Hatching Dragons: How Decades of Humanities Scholarship have Unwittingly Laid a Groundwork for Far Right Theory
I recently commented on a Substack post in which “Endeavour” argued that the reason the imagery of heroism disappeared from Western culture is that the “[t]he concept of nationhood as defined by shared ancestry was replaced by one defined by a set of liberal civic values which could be applied universally.”1 A hero, Endeavour explains, was traditionally “understood to be someone who made extraordinary contributions towards their ‘tribal collective.’”2
I commented that Endeavour’s example of a traditional hero, Achilles, is not officially a representative of “the Greeks” insofar as The Iliad is concerned, and that the “liberal civic values” the author complains are causing the disappearance of heroic imagery have less to do with postwar distortions of the politics of “shared ancestry” than with changes occurring centuries ago to how heroic narratives were taught.3
These were offhand but, I believe, within the parameters of the argument, pressing criticisms, and anyone who takes time to look into the evidence Endeavour claims in support of the argument will discover more against it than for it. Although unsound, however, there remains something to take seriously about the argument, which is that Endeavour’s use of terms like “metanarrative” and interpretation of “undertones of Jewish angst” from comic books appropriates techniques originating with, and still mostly specific to, humanities departments to legitimize race hatred.4
A relevant complaint began Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay on “David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer.” Nietzsche discovered that German culture was in decline owing to a belief among its self-appointed cultural spokesmen that Germany’s military victory over France was the result of its superior culture. He responded that
[o]ur culture played no part even in our success in arms. Stern discipline, natural bravery and endurance, superior generalship, unity and obedience in the ranks, in short, elements that have nothing to do with culture, procured for us the victory over opponents in whom the most important of these elements were lacking[.]5
The problem, for Nietzsche, was that these spokesmen had appropriated the language and practices of German culture to carry out interests that had nothing to do with either the culture or the military.
Nietzsche defined culture as “above all, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people.”6 He was not writing in terms of division, but of unity, which is appropriate to culture because culture does not, of its own accord, divide between, or exclude, anyone. What culture does exclude is non-cultural elements, such as a military victory, which, to become culture, must first undergo transformation through cultural practices, the techniques specific to an art. Nietzsche finished his definition by explaining that
[m]uch knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if needs be can get along very well with the opposite of culture, barbarism, which is a lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles.7
Barbarism results from a neglect of cultural practices, the attempt to directly identify non-cultural elements with culture without the appropriate use of technique.
Nietzsche’s definition of culture allowed him to expose the cultural spokesmen as uncultured cynics, and to measure the ill effect that they were having on culture. They were cynics because they preferred the transactional elements of humanity, elements that persist only as facts of our species. The subordination of culture to military victory
is in the highest degree destructive: not because it is a delusion—for there exist very salutary and productive errors—but because it is capable of turning our victory into a defeat: into the defeat, if not the extirpation, of the German spirit for the benefit of the ‘German Reich’.8
The First World War realized this defeat, satisfied Nietzsche’s prediction by forcing a German culture predicated on military victory into contradiction with the defeated German people, and readied these people for the promise of cultural renewal through a militarized Third Reich.
But cultural decline was already apparent to some much earlier than the First World War. By 1873, Nietzsche felt confident enough in his appraisal of it to publish his description of the displacement of German culture by the cultural spokesmen, which acknowledged
[t]he enormous incongruity between this complacent, indeed exultant belief and an in fact notorious cultural deficiency [which] seems to be apparent only to the select few. For all those whose views coincide with public opinion have covered their eyes and stopped their ears—the incongruity must not be admitted to exist. How is this possible? What force is so powerful as to dictate such a ‘must not’? What species of man must have come to dominate in Germany that such strong and simple feelings can be prohibited and expression of them obstructed? I shall call this power, this species of man, by its name—it is the cultural philistine.9
It is a further incongruity that many of Nietzsche’s outspoken disciples are among those who “covered their eyes and stopped their ears” to what was said and done, but Nietzsche’s legacy is no exception to the rule of cultural philistinism, and the cultural philistines’ celebration of him is further proof that barbarism is compatible with knowledge, even knowledge of barbarism.
Nietzsche was thinking about a similar incongruity when he reported on how
a circle of philistines was celebrating the memory of a true and genuine non-philistine, and one moreover who in the strictest sense of the word perished by the philistines: the memory of the glorious Hölderlin.10
The cultural philistines
[t]hus had a right on this occasion to speak of tragic souls which perish through contact with ‘reality’—the word reality here understood in this sense, already alluded to, of philistine rationality.11
By “philistine rationality”, Nietzsche had in mind the levelling cynicism of the cultural philistines who exchanged a free, flourishing culture for one that emptied the human being of everything that might elevate it above the life cycle of our species.
The title of the essay refers to the distorted reflection of Strauss that Nietzsche found, while reading Strauss, in himself as both a thinker and a writer. In the essay, Nietzsche is critical of Strauss for choosing to express himself in the confessional style, the proper use of which was understood by Nietzsche and he criticized Strauss for impropriety:
David Strauss makes a twofold confession regarding philistine culture: confession by word and confession by deed—the word of the confessor and the deed of the writer. His book entitled The Old Faith and the New is, with regard to its content and with regard to its quality as a book and the production of a writer, an uninterrupted confession; and that he should permit himself to make public confession as to his beliefs at all already constitutes a confession.—It may be that everyone over forty has the right to compile an autobiography, for even the humblest of us may have experienced and seen from closer quarters things which the thinker may find worth noticing. But to depose a confession of one’s beliefs must be considered incomparably more presumptuous, since it presupposes that the writer accords value, not merely to what he has experienced or discovered or seen during his life, but even to what he has believed.12
The confession offers the reader no direct point of reference, no shared factual basis for Strauss’s beliefs. Instead, Strauss depended on abstractions, language that generalized in too imprecise a manner to lay claim to any actual experience. Nietzsche diagnosed the meaninglessness in Strauss’s words as the detachment of language from experience, as Strauss unable to connect the two in a way communicable to the reader.
While attempting to wrestle with Nietzsche, Endeavour describes Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an argument against the “ease, comfort, and convenience” of sedentary and lonely lifestyles, food delivery and dating apps.13 Contrary to this description, however, the philistine rationality of the last man is foremost an assault on the spirit rather than on “physical health,” and Endeavour’s reduction of the problem to laziness—too lazy to exercise or go out with friends and see family, to cook for himself or to hit on women in person—is an example of, rather than a solution to, the dispirited, and all too healthy, industriousness characteristic of the last man.14 A slow, thoughtful explication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra might have clued Endeavour in as to the importance of Zarathustra’s choice to live in solitude (as did Nietzsche), and apart from the civic values that Endeavour proclaims in his post on Nietzsche and decries in his post on heroes.
What makes the situation with Endeavour all the more curious is that the language and practices of humanities departments were so easily appropriated to legitimize race hatred—curious, at least, until one attends closely to what is entailed by that language and those practices. For Endeavour, despite overstating the hypocrisy of modern heroic narratives, is nevertheless correct that there is, by and large, hypocrisy among our own cultural spokespeople.
Consider The Origins of Totalitarianism, wherein Hannah Arendt attempted to come to terms with the consequences of cultural decline predicted by Nietzsche. In the “Preface to Part One: Antisemitism”, Arendt reflected that
[t]he history of antisemitism, like the history of Jew-hatred, is part and parcel of the long and intricate story of Jewish-Gentile relations under the conditions of Jewish dispersion. Interest in this history was practically non-existent prior to the middle of the nineteenth century when it coincided with the rise of antisemitism and its furious reaction to emancipated and assimilated Jewry—obviously the worst possible constellation for establishing reliable historical records. Since then, it has been the common fallacy of the Jewish and non-Jewish historiography—though mostly for opposite reasons—to isolate the hostile elements in Christian and Jewish sources and to stress the series of catastrophes, expulsions, and massacres that have punctuated Jewish history just as armed and unarmed conflicts, war, famine, and pestilence have punctuated the history of Europe. Needless to add, it was Jewish historiography, with its strong polemical and apologetical bias, that undertook to trace the record for Jew-hatred in Christian history, while it was left to the antisemites to trace an intellectually not too dissimilar record from the ancient Jewish authorities.15
Arendt’s argument is that this historiographical fixation on Gentile hostility, with its eventual iteration as transhistorical hostility, was later appropriated by antisemitic propagandists:
what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystalized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon: they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence.16
The mistaken claim that the history of Jewish-Gentile relations was determined by an insurmountable hostility became a pretext by which antisemites could further the claim of a genetic basis for Jew-hatred. Arendt was not criticizing Jewish apologists for that hatred, but she did criticize their rationale, and it was her critical attitude towards the naturalization of hatred that, I contend, should be brought to bear on humanities departments and their enthusiasm for “historicizing” hate.
Since the 1990s, David Bromwich has been an eminently ruthless but penetrating critic of similar trends within liberal culture, which he has referred to as “culturalism,” “liberal culturalism”, “cultural identity”, and “identity politics.”17 In 1995, he published an article in Dissent in which he attempted to “offer some notes and questions about a line of political apologetics that if pursued far would lead to the euthanasia of liberal society.” This line of political apologetics was culturalism, which he defined as
the thesis that there is a universal human need to belong to a culture—to belong, that is, to a self-conscious group with a known history, a group that by preserving and transmitting its customs, memories, and common practices confers the primary pigment of individual identity on the persons it comprehends.18
Liberal theorists, Bromwich argued, had trafficked the thesis of culturalism as a means of underselling the ironies of liberalism, ironies that these theorists believed overwhelmingly exposed the incongruity between the ideals and reality of liberal societies. Bromwich characterized the activity of these liberal theorists as a “shedding of irony […] a gesture that they hope will be taken seriously.”19 Implicit in this characterization is an accusation that to be taken seriously is to speak on behalf of others, to maintain the irony that comes with increasing others’ rights by cynically impressing on them the importance of uniformity within a group.
The best suited to maintain culture on these terms, and thereby vent the ironies of liberal society, were the cultural spokespeople of the university, and Bromwich extended many examples of culturalism to university practice in a book he published several years prior to the Dissent article. In Politics by Other Means, Bromwich described the aftermath of an invitation to respond to Henry Rosovsky, the dean of faculty at Harvard University, who
appeared to deny that criticism of education could be anything but a pose, unless it offered a point by point administrable solution to the need for adjudication among constituencies. Having described his reaction in this way, however, I am brought up short. For the author of The University: An Owner’s Manuel did not say, or imply, that he was opposed to criticism. Rather, he was opposed to intellectual criticism: the kind of analysis that appeals too severely from habits to principles, and does not take into account the diversity of interest a great institution has to represent. Nor did he say that one ought to refuse to listen to the critics. One ought to be tolerant and hear what they had to say, only take every word with a strong dose of irony. But, to judge by his reactions on this occasion, there is another kind of criticism Rosovsky is prepared to attend to more warmly. This is the directive a society offers to its educators simply by being a society—an apparent tautology which I will explain as well as I can.20
Bromwich’s explanation is quite long, but he begins it by describing how
the proposals that come from a society being what it is are not, exactly, arguments. They are instead a given and deducible outcome, a machine, as it were, operated by the brute fact of demographics.21
In slightly different terms than Bromwich’s own, he explains that Rosovsky imagined liberal societies as demographic machines, and universities were to act as blueprints of, and operators to, these machines. If liberal societies were to achieve optimal demographic efficiency, then this was to occur first in the universities, among parallel demographics to that of society. Bromwich was disturbed by Rosovsky’s vision of the university, and reflected that
[i]t is, in truth, more than a license for conformity, it is a four-year sentence to conformity. For there is not one of us who could not, if the will were there, be identified and exhaustively understood as the member of some group.22
Momentarily, I will turn to Urvashi Chakravarty’s Fictions of Consent, born from the legacy of culturalism. First, however, I want to turn to Bromwich’s warning with which he concluded his article in Dissent:
I began by saying that liberal culturalism is a lie, a gesture of shrugging off irony adopted late by persons who think habitually as ironists. I have to recur to the same note more somberly. The theorists of cultural identity are hatching dragons. The nest belongs to a kind of creature that they have never imagined, but there they sit and brood, with care and concern, thinking what comes will possibly look a good deal like themselves. The fire may scorch us in the years to come.23
A generation later, Chakravarty published Fictions of Consent, an examination of
the ways in which early modern English iterations of service and servitude laid the conceptual and rhetorical groundwork for such pervasive and lasting narrative and ideological strategies around slavery.24
As Arendt made the case that Jewish historiography provided a pretext for later antisemitic ideology, and I suggest that humanities departments are providing a pretext for the far right, Chakravarty goes on to argue that the discourses of service and servitude in early modern England established a pretext for slavery. But while Arendt (and I, hopefully) avoided implying that a pretext is a cause, Chakravarty repeatedly attempts to establish a casual relationship; and, moreover, where Arendt drew out the motives of the apologists, which were separate from those of the antisemites, Chakravarty moves to render indistinguishable the motives behind service and servitude from those behind slavery. The result is that slavery becomes virtually indistinguishable from service and servitude, and the real differences—the kind that one comes to know through experience—disappear behind a concern for slavery as pretext.
Chakravarty believes that
[s]lavery and bondage were of course not only commonplace in the early modern world; they constituted it. And early modern English audiences [of theatre] and readers would almost certainly have encountered discussions of slavery outside England’s borders. They may have read the daring tales of kidnap, bondage, and escape that characterized captivity narratives, or responded to the petitions for the redemption of captured English travelers and sailors taken prisoner in Algiers or Barbary; they had perhaps witnessed processions of redeemed captives and enjoyed representations of slaves (ancient and early modern) on the Renaissance stage, even as they remembered the notorious cases of schoolboys, such as Thomas Clifton, who were kidnapped and impressed into playing companies; most unsettlingly, they may have known of the sixteenth-century slaving voyages of Francis Drake and John Hawkins, among others, and perhaps would eventually subscribe to the joint stock companies which, later in the seventeenth century, invited “Native Subjects” to become “sharers” in order to finance the procurement of “Negroes” to “furnish his Majesties American Plantations.” But English readers and audiences did not only confront slavery in the form of returned English captives or migrant servants; they also performed, ventriloquized, and vivified both classical and contemporary slaves as memories, specters, alternates, and intimates in the slave plays that English schoolboys read and enacted as part of their grammar school education. These plays—principally comedies by Terence and Plautus—were as ubiquitous as they were significant for their depictions of wily slaves, faithful freedmen, and errant sons learning to become citizens of Rome. But they also staged the kinds of slaves, and the forms of bondage, that would come to inform not only the characters and plots of early modern plays, but the ways in which concepts of slavery and manumission were conceived, fictionalized, and disseminated.25
And from these conjectures and examples, Chakravarty contends
that the schoolroom, rather than the sea or the shore or the slave market, was the primary contact zone for slavery. Slavery was not a foreign phenomenon but intimately familiar, seeded in the spaces which were both quotidian and quintessentially English, for slavery, crucially, lay at the heart of the humanist curriculum.26
Through a mixture of moralistic may-haves and superficial erudition, in addition to a desire probably shared by most of her readers to locate the classroom at the centre of human history, Chakravarty has done her best to present slavery as the inevitable result of English culture.
For good measure, she adds race to the mix,
[a]s the coarticulation of service and servitude [which] was increasingly limned by the logics of family, race, and blood, [and] it anticipated the racial and rhetorical strategies of Atlantic slavery—and simultaneously secured its futures. 27
This sleight of hand from anticipation to future security—from possibility to necessity—is possible only through its absolving of any underlying agency. Chakravarty reflects that
[i]t is now a commonplace to remark that early modern England was a service society, that every man and woman understood his or hear position in a social and political economy that was organized by the strictures, possibilities, and discourses of service. Yet an equally powerful early modern rhetoric insisted that this widespread—and effectively compulsory—service be understood not as coerced but rather as willing, volitional, consensual; as, paradoxically, “free.”28
The contradiction in “free service” becomes for Chakravarty the principle evidence that consent to power is a fiction barely concealing an impulse to enslave. But why, one might ask, would the English not simply have coined “free slavery” and acted on that?
And more disturbingly, one cannot even begin to talk about justice where consent is absent. It is true that, for example, justice can metaphorically “take place” within the justice system, as judges deliver decisions based on law, but the essence of justice—that which allows the justice system to continue existing—is something that can only be meaningfully discussed when we take into account consent. If service, servitude, and slavery are void of consent, then they cannot be unjust, and this appears to take most of the wind out of Chakravarty’s historical narrative.
There is a scene in Thomas More’s Utopia, a book supposedly about the most just state, where More’s characterization of himself and his friend, Peter Giles, are offering employment advice to Raphael Hythloday, who recently disembarked at Antwerp after a five-year excursion to Utopia. They explain to Raphael that his knowledge would be of service at court. But Raphael rebuffs their advice, indignant that they would have him “enslave” himself “to any king”, to which Peter responds that he does not
‘mean that you should be in servitude to any king, only to his service.’
‘The difference is only a matter of one syllable’, said Raphael.29
As Utopia unfolds, it becomes apparent that Raphael’s intended response about the syllable is literal rather than joking. At one level, Utopia is, as the reader knows, a fiction, a bricolage of ancient literary texts from Raphael’s early education, and Raphael, who appears to struggle with distinguishing text from reality, equates ‘service’ with ‘servitude’ because, as Chakravarty recognizes, it is never clear on a textual basis where one ends and the other begins.
The effect of Raphael’s equation is important for understanding his classification of Utopian slaves, which, while less privileged than citizens, are less distinct than is implied by the word ‘slave.’ The third class are
hard-working penniless drudges from other nations who voluntarily choose slavery in Utopia […] Such people are treated with respect, almost as kindly as citizens, except that they are assigned a little extra work, on the score that their used to it.30
The idea that citizenship and slavery are nearly indistinguishable in an influential early modern English representation of ideal statehood may seem to support Chakravarty’s argument, but the catch is that Utopians are detached from the political consequences of everything important to being human—creativity, freedom, justice, etc.—and the state of Utopia more resembles an attempt at the most efficient organization of bodies than a representation of a political ideal. As well as being a writer, More was a politician, and, as his self-characterization recognizes on the final page, the details of Raphael’s account “were really absurd.”31
More left it to the reader to figure out the absurdities, but Fictions of Consent can be of no assistance because it refigures irony as paradox. Utopia depends for its irony on our capacity to distinguish text from reality, a capacity that Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, warned was of moral and political importance through his retelling of the myth of the Theban king Thamus responding to Theuth’s invention of writing:
You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.32
Socrates goes on to advise Phaedrus
[t]hat if Lysias or anybody else ever did or ever does write—privately or for the public, in the course of proposing some law—a political document which he believes to embody clear knowledge of lasting importance, then this writer deserves reproach, whether anyone says so or not. For to be unaware of the difference between a dream-image and the reality of what is just and unjust, good and bad, must truly be grounds for reproach even if the crowd praises it with one voice.33
One might suspect that, in line with Socrates’s warning, Chakravarty has provoked disapproval among scholars, but, in fact, the book has been widely praised, winning a number of prestigious awards and receiving positive reviews in prestigious journals. Evidently, the academic community, which, by all appearances, takes its deduced role as cultural administrator very seriously, understands this to be a serious scholarly book, a genuine contribution to the maintenance of our liberal society. Should it surprise anyone that Endeavour is able to appeal to readers in arguing that liberal culture is a front for race hatred?
Arendt rejected the historical narrative of “race-thinking,” a racially-prescribed constraint on thinking distinct from racism, as a dominant ideology among Europeans with “its roots deep in the eighteenth century […] emerg[ing] simultaneously in all Western countries during the nineteenth century.”34 She argued that
[u]ntil the fateful days of the ‘scramble for Africa,’ race-thinking had been one of the many free opinions which, within the general framework of liberalism, argued and fought each other to win the consent of public opinion. Only a few of them became full-fledged ideologies, that is, systems based upon a single opinion that proved strong enough to attract and persuade a majority of people and broad enough to lead them through the various experiences and situations of an average modern life. For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.35
Arendt singled out race-thinking and class-thinking as having become “obligatory patterns of thought,” that
free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.36
Contrary to Endeavour, Arendt described how
an old misconception of racism as a kind of exaggerated nationalism is still given currency. Valuable works of students, especially in France, who have proved that racism is not only a quite different phenomenon but tends to destroy the body politic of the nation, are generally overlooked. Witnessing the gigantic competition between race-thinking and class-thinking for dominion over the minds of modern men, some have been inclined to see in the one the expression of national and in the other the expression of international trends, to believe the one to be the mental preparation for national wars and the other to be the ideology for civil wars.37
Race-thinking was, for Arendt,
a source of convenient arguments for varying political conflicts, but it never possessed any kind of monopoly over the political life of the respective nations; it sharped and exploited existing conflicting interests or existing political problems, but it never created new conflicts or produced new categories of political thinking. […] It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world.
Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism. The very existence of an opinion which could boast of a certain tradition served to hide the destructive forces of the new doctrine which, without this appearance of national respectability or the seeming sanction of tradition, might have disclosed its utter incompatibility with all Western political and moral standards of the past, even before it was allowed to destroy the comity of European nations.38
Bromwich’s solution to culturalism was to reengage with irony, but I would add that our reengagement should confine itself to our shared public life. As liberalism implies, there is nothing arbitrary about privacy, and to believe there is, and to locate hope for the future in public opinion, as do Chakravarty and Endeavour, is to pray before the altar of the status quo. Socrates encouraged others to seek dignity in themselves rather than from their city, and, when unjustly condemned, he found within himself a deeper justice, and was able to die on his own terms.
Updated 4 September 2025.
Endeavour. “Why We No Longer have Heroes: Why there are No Figures Worthy of Relevance in the West Today.” Endeavour’s Substack. Substack, 1 September 2025 (23 August 2025), https://royalendeavour.substack.com/p/why-we-no-longer-have-heroes.
Ibid.
Ibid. Endeavour uses a number of terms while relating genetics to heroic narratives, although I am unable to figure out what these terms share, or why Endeavour uses one over the other in a specific context. Endeavour appears to have in mind an intrinsic connection between ‘ancestry,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘nationality,’ and ‘tribe,’ that opposes an intrinsically connected ‘civility,’ ‘egalitarianism,’ ‘liberality,’ and ‘universality,’ but never explicates either connection. Something I want to emphasize in this post is that Endeavour is what Friedrich Nietzsche called a ‘cultural philistine,’ remarkable for its dependence on a vocabulary that lacks any clear point of reference. This brand of philistinism aspires (unsuccessfully) to replace the wisdom of experience with deference to a series of words, gestures, and images, the continuation of which always ‘confesses,’ as Nietzsche puts it, the privately held beliefs of the individual.
Ibid.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer.” Untimely Meditations. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015 (1997), pp. 3-4.
Ibid. p. 5.
Ibid. pp. 5-6.
Ibid. p. 3.
Ibid. p. 7.
Ibid. p. 12.
Ibid. p. 12.
Ibid. p. 14. For Nietzsche, the shortcomings of Strauss’s confession are particular to Strauss, and for that reason I do not believe this is the same ‘confession’ as that of Michel Foucault. Nietzsche recognizes that confession is spiritually greater than Strauss’s misuse of it, while Foucault would appear to resemble more the “uncouth fellows” “who feel the there must lie behind them a system of truly diabolical principles and would no doubt want Strauss to compromise his learned utterances by betraying this diabolical background” (Ibid. p. 14). Confining one’s interest to “confessions” of sex, punishment, or madness, for example, insinuate a diabolical principle, even when one’s interest is not with the individual.
Endeavour. “The Delivery of Nietzsche’s Last Man: What the Rise of Online Food Delivery Services Means for Society. Endeavour’s Substack. Substack, 1 September 2025 (2 April 2025), https://royalendeavour.substack.com/p/the-delivery-of-nietzsches-last-man.
Ibid.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Great Britain, Penguin, 2017 (1951), pp. xiv-xv.
Ibid. p. xviii.
Charles Taylor, who’s “politics of recognition” is one of the targets in the article, denounced Bromwich’s varied list of terms, which he described in his response as “close to useless for discussing any real life issue” (“Responses.” Dissent. Winter 2025, p. 104). Taylor’s criticism may seem not unlike my criticism of Endeavour, but whereas Bromwich’s loose terminology coincides with trending ironies of liberal culture that do not lend themselves to exact terms, Endeavour is addressing both ironic and unironic subject matter, and the loose terminology appears to result from an inability to make that distinction.
Ibid. p. 89.
Ibid. p. 89.
Bromwich, David. Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking. Binghampton, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 41-42.
Ibid. p. 42.
Ibid. p. 43.
Bromwich, David. “Culturalism, or the Euthanasia of Liberalism.” Dissent. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, Winter 1995, p. 102.
Chakravarty, Urvashi. Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022, p. 2.
Ibid. pp. 2-3.
Ibid. p. 3.
Ibid. p. 7.
Ibid. p. 4.
More, Thomas. Utopia. Translated by Robert M. Adams, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019 (1975), p. 13.
Ibid. p. 82.
Ibid. p. 113.
Plato. “Phaedrus.” Complete Works. Translated by John M. Cooper, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1997, p. 552 (275a-b). I plan to respond to Jacques Derrida’s charge of “logocentrism” in a future post. I agree with Derrida that speech, and therefore thinking, is contrived, but I disagree that writing can be substituted for speech, sign for logos, or that signification can replace thinking.
Ibid. p. 554 (277d-e).
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Great Britain, Penguin, 2017 (1951), p. 206.
Ibid. p. 207.
Ibid. p. 207.
Ibid. pp. 209-210.
Ibid. pp. 239-240.