[Billthedrill]

De Sade seems even by modern standards to have been clinically insane. I've read Justine, Juliette, and struggled through the nearly unreadable 120 Days Of Sodom, a book that was actually recreated by De Sade after the original was burnt, (and which of these was the one Beauvoir chose to defend). He wrote that the recreation wasn't as good as the original. One can only imagine.

The po-mo's have it wrong: De Sade wasn't actually advancing anything in particular as much as he was providing a disquisition on how systematic rejection of (especially) Christan mores led to a hedonistic sort of paradise on this earth - this is especially pronounced in Justine. The difficulty is that the hedonistic paradise he described was banal, brutal, and unutterably boring.

It is actually a fairly good measure of the intellectual progress of the postmodern left - it was a doctrine based on and restricted to rejection. There are flaws with present-day society just as there were flaws in de Sade's, and the assumption that categorical rejection of every more that built present society will lead to some sort of mirror-image utopia is one that even its adherents must know is illogical, and hence they reject logic; is immoral, and hence they reject morality, is incoherent, and hence they reject coherence. It is also impossible, which is a much more difficult thing to reject. The only recourse to demanding the impossible is to pretend that you've attained it, and that is precisely where postmodernism leads, to a grand fantasy world with increasingly few connections to the real one.

[RightWhale]

Simone de Beauvoir (heroine of the man-hating lesbian feminists)

They haven't read her writing, or they didn't understand it. She was one of the early feminists, though.

[CatoRenasci]

DeSade was writing in the same climate of opinion that vaunted Rousseau's adoration of the primative. I, too, slogged through DeSade, back when I was a graduate student in intellectual history specializing in the Enlightenment and thought I needed to understand the dark side of it as well as the more luminous facets. In many respects I think DeSade is a fascinating reductio ad absurdum on the branch of the French Enlightenment that encompassed Rousseau. It's curious how great the contrast is between the French Enlightenment, which seemed ever attracted to extremes, and either the English or German Enlightenments, both of which combined philosophical speculation with a firm connection to common sense.

[little jeremiah]

Liberalism (really, leftism and all its pet isms) is a (serious) mental illness.

Objective reality exists, and they don't "believe" in it.

[El Conservador]

I read Philosophy in the Boudoir almost 6 years ago, a few months before I came to the US.

From what I vaguely remember reading, I'll agree with your assessment, but I'd like to add something:

He was more Nietzschean that Nietzsche himself. His hedonistic, "perfect" world would be ruled by Godless, powerful human beings who wouldn't budge in killing and maiming to achieve absolute power.

[Continental Soldier]

Thanks Bill -- I've been trying to get that across for some time now.