HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: John Holbo on the Horrible Atrocity of Defending Good Causes Badly!
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Western Marxism
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From three years ago: 2022-10-27. Did I get this right back then?...
I find my friend John Holbo writing:
John Holbo: Russell Jacoby Against the Buzzwords: ‘Russell Jacoby… in “Tablet”… approvingly retweeted by Richard Dawkins, then by Elon Musk…. I’m sympathetic to Jacoby’s old line… ‘theory’ silliness… in the 80’s-90’s… perverse incentives… for doing ‘philosophy’ badly in various ways. This was not good…. But… as Jacoby himself used to acknowledge… pretend[ing] ‘ivory tower-types being eccentric’ = ‘barbarians at the gates of western civ’ is one more funny, bug-in-his-ear character in some David Lodge novel. But now Jacoby’s updated his script… these leftists don’t even have power in the Ivory Tower!—they don’t have jobs! they are bitter baristas! resentful HR drones!—that makes them so dangerous!… Their weakness is their terrible strength!… The black comedy quality of this twist—surely this is shaping up [as] a sad David Lodge novel...
And this is the illustration Russell Jacoby chooses to illustrate his article:
Oohhh… kaaaayyyy…
Who is this guy?
I did, long ago, read a very nice, book by Russell Jacoby called Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. It was worthwhile, even if written in embarrassingly crude-and-creaky New Leftese.
Jacoby’s work did cast a long shadow not on my contribution but on some of the other contributions than mine to our 2016 conference volume Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits?
I do remember Dan Drezner citing Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe in his 2017 The Ideas Industry.
Scanning my hard disk, I see his name come up in a few of my notes. So: someone who took the Long March from New Left (“I was part of a Boston bookstore ‘collective’ that interminably discussed everything from the titles the store should stock to the details of our lives…”) to, today, the Paleolithic Right:
...Russell Jacoby: The Takeover: Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students and unleashed them into the public square: ‘The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture… staff the ballooning diversity and inclusion commissariats that assault us…. Buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in public life. Already
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