Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

Terry Eagleton

Categorized in : Class Capitalism Working Class

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black. by Terry Eagleton

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

black cat night

If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do. by Terry Eagleton

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all trac... by Terry Eagleton

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

revolution ends successful

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. by Terry Eagleton

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

political recipes historical

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.

pain justice jesus

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensi... by Terry Eagleton

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

sensitive art needs

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

united-states imagination lying

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

looks ideas art

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.

reading together thinking

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

space reading book

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

possibility alternatives kind

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

struggle mistake men

Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.

yahweh totems way

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

adequate simple moving

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong. by Terry Eagleton

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

shame strong world

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours. by Terry Eagleton

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

indulge favour humanity

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

actors different long

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

taught backgrounds catholic

I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.

stupid ideas thinking