Russell Jacoby: Ideology

Russell Jacoby is American historian. Explore interesting quotes on ideology.

Russell Jacoby: 100 quotes0 likes

“Existentialism is bourgeois ideology in the hour of its defeat.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 63

“The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 6-7

“Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … “The greatness of Freud,” wrote Adorno, “consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality.” … A parallel can be established between Marx’s judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 27-28

““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.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 48-49

“The inner connection between a positivism of numbers and quantities and one of human values and qualities is the excision of a critical distance and theory. Both surrender to different faces of reality—its facts or its ideology—and both stay clear and clean of antagonisms and contradictions.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 61

“Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 73

“No matter how heretical the neo- and post-Freudians imagined they were in theorizing about the “values,” “insecurities,” “goals” of the individual, they were safely following the official ideology of the private and autonomous individual and consumer.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 26