Sublime

“So, what you’re saying is that you were Emily Blasted?” Marx said.

As Marx and Engels put it in their classic summary: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.”

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty.

critical theory had to say something about what kinds of institutions are needed to protect individuals against the attractions of political extremism, on the one hand, and the depredations of a burgeoning capitalist economy, on the other.

In this process, Marx saw the seeds of a society that would eventually be reduced to two classes—owners and workers.

1 The Enlightenment and Idealism

and it was Marx who turned them on to Takashi Murakami and Tsuguharu Foujita. It was Marx, with his love of avant-garde instrumental music, who played Brian Eno, John Cage, Terry Riley, Miles Davis, and Philip Glass on his CD player while Sadie and Sam worked. It was Marx who suggested they reread The Odyssey and The Call of the Wild and Call It Co

the ideal of a society governed in the economic and political sphere by co-operation between the workers now inspires scarcely a single mass movement,

In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers—from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yes and a partial no. Insofar as Marx posited a metaphysical materialism, an ethical relativism, and a strangulating totalitarianism, I responded with an unambiguous no; but insofar as he pointed to weaknesses of traditio