Pop (Theory) Quiz

Who said this?

“We can think of emancipatory social science as an account of a
journey from the present to a possible future: the critique of society tells
us why we want to leave the world in which we live; the theory of alternatives
tells us where we want to go; and the theory of transformation
tells us how to get from here to there.”

And who said this?

“the only law for book publication, the only law concerning the book that I would like to see passed, would be to prohibit the use of the author’s name more than once, with the additional right to anonymity and the use of pseudonyms, in order that each book might be read for itself. There are books for which recognition of the author provides the key to their intelligibility. But outside of a few great authors, this knowledge of the author’s name has no real use. It serves only as a screen. For someone like me, who is not a great author but only someone who writes books, books ought to be read for themselves, with their imperfections and their possible good qualities.”

And finally, who said this?

“To my mind, the realms of ethics and politics can be neither divided nor conflated. Ethics deals with such questions as human values, purposes, relationships, qualities of behaviour, motives for action while politics raises the question of what material conditions, power-relations and social institutions we need in order to foster certain of these values and qualities and not others. This is nothing to do with the relation between spiritual and material or personal and public.”

1 thought on “Pop (Theory) Quiz

  1. Clive, the first one is Eric Olin Wright – that most elegant and punctual of analytical Marxists. Right on Eric … .

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