“Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.”

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 29.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally vali…" by Max Horkheimer?
Max Horkheimer photo
Max Horkheimer 61
German philosopher and sociologist 1895–1973

Related quotes

“The only valid rule about the proper length of a statement is that it achieve its purpose effectively.”

Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) Canadian eductor

Source: Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), p. 10: Introduction

Ernesto Grassi photo

“The rule is derived inductively from experience, therefore does not have any inner necessity, is always valid only for special cases and can anytime be refuted by opposite facts. On the contrary, the law is a logical relation between conceptual constructions; it is therefore deductible from upper [übergeordnete] laws and enables the derivation of lower laws; it has as such a logical necessity in concordance with its upper premises; it is not a mere statement of probability, but has a compelling, apodictic logical value once its premises are accepted”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1920s, Kritische Theorie der Formbildung (1928, 1933), p. 91; as cited in: M. Drack, W. Apfalter, D. Pouvreau (2007) " On the making of a system theory of life: Paul A Weiss and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's conceptual connection http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874664/". in: Q Rev Biol. 2007 December; 82(4): 349–373.

David Lange photo

“The statement which has been made by the Leader of the Opposition was that the intelligence has stopped. I don't know whether that was a personal confession or whether it was a statement of position.”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Referring to Jim McLay's comments on the effect of the nuclear ships ban on the exchange of military intelligence with New Zealand's allies.
Source: Gliding on the Lino: The Wit of David Lange, compiled by David Barber, 1987.

Freeman Dyson photo
Jürgen Habermas photo

“[Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.”

Source: Knowledge and Human Interests, 1971, p. 310 as cited in: Dominick LaCapra (1983) Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. p. 170

Umberto Eco photo

“A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.”

[O] : Introduction, 0.8
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: A general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity — languages — and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals. It studies and describes languages through languages. By studying the human signifying activity it influences its course. A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Ivanka Trump photo

“Every legally cast vote should be counted. Every illegally cast vote should not. This should not be controversial. This is not a partisan statement — free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy”

Ivanka Trump (1981) American businesswoman, socialite, fashion model and daughter of Donald Trump

via tweet https://twitter.com/IvankaTrump/status/1324720284948193285 On November 6, 2020
2020

Karen Armstrong photo

“The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Context: The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tsu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.

Related topics