Page 167 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

NOTES

political theory proper (in the sense, that is, of the theory of the state and of state
power).
20. Bürger, Theory of the avant-garde, p. 49.
21. H.Marcuse, The affirmative character of culture, in Negations, tr. J.J.Shapiro
(Boston, Beacon Press, 1968).
22. Williams, Culture, p. 102.
23. A.Gramsci, Selections from prison notebooks, tr. Q.Hoare & G.Nowell Smith
(London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), pp. 5–8.
24. C.B.Macpherson, The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to
Locke (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 53–4.
25. Ibid., p. 51.
26. D.Hume, Of the standard of taste and other essays (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill,
1965), p. 17.
27. Ibid., p. 7.
28. J.Bentham, The rationale of reward, in The works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. II
(New York, Russell & Russell, 1962), p. 253.
29. J.S.Mill, Utilitarianism (Glasgow, Fontana, 1962), pp. 258, 260.
30. Ibid., p. 260.
31. Ibid., p. 259.
32. T.Parsons, The structure of social action (New York, Free Press, 1949), p. 44.
33. Ibid., p. 56.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., pp. 60–1.
36. Ibid., p. 469.
37. Though it seems much less offensively so at present. As one sociologist has recently
argued: “In our current social situation, where economists are seeking to apply
utilitarian models to everything from crime and immigration to the selling of
children, where utilitarian rational-choice models seem once again to be making
inroads into the heart of sociology, and where methodological empiricism is
stronger than ever, it is well to reread Parsons’s fifty year-old demolition of these
very same points of view” (M.Gould, Voluntarism versus utilitarianism: a critique
of Camic’s history of ideas, Theory, culture and society, 6, 4, 1989, p. 649).
38. A.W.Gouldner, The coming crisis of western sociology (London, Heinemann,
1971), pp. 61–2.
39. M.Horkheimer, Critical theory: selected essays, tr. M.J.O.O’Connell (New York,
Seabury Press, 1972), p. 202.
40. I am well aware that capitalism and state capitalism have produced a whole
series of other, much more objectionable, political forms: Bonapartism, military
dictatorship, fascism, Stalinism, and so on. But these each appear to be essentially
exceptional responses to moments of particular crisis. The dismantling of Iberian
fascism in the 1970s, of a whole series of Latin American military dictatorships
during the late 1980s, and most spectacularly of all of Eastern European Stalinism
as a result of the revolutions of 1989, all seem to suggest the provisional, transitional
and temporary nature of such illiberal forms. I should add that it is liberalism,
rather than democracy, which is much more properly normal to capitalist society.
41. It is, of course, deeply controversial to suggest that the intelligentsia is any kind
of class. My own view, however, is that it is a “social class”, in Weber’s sense of
the term. cf. M.Weber, The theory of social and economic organization, tr.
A.M.Henderson & T.Parsons (New York, Free Press, 1964), p. 424. It is a group
possessed of sense of collective identity founded on common material interests.
These interests are not those of a common relation to the means of production,
such as is postulated in Marx’s understanding of class, but rather of a shared

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