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“... from a metaphysic to a particular political consequence (much as people used to worry about Karl Popper’s deduction of a piecemeal liberalism from his metaphysic of provisional knowledge). The trouble with metaphysical theories is that they are utterly general, and so designed in advance to accommodate my particular cultural adaptation. Norris grants ...”

“... Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The Widow’s Children ‘a compelling and satisfying book’. All those endorsements, however, didn’t keep her novels from going out of print at the end of the decade (they were reprinted in the 1980s, but went out of print again). Then ...”

“... of Art Nouveau. He was to architecture what Schoenberg was to music, Wittgenstein to philosophy or Karl Kraus to journalism – a scourge of the impure and the superfluous. In ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), his fiercest polemic, he associates the Art Nouveau designer with a child smearing walls and a ‘Papuan’ tattooing skin. For Loos the ornate design of ...”

“... toxic populism, just as Plato warned. Capitalism inclines towards self-serving oligarchy, just as Marx predicted. Each works only if the other is there.Wolf would like to think that democracy and capitalism suit each other, despite their differences. Both rest on an idea of individual human agency. In a capitalist economy consumer choice determines what gets ...”

“... all this he was seriously studying socialism; fired by Henry George, he was instructed mainly by Marx, whom he actually read (in French). Soon he was an indispensable Fabian. He worked like the devil – it is quite a relief to find him talking about his ‘inveterate laziness’, and to learn that on some days he ‘did practically nothing’. But on such ...”

“... lectures by Korsch and Sternberg, to ask Weigel for Communist books and to read intensively in Marx and Lenin. His conviction was never purely theoretical, however. According to Willett, a turning-point seems to have come for him in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash and the world economic crisis which led to the rise of the Nazis. On May Day that ...”

“... more impossibilia, less and less consolation – left his followers orphaned from his meanings. Karl Kraus was alert to this, and to Freud as unmistakably a Viennese phenomenon. Freud’s cultural outlook may or may not have been as insular as we are told, with his indifference to contemporary developments, but the air of valediction places him squarely in ...”

“... others) call the hypothetico-deductive philosophy of science. His main source for it is Sir Karl Popper. Medawar is well-known as Popper’s leading disciple; his superlatives have even been emblazoned on the cover of Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery to lubricate the sales of that work. But Popper himself is not the subject of an ...”

“... 3rd, around 12 o’clock: wet rub-down; short walk; fresh compress. Then lunch in my room with Karl [Ritter], to prevent insubordination. Then an hour spent in idleness: brisk two-hour walk – alone. 4th, around 4 o’clock: another wet rub-down and a short walk. 5th, hip-bath for a quarter of an hour around 6 o’clock, followed by a walk to warm me ...”

“... in fiction, or reality versus fiction. Take the many articles about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s ...”

“... Richter may be painting after the ‘subject of history’ (the proletariat in some readings of Marx) has left the stage, but he is still making paintings on the subject of history and its agents.This line of argument is presented with exemplary patience and learning in a series of long, leisurely essays written across several decades and collected here. It ...”

“... sovereign infrastructure all the rest flowed. The picture might be blurred, by reference to Marx’s more liberal writings or to, say, Althusser’s notion of ‘relative autonomy’ for literature, but, by and large, the direction of the logic of explanation, from materio-economic ground to any-and-every sort of consequent, was clear and unilinear. In ...”

“... into English, Baudrillard places himself at the revisionary end of a line that begins with Marx and his commodity law of value and that was later variously transformed by Benjamin, as in his most famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, a major text for the Sixties, and by the ...”

“... these mechanisms? In its fixation on the wage relation (the original source of injustice for Marx), it hasn’t given adequate attention to the family. In her new book, Melinda Cooper argues that the family has been pivotal in the reform of capitalism since the early 1970s, but that this fact has been disguised by the slipperiness of conservative ...”

“... those ideas back … as gifts’. This is strikingly reminiscent of the communist’s role, per Marx, as someone who shows ‘the world what it is really fighting for’. And indeed, Graeber described himself at one point as a ‘libertarian, practice-oriented Marxist’. There was ‘no necessary contradiction’ between Marxism and anarchism, he ...”