/lit/ - Literature

>>14131992
The west went full blown dystopian after may 68

Alexis de Tocqueville loved liberalism, but he warned of progressivism: rampant individualism and gentle totalitarianism. But the transition from liberalism to progressivism was perhaps inevitable. Juan Donoso Cortés criticized liberalism as ostensibly a continuous "dialogue" rather than a decision. When liberalism at last must decide, it makes believe it did so through common agreement.

>For it has been already shown that nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called injustice or injury; because every subject is author of every act the sovereign doth

-Hobbes

>When therefore the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will; and it is in that case that I should not have been free.

-Rousseau on democratic will

Hobbes saw adjudication as needed for order, whether or not it was always right. But his effort to write in a consensual social contract has had serious repercussions, especially when Whig history, and later Hegelianism, hit the ground running, and history began to be seen as a continuous dialogue moving toward truth. In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky questions whether a man has a "right" to be unhappy. A liberal might say yes, but a progressive would say you have a pathology and must be cured. This was a big topic in Dostoevsky's time. Decades earlier, Malthus (who, contrary to popular belief, was not a prophet of doom or eugenicist or advocate for birth control) argued against a pinko, the latter maintaining punishment is wrong because you can't convince a man he was wrong by blows. Malthus rightfully says repentance is up to him, but punishment isn't about arguing with him, using the death sentence to prove his point. But something worse was around the corner (which Dostoevsky was confronting): the idea that criminals are simply sick and punishment is "treatment". In order to maintain the idea of rational dialogue as the source of all decisions, liberalism had categorize dissent as "irrational". The dissentor's insanity meant someone else could speak for him, as he wasn't in his right mind. Increasingly "experts" chose whom to politically pathologize, and this was the shift from liberalism to progressivism: the rise of a pseudo scientific class that formed the basis of secular clericalism. Paul Gottfried talks extensively about this in his work, After Liberalism. He notes that The Authoritarian Personality was not an isolated example of this, but part of a new trend by progressive organizations such as the American Jewish Committee (which sponsored Adorno's work). Because progressivism is obsessed with consensualism, it must declare dissent I everything not "relative" as "non compos mentis*.

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