Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed that great triumvirate of late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century thought - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - "the school of suspicion," by which he meant those thinkers who taught us to regard with suspicion our conscious understandings and experience, whether the deliverances of ordinary psychological introspection about one's desires ("I really want to be rich!"), or the moral categories political leaders and ordinary citizens apply to themselves and the social world they inhabit ("an inheritance tax is an immoral death tax!"). "Beneath" or "behind" the surface lay causal forces that explained the conscious phenomena precisely because they laid bare the true meaning of those phenomena: I don't really want lots of money, I want the love I never got as a child; survivors have no moral claim on an inheritance, but it is in the interests of the ruling classes that we believe they do; and so on. Recent years have been, in now familiar ways, unkind to Marx and Freud. Yet instead of a frontal assault on the critiques of the explanatory programs of Marx and Freud, the defense of their legacy in the English-speaking world has gradually fallen to those I will call moralizing interpreters of their thought. The moralizing readers de-emphasize (or simply reject) the explanatory and causal claims in the work of Marx and Freud, and try to marry more-or-less Marxian and Freudian ideas to various themes in normative ethics and political philosophy. Explanation of phenomena is abandoned in favor of the more traditional philosophical enterprise of justification, whether of the just distribution of resources or the possibility of morality's authority. So, for example, G.A. Cohen, the most influential of English-language Marx interpreters in recent decades, has declared that "Marxism has lost much or most of its [empirical] carapace, its hard shell of supposed fact" and that, as a result, "Marxists . . . are increasingly impelled into normative political philosophy." (Under the influence of Habermas, the Marxist tradition has taken a similar turn on the Continent.) Similarly, a leading moral philosopher notes that, "Just when philosophers of science thought they had buried Freud for the last time, he has quietly reappeared in the writings of moral philosophers" and goes on to claim that "Freud's theory of the superego provides a valuable psychological model for various aspects of (Kant's) Categorical Imperative." On these new renderings, Marx and Freud command our attention because they are really just complements (or correctives) to Rawls or Korsgaard, really just normative theorists who can be made to join in a contemporary dialogue about equality and the authority of morality. Nietzsche, too, has been transformed by moralizing interpreters, though in a somewhat different way. The crucial development here has been the retreat from the natural reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher engaged in an attack on morality - a reading first articulated by the Danish scholar Georg Brandes more than a century ago - in favor of a reading which presents Nietzsche as fundamentally concerned with questions of truth and knowledge: the moralistic scruples of interpreters are satisfied by treating Nietzsche as concerned with something else, something less morally alarming than a "revaluation of values." I shall argue that, in fact, all three of the great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion have suffered at the hands of moralizing interpreters who have resisted the essentially naturalistic thrust of their conception of philosophical practice. As a matter of both textual exegesis and intellectual importance, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are best read as primarily naturalistic thinkers, that is thinkers who view philosophical inquiry as continuous with a sound empirical understanding of the natural world and the causal forces operative in it. When one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness: that, in short, is the essence of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID691002_code603.pdf?abstractid=691002&rulid=10752981&mirid=2

Ian McEwan: A Novel Approach to Political Communication

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud

Louise M. Rosenblatt s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fieldsliterary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics.Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts.The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading processevoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories.\

The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work

The Politics of Aristotle

Culture, community, nation

Preface and Acknowledgements. Part 1: Theory, Politics, and History: 1. 1. Critical Theory and Modernity. 1. 2. Critical Theory and the Crisis of Marxism. 1. 3. The Institute for Social Research. Part 2: From Supradisciplinary Materialism to Critical Theory: 2. 1. Supradisciplinary Materialism. 2. 2. Toward a Materialist Social Psychology. 2. 3. Traditional and Critical Theory. Part 3: State, Society, Economy: New Theories of Capitalism and Fascism: 3. 1. Political Sociology and Political Economy. 3. 2. From Market to Monopoly / State Capitalism. 3. 3. Fascism. 3. 4. Fragments of a Theory of Society. Part 4: From Dialectic of Enlightenment to the Authoritarian Personality: Critical Theory in the 1940s: 4. 1 Science, Reason and Dialectic of Enlightenment. 4. 2. Eclipse of Reason. 4. 3. Critical Theory, the Proletariat and Politics. 4. 4. Studies in Prejudice and the Return to Germany. Part 5: From 'Authentic Art' to the Culture of Industries: Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Culture: 5. 1. Dialectics of Culture. 5. 2. Critical Theory and the Culture Industry. 5. 3. New Critical Perspectives on Commodities, Needs and Consumption. Part 6: From the Consumer Society to Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Vicissitudes of Capitalism: 6. 1. Critical Theory and the Consumer Society. 6. 2. New Critical Perspectives on Commodities, Needs and Consumption. 6. 3. Critical Theory, Modernity and Post-Modernity. Part 7: Techno-Capitalism: 7. 1. Technology, Capitalism and Domination. 7. 2. The Capitalist State. 7. 3. Toward a New Crisis Theory: Habermas and Offe. Part 8: Theory and Practice: The Politics of Critical Theory: 8. 1. Critical Theory and Radical Politics. 8. 2. Techno-Capitalism, Crisis and Social Transformation. 8. 3. New Social Movements and Socialist Politics. 8. 4. For Supradisciplinary Radical Social Theory with a Practical Intent. Notes. Index.

Critical theory, Marxism, and modernity

Introduction: Habermas and the public sphere

A work of literary criticism in which Kundera argues that the European novel is "born out of the laughter of God". The author's previous novels include "The Joke", "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being".

Ian McEwan: A Novel Approach to Political Communication

Citations

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud

The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work

References

The Politics of Aristotle

Culture, community, nation

Critical theory, Marxism, and modernity

Introduction: Habermas and the public sphere

The Art of the Novel

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