“Yet it is also true, Hegel granted, that in many cases the individual’s freedoms and interests will genuinely be set aside, overridden, and even smashed. One reason for this is that the state’s general principles are universal and necessary, and so they cannot be expected to apply perfectly to the particular and contingent. As Hegel explained, “universal law is not… — Stephen R.C. Hicks Copy Share
![“Yet mere membership as a matter of duty is not enough for Hegel, given the grandeur of the state’s divine historical purpose: “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.”[211]” quote by Stephen R.C. Hicks](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/371/stephen-r-c-hicks-12692_quote_yet-mere-membership-as-a-matter-of-duty_229759.jpg)
