
“Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.”
As quoted in "Master Race," Partisan Review 50th Anniversary Edition (1985), edited by William Phillips
1980s
“Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.”
As quoted in "Master Race," Partisan Review 50th Anniversary Edition (1985), edited by William Phillips
Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2
Context: In spite of the universalistic spirit of the monotheistic Western religions and of the progressive political concepts that are expressed in the idea "that all men are created equal," love for mankind has not become a common experience. Love for mankind is looked upon as an achievement which, at best, follows love for an individual or as an abstract concept to be realized only in the future. But love for man cannot be separated from love for one individual. To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow.
La forme bâtarde de la culture de masse est la répétition honteuse: on répète les contenus, les schèmes idéologiques, le gommage des contradictions, mais on varie les formes superficielles: toujours des livres, des émissions, des films nouveaux, des faits divers, mais toujours le même sens.
"Modern," in The Pleasure of the Text (1975)
Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 53
Source: Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), p. 31.
Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology
"For America's Sake" speech (12 December 2006), as quoted in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 17
Context: Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control — a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.
Source: The twelve principles of efficiency (1912), p. 176; cited in Münsterberg (113; 52)