Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: savagesusie

“critical theory designed by cultural Marxists was inserted into the curricula to demonize our Founding Fathers.”

There’s nothing wrong with critical theory. It’s like logic, a tool.

At least this is what I was taught. 4 things you want to see from sources:

1. Corroboration. Does the source say the same thing as other sources.

2. Time. Is the source closer to the event than other sources.

3. Author. Is the author a primary source? Did he witness the event in question?

4. Reliability. Do we possess the original? If we do not possess the original, how many and how old are the copies which we do possess? How large is the textual variation?

It certainly doesn’t spare Marxist garbage like the Manifesto, which is just that, a theory about history. It makes claims, which haven’t come true. It’s contradictory, as a manifesto from the bourgeosie to the proletariat, not the other way around. It assumes that class is rigid, and yet flexible enough that the bourgeosie can harangue the proletariat.


23 posted on 12/25/2010 11:26:33 AM PST by BenKenobi (Rush speaks! I hear, I obey)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies ]


To: BenKenobi
Nice post, thanks.

Marx was proletarian in terms of his income and living in squalor, but he was certainly educated and "bourgeoise" in that respect.

26 posted on 12/25/2010 2:14:06 PM PST by lentulusgracchus
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies ]

To: BenKenobi

My point is that schools teach you lies (Marxism): The following exert is from a great article on PC which includes origin of “Critical Theory”.

“Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,” – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – “in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.”

The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.”


31 posted on 12/25/2010 11:19:32 PM PST by savagesusie
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies ]

To: BenKenobi

This is one of the most comprehensive explanations of PC and easiest to understand.

Forgot the article: http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/


32 posted on 12/25/2010 11:22:54 PM PST by savagesusie
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson