“Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology

“Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology
Edited by William S. Lind
A Product of the Free Congress Foundation
November, 2004

Introduction
As Russell Kirk wrote, one of conservatism’s most important insights is that all
ideologies are wrong. Ideology takes an intellectual system, a product of one or more
philosophers,  and  says,                                                                     “This  system  must  be  true.”  Inevitably,  reality  ends  up
contradicting the system, usually on a growing number of points. But the ideology, by its
nature, cannot adjust to reality; to do so would be to abandon the system.
Therefore, reality must be suppressed. If the ideology has power, it uses its power
to undertake this suppression. It forbids writing or speaking certain facts. Its goal is to
prevent not only expression of thoughts that contradict what “must be true,” but thinking
such thoughts. In the end, the result is inevitably the concentration camp, the gulag and
the grave.
While some Americans have believed in ideologies, America itself never had an
official, state ideology - up until now. But what happens today to Americans who suggest
that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men
and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong? If they
are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies. If they are
university students, they face star chamber courts and possible expulsion. If they are
employees of private corporations, they may face loss of their jobs. What was their
crime? Contradicting America’s new state ideology of “Political Correctness.”
But what exactly is “Political Correctness?” Marxists have used the term for at
least 80 years, as a broad synonym for “the General Line of the Party.” It could be said
that Political Correctness is the General Line of the Establishment in America today;
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certainly, no one who dares contradict it can be a member of that Establishment. But that
still does not tell us what it really is.
This short book, which Free Congress has decided to make available free over its
website, seeks to answer that question. It does so in the only way any ideology can be
understood, by looking at its historical origins, its method of analysis and several key
components, including its place in higher education and its ties with the Feminist
movement. Finally, it offers an annotated bibliography for those who wish to pursue the
subject in greater depth.
Perhaps the most important question facing Americans today is, “Do we really
want America to be an ideological state?” Because conservatives know where all
ideologies lead, our answer, resoundingly, is “NO!” But if we expect to prevail and
restore our country to full freedom of thought and expression, we need to know our
enemy. We need to understand what Political Correctness really is. As you will soon see,
if we can expose the true origins and nature of Political Correctness, we will have taken a
giant step to its overthrow.
William S. Lind
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Chapter 1
What is “Political Correctness”?
by
William S. Lind
Most Americans look back on the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to
the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were
generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in
the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and
effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities
through volunteer work. Children grew up in two-parent households, and the mother was
there to meet the child when he came home from school. Entertainment was something
the whole family could enjoy.
What happened?
If a man from America of the 1950s were suddenly introduced into America in the
2000s, he would hardly recognize it as the same country. He would be in immediate
danger of getting mugged, carjacked or worse, because he would not have learned to live
in constant fear. He would not know that he shouldn’t go into certain parts of the city,
that his car must not only be locked but equipped with an alarm, that he dare not go to
sleep at night without locking the windows and bolting the doors - and setting the
electronic security system.
If he brought his family with him, he and his wife would probably cheerfully pack
their children off to the nearest public school. When the children came home in the
afternoon and told them they had to go through a metal detector to get in the building,
had been given some funny white powder by another kid and learned that homosexuality
is normal and good, the parents would be uncomprehending.
In the office, the man might light up a cigarette, drop a reference to the “little
lady,” and say he was happy to see the firm employing some Negroes in important
positions. Any of those acts would earn a swift reprimand, and together they might get
him fired.
When she went into the city to shop, the wife would put on a nice suit, hat, and
possibly gloves. She would not understand why people stared, and mocked.
And when the whole family sat down after dinner and turned on the television,
they would not understand how pornography from some sleazy, blank-fronted “Adults
Only” kiosk had gotten on their set.
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Were they able, our 1950s family would head back to the 1950s as fast as they
could, with a gripping horror story to tell. Their story would be of a nation that had
decayed and degenerated at a fantastic pace, moving in less than a half a century from the
greatest country on earth to a Third World nation, overrun by crime, noise, drugs and dirt.
The fall of Rome was graceful by comparison.
Why did it happen?
Over the last forty years, America has been conquered by the same force that
earlier took over Russia, China, Germany and Italy. That force is ideology. Here, as
elsewhere, ideology has inflicted enormous damage on the traditional culture it came to
dominate, fracturing it everywhere and sweeping much of it away. In its place came fear,
and ruin. Russia will take a generation or more to recover from Communism, if it ever
can.
The ideology that has taken over America goes most commonly by the name of
“Political Correctness.” Some people see it as a joke. It is not. It is deadly serious. It
seeks to alter virtually all the rules, formal and informal, that govern relations among
people and institutions. It wants to change behavior, thought, even the words we use. To
a significant extent, it already has. Whoever or whatever controls language also controls
thought. Who dares to speak of “ladies” now?
Just what is “Political Correctness?” “Political Correctness” is in fact cultural
Marxism - Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The effort to translate
Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the
1960s. It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist
Antonio Gramsci. In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted
to making the translation, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt
School). One of its founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the
question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?” The Frankfurt School gained
profound influence in American universities after many of its leading lights fled to the
United States in the 1930s to escape National Socialism in Germany.
The Frankfurt School blended Marx with Freud, and later influences (some
Fascist  as  well  as  Marxist)  added  linguistics  to  create                               “Critical  Theory”  and
“deconstruction.”  These  in  turn  greatly  influenced  education  theory,  and  through
institutions of higher education gave birth to what we now call “Political Correctness.”
The lineage is clear, and it is traceable right back to Karl Marx.
The parallels between cultural Marxism and classical, economic Marxism are
evident. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, shares with classical Marxism the
vision of a “classless society” i.e., a society not merely of equal opportunity, but equal
condition. Since that vision contradicts human nature - because people are different, they
end up unequal, regardless of the starting point - society will not accord with it unless
forced. So, under both variants of Marxism, it is forced. This is the first major parallel
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between classical and cultural Marxism: both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian
nature of Political Correctness can be seen on campuses where “PC” has taken over the
college: freedom of speech, of the press, and even of thought are all eliminated.
The second major parallel is that both cultural Marxism and classical, economic
Marxism have single-factor explanations of history. Classical Marxism argues that all of
history was determined by ownership of the means of production. Cultural Marxism says
that history is wholly explained by which groups - defined by sex, race and sexual
normality or abnormality - have power over which other groups.
The third parallel is that both varieties of Marxism declare certain groups
virtuous and others evil a priori, that is, without regard for the actual behavior of
individuals.  Classical  Marxism  defines  workers  and  peasants  as  virtuous  and  the
bourgeoisie (the middle class) and other owners of capital as evil. Political Correctness
defines blacks, Hispanics, Feminist women, homosexuals and some additional minority
groups as virtuous and white men as evil. (Political Correctness does not recognize the
existence of non-Feminist women and defines blacks who reject Political Correctness as
whites).
The fourth parallel is in means: expropriation. Economic Marxists, where they
obtained power, expropriated the property of the bourgeoisie and handed it to the state, as
the “representative” of the workers and the peasants. Cultural Marxists, when they gain
power (including through our own government), lay penalties on white men and others
who disagree with them and give privileges to the groups they favor. Affirmative action
is an example.
Finally, both varieties of Marxists employ a method of analysis designed to show
the correctness of their ideology in every situation. For classical Marxists, the analysis is
economic. For cultural Marxists, the analysis is linguistic: deconstruction. Deconstruction
“proves” that any “text,” past or present, illustrates the oppression of blacks, women,
homosexuals, etc.  by reading that meaning into words of the text (regardless of their
actual meaning). Both methods are, of course, phony analyses that twist the evidence to
fit preordained conclusions, but they lend a “scientific” air to the ideology.
These parallels are neither remarkable nor coincidental. They exist because
Political Correctness is directly derived from classical Marxism, and is in fact merely a
variant of Marxism. Through most of the history of Marxism, cultural Marxists were
“read out” of the movement by classical, economic Marxists. Today, with economic
Marxism dead, cultural Marxism has filled its shoes. The medium has changed, but the
message is the same: a society of radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the
state.
Political Correctness now looms over American society like a colossus. It has
taken over both political parties - recent Republican conventions were choreographed
according to its dictates, while cultural conservatives were shown the door - and is
enforced by many laws and government regulations. It almost totally controls the most
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powerful element in our culture, the entertainment industry. It dominates both public and
higher education: many a college campus is a small, ivy-covered North Korea. It has even
captured the clergy in many Christian churches. Anyone in the Establishment who
departs from its dictates swiftly ceases to be a member of the Establishment.
The remainder of this short book will explore the subject of Political Correctness
further: its history, its method of analysis (deconstruction), and the means by which it has
attained its influence, especially through education.
But one more question must be addressed at the outset, the most vital question:
how can Americans combat Political Correctness and retake their society from the
cultural Marxists?
To that end, it is not sufficient to criticize Political Correctness. It tolerates a
certain amount of criticism, even gentle mocking. It does so through no genuine tolerance
for other points of view, but in order to disarm its opponents, to let itself seem less
menacing  than it is. The cultural Marxists do not yet have total power, and they are too
wise to appear totalitarian until their victory is assured.
Rather, those who would defeat cultural Marxism must defy it. They must use
words it forbids, and refuse to use the words it mandates; remember, sex is better than
gender. They must shout from the housetops the realities it seeks to suppress, such as the
facts that violent crime is disproportionately committed by blacks and that most cases of
AIDS are voluntary, i.e., acquired from immoral sexual acts. They must refuse to turn
their children over to public schools.
Above all, those who would defy Political Correctness must behave according to
the old rules of our culture, not the new rules the cultural Marxists lay down. Ladies
should be wives and homemakers, not cops or soldiers, and men should still hold doors
open for ladies. Children should not be born out of wedlock. Open homosexuals should
be shunned. Jurors should not accept race as an excuse for murder.
Defiance  spreads.  When  other  Americans  see  one  person  defy  Political
Correctness and survive - and you still can, for now - they are emboldened. They are
tempted to defy it, too, and some will. The ripples from a single act of defiance, of one
instance of walking up to the clay idol and breaking off its nose, can range far. There is
nothing the Politically Correct fear more than open defiance, and for good reason; it is
their chief vulnerability. That should lead cultural conservatives to defy cultural Marxism
at every turn.
While the hour is late, the battle is not decided. Very few Americans realize that
Political Correctness is in fact Marxism in a different set of clothes. As that realization
spreads, defiance will spread with it. At present, Political Correctness prospers by
disguising itself. Through defiance, and through education on our own part (which should
be part of every act of defiance), we can strip away its camouflage and reveal the
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Marxism  beneath  the  window-dressing  of   “sensitivity,”   “tolerance”  and   “multi-
culturalism.”
Who dares, wins.
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Chapter II
The Historical Roots of “Political Correctness”
by
Raymond V. Raehn
America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values
that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.” Political Correctness seeks to
impose  a  uniformity  of  thought  and  behavior  on  all  Americans  and  is  therefore
totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion
of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution.
Social revolution has a long history, conceivably going as far back as Plato’s
Republic. But it was the French Revolution of 1789 that inspired Karl Marx to develop
his theories in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the success of the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia set off a wave of optimistic expectation among
the Marxist forces in Europe and America that the new proletarian world of equality was
finally coming into being. Russia, as the first communist nation in the world, would lead
the revolutionary forces to victory.
The Marxist revolutionary forces in Europe leaped at this opportunity. Following
the end of World War I, there was a Communist “Spartacist uprising in Berlin, Germany
lead by Rosa Luxemburg; the creation of a “Soviet” in Bavaria led by Kurt Eisner; and a
Hungarian communist republic established by Bela Kun in 1919. At the time, there was
great concern that all of Europe might fall under the banner of Bolshevism. This sense of
impeding doom was given vivid life by Trotsky’s Red Army invasion of Poland in 1919.
However, the Red Army was defeated by Polish forces at the battle of the Vistula
in 1920. The Spartacist, Bavarian Soviet and Bela Kun governments all failed to gain
widespread support from the workers and after a brief time they were all overthrown.
These events created a quandary for the Marxist revolutionaries in Europe. Under
Marxist economic theory, the oppressed workers were supposed to be the beneficiaries of
a social revolution that would place them on top of the power structure. When these
revolutionary opportunities presented themselves, however, the workers did not respond.
The Marxist revolutionaries did not blame their theory for these failures. They blamed the
workers.
One group of Marxist intellectuals resolved their quandary by an analysis that
focused on society’s cultural “superstructure” rather than on the economic substructures
as Marx did. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs
contributed the most to this new cultural Marxism.
Antonio Gramsci worked for the Communist International during 1923-24 in
Moscow and Vienna. He was later imprisoned in one of Mussolini’s jails where he wrote
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his famous “Prison Notebooks.” Among Marxists, Gramsci is noted for his theory of
cultural hegemony as the means to class dominance. In his view, a new “Communist
man” had to be created before any political revolution was possible. This led to a focus
on the efforts of intellectuals in the fields of education and culture. Gramsci envisioned a
long march through the society’s institutions, including the government, the judiciary, the
military, the schools and the media. He also concluded that so long as the workers had a
Christian soul, they would not respond to revolutionary appeals.
Georg Lukacs was the son a wealthy Hungarian banker. Lukacs began his
political life as an agent of the Communist International. His book History and Class
Consciousness gained him recognition as the leading Marxist theorist since Karl Marx.
Lukacs believed that for a new Marxist culture to emerge, the existing culture must be
destroyed. He said, “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only
solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,” and, “Such a worldwide overturning
of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of
new ones by the revolutionaries.”
When he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun
regime  in  Hungary  in                                                                        1919,  Lukacs  launched  what  became  known  as   “Cultural
Terrorism.” As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in
Hungarian schools. Hungarian children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse,
the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the out-datedness of monogamy, and the
irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Women, too, were called to
rebel against the sexual mores of the time. Lukacs’s campaign of “Cultural Terrorism”
was a precursor to what Political Correctness would later bring to American schools.
In 1923, Lukacs and other Marxist intellectuals associated with the Communist
Party of Germany founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in
Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute, which became known as the Frankfurt School, was
modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.  In 1933, when Nazis came to power
in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled.  Most came to the United States.
The members of the Frankfurt School conducted numerous studies on the beliefs,
attitudes and values they believed lay behind the rise of National Socialism in Germany.
The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis
to form the basis of what became known as “Critical Theory.” Critical Theory was
essentially destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including
Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition,
sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and
conservatism. These criticisms were reflected in such works of the Frankfurt School as
Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and The Dogma of Christ, Wilhelm’s Reich’s The
Mass Psychology of Fascism and Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality.
The  Authoritarian  Personality,  published  in                                                1950,  substantially  influenced
American psychologists and social scientists. The book was premised on one basic idea,
that the presence in a society of Christianity, capitalism and the patriarchal-authoritarian
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family  created  a  character  prone  to  racial  prejudice  and  German  fascism.  The
Authoritarian Personality became a handbook for a national campaign against any kind
of prejudice or discrimination on the theory that if these evils were not eradicated,
another Holocaust might occur on the American continent. This campaign, in turn,
provided a basis for Political Correctness.
Critical Theory incorporated sub-theories which themselves were intended to chip
away  at  specific  elements  of  the  existing  culture,  including                           “matriarchal  theory,”
“androgyny theory,” “personality theory,” “authority theory,” “family theory,” “sexuality
theory,” “racial theory,” “legal theory” and “literary theory.” Put into practice, these
theories were to be used to overthrow the prevailing social order and usher in social
revolution based on cultural Marxism.
To achieve this, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School recognized that
traditional beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and then
replaced. The patriarchal social structure would be replaced with matriarchy; the belief
that men and women are different and properly have different roles would be replaced
with androgyny; and the belief that heterosexuality is normal would be replaced with the
belief that homosexuality is “normal.”
As a grand scheme intended to deny the intrinsic worth of white, heterosexual
males, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School opened the door to the racial and
sexual antagonisms of the Trotskyites.  Leon Trotsky believed that oppressed blacks
could be the vanguard of a communist revolution in North America. He denounced white
workers who were prejudiced against blacks and instructed them to unite with the blacks
in revolution. Trotsky’s ideas were adopted by many of the student leaders of the 1960s
counterculture movement, who attempted to elevate the black revolutionaries to positions
of leadership in their movement.
The student revolutionaries were also strongly influenced by the ideas of Herbert
Marcuse,  another  member  of  the  Frankfurt  School.  Marcuse  preached  the                 “Great
Refusal,” a rejection of all basic Western concepts, sexual liberation and the merits of
feminist and black revolutions. His primary thesis was that university students, ghetto
blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World could take the place of the
proletariat in the Communist revolution. In his book, An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse
proclaimed his goals of a radical transvaluation of values; the relaxation of taboos,
cultural subversion; Critical Theory; and a linguistic rebellion that would amount to a
methodical reversal of meaning. As for racial conflict, Marcuse wrote that white men are
guilty and that blacks are the most natural force of rebellion.
Marcuse may be the most important member of the Frankfurt School in terms of
the origins of Political Correctness, because he was the critical link to the counterculture
of the 1960s. His objective was clear: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution,
since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including morality
of existing society…” His means was liberating the powerful, primeval force of sex from
its civilized restraints, a message preached in his book, Eros and Civilization, published
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in                                                                                                 1955.  Marcuse became one of the main gurus of the 1960s adolescent sexual
rebellion; he himself coined the expression, “make love, not war.” With that role, the
chain of Marxist influence via the Frankfurt School was completed: from Lukacs’s
service as Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Hungarian government in
1919 to American students burning the flag and taking over college administration
buildings in the 1960s. Today, many of these same colleges are bastions of Political
Correctness, and the former student radicals have become the faculties.
One of the most important contributors to Political Correctness was Betty Friedan.
Through her book The Feminine Mystique, Friedan became the mother of the modern
feminist movement in America. Friedan was not a member of the Frankfurt School, but
she was strongly influenced by it. Her work offers a useful case study of the Marxist
roots of Political Correctness.
Friedan devoted almost a full chapter of The Feminine Mystique to Abraham
Maslow’s theory of self-actualization.  Maslow was a social psychologist who in his early
years did research on female dominance and sexuality. Maslow was a friend of Herbert
Marcuse at Bandeis University and had met Erich Fromm in 1936. He was strongly
impressed  by  Fromm’s  Frankfurt  School  ideology.  He  wrote  an  article,                      “The
Authoritarian Character Structure,” published in                                                   1944, that reflected the personality
theory of Critical Theory. Maslow was also impressed with the work of Wilhelm Reich,
who was another Frankfurt School originator of personality theory.
The significance of the historical roots of Political Correctness cannot be fully
appreciated unless Betty Friedan’s revolution in sex roles is viewed for what it really was
- a manifestation of the social revolutionary process begun by Karl Marx. Friedan’s
reliance on Abraham Maslow’s reflection of Frankfurt School ideology is simply one
indicator.  Other indicators include the correspondence of Friedan’s revolution in sex
roles with Georg Lukacs’ annihilation of old values and the creation of new ones, and
with  Herbert  Marcuse’s  transvaluation  of  values.  But  the  idea  of  transforming  a
patriarchy into a matriarchy - which is what a sex-role inversion is designed to do - can
be connected directed to Friedrich Engels book The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the Sate. First published in 1884, this book popularized the now-accepted
feminist belief that deep-rooted discrimination against the oppressed female sex was a
function of patriarchy. The belief that matriarchy was the solution to patriarchy flows
from Marx’s comments in The German Ideology, published in 1845. In this work Marx
advanced the idea that wives and children were the first property of the patriarchal male.
The Frankfurt School’s matriarchal theory (and its near-relation, androgyny theory) both
originated from these sources.
When addressing the general public, advocates of Political Correctness - or
cultural Marxism, to give it its true name - present their beliefs attractively. It’s all just a
matter of being “sensitive” to other people, they say. They use words such as “tolerance”
and “diversity,” asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
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The reality is different. Political Correctness is not at all about “being nice,”
unless one thinks gulags are nice places. Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that
implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social
order and, ultimately, a totalitarian state. If anything, the cultural Marxism created by the
Frankfurt School is more horrifying than the old, economic Marxism that ruined Russia.
At least the economic Marxists did not exalt sexual perversion and attempt to create a
matriarchy, as the Frankfurt School and its descendants have done.
This short essay has sought to show one critical linkage, that between classical
Marxism and the ingredients of the “cultural revolution” that broke out in America in the
1960s. The appendices to this paper offer a “wiring diagram” which may make the trail
easier to follow, along with a more detailed look at some of the main actors. Of course,
the action does not stop in the ‘60s; the workings of Frankfurt School are yet very much
with us, especially in the field of education. That topic, and other present-day effects of
Frankfurt School thinking, will be the subjects of future chapters in this book.
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Profiles
Georg Lukacs
•                                                                                     He began his political life as a Kremlin agent of the Communist International.
•                                                                                     His History and Class-Consciousness gained him recognition as the leading
Marxist theorist since Karl Marx.
•                                                                                     In 1919 he became the Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun
Regime  in  Hungary.  He  instigated  what  become  known  as  the                    “Cultural
Terrorism.”
•                                                                                     The Cultural Terrorism was a precursor of what was to happen in American
schools.
•                                                                                     He  launched  an                                                                    “explosive”  sex  education  program.  Special  lectures  were
organized in Hungarian schools and literature was printed and distributed to
instruct children about free love, the nature of sexual intercourse, the archaic
nature of the bourgeois family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy and the
irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure.  Children urged thus
to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the Church, and to
ignore  precepts  of  morality,  were  easily  and  spontaneously  turned  into
delinquents  with  whom  only  the  police  could  cope.  This  call  to  rebellion
addressed to Hungarian children was matched by a call to rebellion addressed to
Hungarian women.
•                                                                                     In rejecting the idea that Bolshevism spelled the destruction of civilization and
culture, Lukacs stated: “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place
without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the
revolutionaries.”
•                                                                                     Lukacs’ state of mind was expressed in his own words:
o  “All the social forces I had hated since my youth, and which I aimed in
spirit to annihilate, now came together to unleash the First Global War.”
o  “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution
to the cultural contradictions of the epoch.”
o  “The  question  is,  Who  will  free  us  from  the  yoke  of  Western
Civilization?”
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o  “Any political movement capable of bringing Bolshevism to the West
would have to be ‘Demonic’.”
o  “The  abandonment  of  the  soul’s  uniqueness  solves  the  problem  of
‘unleashing’ the diabolic forces lurking in all the violence which are
needed to create a revolution.”
•  Lukacs’ state of mind was typical of those who represented the forces of
Revolutionary Marxism.
•  At a secret meeting in Germany in 1923, Lukacs proposed the concept of inducing
“Cultural Pessimism” in order to increase the state of hopelessness and alienation
in the people of the West as a necessary prerequisite for revolution.
•  This meeting led to the founding of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt
University in Germany in 1923 - an organization of Marxist and Communist-
oriented psychologists, sociologists and other intellectuals that came to be known
as the Frankfurt School, which devoted itself to implementing Georg Lukacs’s
program.
Antonio Gramsci
•   He was an Italian Marxist on an intellectual par with Georg Lukacs who arrived
by analysis at the same conclusions as Lukacs and the Frankfurt School regarding
the critical importance of intellectuals in fomenting revolution in the West.
•   He had traveled to the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and
made some accurate observations that caused him to conclude that a Bolshevik-
style uprising could not be brought about by Western workers due to the nature of
their Christian souls.
•   Antonio Gramsci became the leader of the Italian Communist Party, which earned
him a place in one of Mussolini’s jails in the 1930s, where he wrote Prison
Notebooks and other documents.
•   These works became available in English to Americans.
•   His advice to the intellectuals was to begin a long march through the educational
and cultural institutions of the nation in order to create a new Soviet man before
there could be a successful political revolution.
•   This reflected his observations in the Soviet Union that its leaders could not create
such a new Soviet man after the Bolshevik Revolution.
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•   This  blueprint  for  mind  and  character  change  made  Gramsci  a  hero  of
Revolutionary Marxism in American education and paved the way for creation of
the New American Child in the schools by the education cartel.
•   The essential nature of Antonio Gramsci’s revolutionary strategy is reflected in
Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America: “There is a revolution coming. It
will not be like revolutions in the past.  It will originate with the individual and
the culture, and it will change the political structure as its final act. It will not
require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence.
This is revolution of the New Generation.”
Wilhelm Reich
•                                                                                       In his 1933 book entitled The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he explained that the
Frankfurt School departed from the Marxist sociology that set                           “Bourgeois”
against                                                                                 “Proletariat.” Instead, the battle would be between                                “reactionary” and
“revolutionary” characters.
•                                                                                       He also wrote a book entitled The Sexual Revolution, which was a precursor of
what was to come in the 1960s.
•                                                                                       His “sex-economic” sociology was an effort to harmonize Freud’s psychology
with Marx’s economic theory.
•                                                                                       Reich’s theory was expressed in his words: “The authoritarian family is the
authoritarian  state  in  miniature.  Man’s  authoritarian  character  structure  is
basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living
substance of sexual impulses. Familial imperialism is ideologically reproduced in
national imperialism…the authoritarian family…is a factor where reactionary
ideology and reactionary structures are produced.”
•                                                                                       Wilhelm Reich’s theory, when coupled with Georg Lukacs’ sex education in
Hungary, can be seen as the source for the American education cartel’s insistence
on sex education from kindergarten onwards and its complete negation of the
paternal family, external authority, and the traditional character structure.
•                                                                                       Reich’s  theory  encompassed  other  assertions  that  seem  to  have  permeated
American education:
o   The organized religious mysticism of Christianity was an element of the
authoritarian family that led to Fascism.
o   The patriarchal power in and outside of man was to be dethroned.
8

o   Revolutionary  sexual  politics  would  mean  the  complete  collapse  of
authoritarian ideology.
o   Birth control was revolutionary ideology.
o   Man was fundamentally a sexual animal.
•   Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism was in its ninth printing as of 1991, and
is available in most college bookstores.
Erich Fromm
•                                                                                      Like Wilhelm Reich, Fromm was a social psychologist of the Frankfurt School
who came to America in the 1930s.
•                                                                                      His book Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, is an ideological companion
to Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
•                                                                                      Fromm  asserted  that  early  capitalism  created  a  social  order  that  bred  a
sadomasochistic and authoritarian character of which Martin Luther and Adolph
Hitler were prime examples.
•                                                                                      He asserted that the same capitalistic social order resulted in Calvin’s Theory of
Predestination, which reflected the principle of the basic inequality of men that
was revived in Nazi ideology.
•                                                                                      He   asserted   the   authoritarian   character   experiences   only   domination   or
submission and “differences, whether sex or race, to him are necessarily of
superiority or inferiority.”
•                                                                                      He asserted that “Positive Freedom” implies the principle that there is no higher
power than the unique individual self; that man is the center and purpose of life;
that the growth and realization of man’s individuality is an end that can never be
subordinated to purposes which are supposed to have a greater dignity.
•                                                                                      Fromm made the real meaning of this “Positive Freedom” clear in another of his
many books - The Dogma of Christ… wherein he describes a revolutionary
character such as himself as: the man who has emancipated himself from the ties
of blood and soil, from his mother and father, and from special loyalties to state,
race, party or religion.
•                                                                                      Fromm makes his revolutionary intent very clear in The Dogma of Christ… “We
might define revolution in a psychological sense, saying that a revolution is a
political movement led by people with revolutionary characters, and attracting
people with revolutionary characters.”
9

Herbert Marcuse
•                                                                                      Like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse was an intellectual of the
Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.
•                                                                                      He has often been described as a Marxist philosopher, but he was in fact a full-
blooded social revolutionary who contemplated the disintegration of American
society just as Karl Marx and Georg Lukacs contemplated the disintegration of
German society: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the
protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality
of existing society…there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the
traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended.
These ideas are old-fashioned…What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and
dispersed disintegration of the system.”
•                                                                                      Marcuse published Eros and Civilization in 1955, which became the founding
document of the 1960s counterculture and brought the Frankfurt School into the
colleges and universities of America.
•                                                                                      He asserted that the only way to escape the one-dimensionality of modern
industrial society was to liberate the erotic side of man, the sensuous instinct, in
rebellion against “technological rationality.”
•                                                                                      This erotic liberation was to take the form of the “Great Refusal,” a total rejection
of the capitalist monster and its entire works, including technological reason and
ritual-authoritarian language.
•                                                                                      He provided the obtuse intellectual justifications for adolescent sexual rebellion,
and the slogan “Make Love, Not War.”
•                                                                                      His theory included the belief that the Women’s Liberation Movement was to be
the most important component of the opposition, and potentially the most radical.
•                                                                                      His revolutionary efforts would blossom into a full-scale war by revolutionary
Marxism against the European white male in the schools and colleges.
Theodor Adorno
•   He was another Marxist revolutionary and member of the Frankfurt School who
came to America in the 1930s.
•   Along with others, Adorno authored The Authoritarian Personality, which was
published in 1950.
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•                                                                                      Adorno’s book was inspired by the same kind of theoretical assertions revealed in
the works of Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse based on
analytical studies of German society that were begun in 1923.
•                                                                                      The basic theme was the same. There was such a thing as an authoritarian
character that was the opposite of the desired revolutionary character. This
authoritarian character was a product of capitalism, Christianity, conservatism, the
patriarchal family and sexual repression. In Germany, this combination induced
prejudice, anti-Semitism and fascism according to Frankfurt School theory.
•                                                                                      It so happened that most Americans were products of capitalism, Christianity,
conservatism, the patriarchal family and sexual repression in their youth. So
Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School had a golden
opportunity to execute Georg Lukacs’s and Antonio Gramsci’s program for
creating social revolution in America instead of Germany.
•                                                                                      They would posit the existence of authoritarian personalities among Americans
with tendencies toward prejudice, and then exploit this to force the “scientifically
planned re-education” of Americans with the excuse that it was being done in
order to eradicate prejudice.
•                                                                                      This scientifically-planned re-education would become the master plan for the
transformation of America’s system of fundamental values into their opposite
revolutionary values in American education so that school children would become
replicas of the Frankfurt School revolutionary characters and thus create the New
American Child.
•                                                                                      This can be confirmed by noting that The Authoritarian Personality is the key
source of the affective domain of Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives of 1964, which guided the education cartel thereafter.
11

12

Chapter III
Political Correctness in Higher Education
by
T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr.
On a growing number of university campuses the freedom to articulate and
discuss ideas - a principle that has been the cornerstone of higher education since the
time of Socrates - is eroding at an alarming rate. Consider just one increasing trend:
hundreds (sometimes thousands) of copies of conservative student newspapers have been
either stolen or publicly burned by student radicals.  In many cases these acts have taken
place with the tacit support of faculty and administrators. The perpetrators are rarely
disciplined.
While it would be easy to dismiss such demonstrations of intolerance as student
pranks, these incidents are the surface manifestations of a more pervasive and insidious
trend - a trend that has as its goal the destruction of the liberal arts tradition that has
helped create and sustain Western civilization.
Though  some  pundits  have  claimed  that  the  prevalence  of  the  ideological
intolerance known as Political Correctness has been exaggerated, the opposite is closer to
the truth. Political Correctness has become so deeply ingrained in American higher
education that many campuses are now dominated by an atmosphere of uncertainty and
apprehension.  An increasing number of dedicated students and faculty members now
live in fear that their intellectual pursuit of truth will offend the Grand Inquisitors of
Political Correctness.
The techniques of Political Correctness are now well known: attacks on the
curriculum in the name of “multiculturalism,” the imposition of restrictive and vaguely-
worded “speech codes” and mandatory “sensitivity training” courses for freshman that
are little more than systematic efforts at ideological indoctrination. But the influence of
Political Correctness has spread in other disturbing ways.  Consider a few recent
incidents from the university battlefield.
•   At Amherst College in Massachusetts, a homosexual student group covered the
university’s sidewalks with graffiti, including the slogan “Queer by Divine
Right,” which was scrawled in front of the campus chapel on Good Friday.
When the Amherst Spectator, a conservative student newspaper, criticized these
chalkings  as  promoting                                                                      “hatred  and  division,”  student  protestors  publicly
burned copies of the paper.
•   When the Cornell Review, another conservative student newspaper, published a
parody of the course descriptions from Cornell’s heavily-politicized Africana
1

Department, campus militants blocked traffic at the center of the campus for
several hours and burned stolen copies of the Review in a metal trash can.  The
militants went on to demand that the university provide “racial sensitivity”
classes for incoming freshman, a campus speech code and more money for
segregated minority programs such as a blacks-only dormitory.
•   Students who participate in ROTC programs have told friends and family that
they are afraid to show up for class wearing their uniforms because their grades
have been arbitrarily marked down by faculty members who are hostile to the
military.
•   In the wake of a rash of sexual harassment charges that have been filed by
extreme feminists against their alleged enemies, some professors have begun to
take out insurance policies to protect themselves from the crushing financial
burden of malicious and frivolous lawsuits.
•   A faculty questionnaire at the University of Massachusetts asks professors what
“contribution to multi-culturalism” they have made. The questionnaire is then
used in making decisions about tenure and promotion.
It is worth remembering that for every dramatic and well-publicized example of
Political Correctness, there are innumerable instances where its influence is more subtle,
but just as real.
The Origins of Political Correctness in Higher Education
While the ideology of Political Correctness is hardly restricted to our campuses,
there is no doubt it originated there. The intellectual roots of this phenomenon stretch
back over centuries. Ultimately, the origins of PC can be traced to the rise of modern
ideology and its quest for power. In contrast to the classical and Judeo-Christian
traditions, which stressed man’s need to understand the moral order and conform himself
to it, modern ideologies have sought to dominate and control the world. In the twentieth
century these ideologies finally gained political power in Communist states.
But in the West, ideology has not been able to make such a direct assault on our
traditions of ordered liberty. Rather, radical intellectuals have sought to undermine the
foundations of knowledge itself, concentrating their efforts on the transformation of the
university.
The turning point in the academy came in the 1960s, when militant students
launched a guerilla attack on the traditions of Western culture and the liberal arts. Seeing
that they could not gain lasting power through demonstrations alone, many of these
militants opted to remain “in the system,” going on to become professors themselves.
This generation of “tenured radicals” (to use Roger Kimball’s phrase) has now become
the establishment in the vast majority of our institutions of higher learning. As university
2

presidents, deans, and department chairmen, they have set about hiring other ideologues
in their own image and have instigated the repressive policies we know as Political
Correctness. These politicized academics will be extremely difficult to dislodge from
their current positions of power.
Ideology vs. Liberal Education
The stakes in this war of ideas are high, for they include the very concept of
freedom itself. Americans have always understood the intimate and vital connection
between liberal education and political liberty. That is why Political Correctness is
nothing less than a death blow aimed at the heart of our republic.
In his seminal book, The Idea of a University, Cardinal John Henry Newman
defined the “liberal arts” as a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.  By way of contrast,
he defined the “servile arts” as those modes of study that serve only specific, immediate
ends. The liberal arts are liberating, Newman argued, because they enable men to
discover the underlying principles that guide us toward wisdom and virtue.
Were he alive today, Newman would view Political Correctness as “servile”
because its purpose is to advance a political agenda to a position of national power.
Militant professors in increasing numbers are shamelessly turning their podiums into
pulpits,  abandoning  the  search  for  objective  truth  and  setting  about  the  task  of
indoctrinating their students.
The Devastated Curriculum
The proponents of Political Correctness have concentrated their efforts on the
core of a liberal education, the curriculum. Their efforts will radically alter what new
generations  of  Americans  will  learn.  In  this  battle  the  handmaiden  of  Political
Correctness has been the “multicultural” movement. A number of critics have rightly
pointed out that multiculturalism is more than an argument for courses that concentrate
on groups that at one time were disadvantaged or oppressed. Rather, multiculturalism
involves the systematic restructuring of the curriculum so as to hinder students from
learning  about  the  Western  tradition.  Since  the  ulterior  motive  behind  Political
Correctness is an attempt to restructure American society along egalitarian lines, it is
imperative for its proponents to instill in the minds of students a thoroughgoing cultural
relativism.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Politically Correct assault on the
curriculum is that it has occurred at many of America’s elite universities. Take, for
example, the case of Stanford University, an institution that has long played a leadership
role  in  American  higher  education.  Stanford  eliminated  its  long-standing  Western
civilization requirement in 1988 and replaced it with a multicultural program known as
“Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” Under this new program freshmen at Stanford can just as
easily study Marxist revolutionaries in Central America as they can Plato, Shakespeare or
Newton.
3

Stanford has also led the movement away from serious study of history. Students
at Stanford, like students at all but one of the other top 50 universities in the United
States, are not required to take a single course in history. Instead, they are offered a
choice of courses under the heading of “American Cultures.” According to one recent
graduate of Stanford, it is impossible to fulfill the “American Cultures” requirement by
studying Protestantism, Irish Americans, or the American West, while courses that do
fulfill the requirement include “Film and Literature: US-Mexico Border Representations”
and “Contemporary Ethnic Drama.” Stanford students must also take courses in “World
Cultures”  and                                                                                “Gender  Studies”  that  include   “Chicana  Expressive  Culture”  and
“Misogyny and Feminism in the Renaissance.”
Because elite institutions such as Stanford set an example for the rest of American
higher education, other universities eagerly adopt these devastating assaults on the
curriculum. This “trickle-down” effect will have a long-lasting impact on the way future
generations of Americans will be educated.
Intolerance and the Assault on Freedom
The two pillars that have traditionally sustained the liberal arts are academic
freedom and freedom of speech. Without the freedom to pursue the truth and to write and
speak freely, authentic scholarship is impossible. But both of these fundamental freedoms
have been routinely abrogated by the establishment of speech codes, “sensitivity” classes,
and a general atmosphere of fear and intimidation on campus.
For example, younger professors who have not received tenure must not only be
careful of what they say, but of what they publish.  Ideological university administrators
in the 1990s have created an environment dominated by suspicion that is far more intense
than anything spawned by anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
The most tragic victims of this age of Political Correctness are the students. The
traditional goal of a liberal arts education - acculturation, whereby students absorb the
inherited wisdom of the past - has been set aside. Increasingly, a university education
today seems to involve rote learning of political opinions. When all is said and done,
Political Correctness substitutes smug feelings of righteousness for the traditional habits
of critical thinking.  One distinguished scholar recently lamented that “higher education
is increasingly about acquiring attitudes and opinions that one puts on like a uniform.”
Because the academy is a relatively isolated world, it can allow politicized
administrators  to  turn  the  campus  into  a  laboratory  for  experiments  in  social
transformation. When critics of Political Correctness have compared the atmosphere on
campus to that of a totalitarian state, liberal pundits have been quick to denounce them as
hysterical.  Few of these pundits have any first-hand experience of daily life on campus.
4

The Movement for Academic Reform
Despite the institutional power of the campus radicals, forces are at work seeking
to spur authentic academic reform. The academic reform movement relies on the
principles of accountability, communication and a commitment to authentic scholarship.
One  force  of  academic  reform  is  a  growing  demand  among  parents  for  greater
accountability from colleges and universities. At a time when studies show that students
are paying more and learning less than ever before, parents in increasing numbers are
becoming discriminating consumers.
Another force is independent student newspapers whose journalists publicize the
antics of Political Correctness on campus. In the past, campus radicals thrived in the
enclosed world of the university, but their actions are no longer going undetected. The
advent of conservative student newspapers on dozens of campuses has forced campus
militants into the open where they are most vulnerable to the scrutiny of an exasperated
public.
Two years ago, those who fund the Collegiate Network asked the Intercollegiate
Studies Institute to take over the administration of their program to support and enhance
responsible  student  journalism.  The  Collegiate  Network  contributes  seed  money,
practical help and intellectual guidance to the 60 conservative student newspapers which
provide alternative forums of discussion at many of the nations most elite (and closed-
minded) universities.
These alternatives papers have identified abuses at all levels of academic life and
engaged in investigative journalism that has been remarkably fair and accurate. Perhaps
the most well-known “scoop” came from Yale University’s alternative paper, Light &
Truth, a publication supported by the Collegiate Network. The editors of Light & Truth
discovered that the $20 million gift of alumnus Lee Bass was not being used for its
intended purpose of supporting an integrated course in Western civilization. Their report
broke open the scandal, which ended when Yale returned Mr. Bass’s money. The
subsequent furor cost Yale a great deal more than Mr. Bass’s $20 million - both in
monetary terms and in the loss of confidence of many Yale donors that the current
administration can be trusted.
Not  all  the  scandals  uncovered  by  alternative  campus  papers  are  of  this
magnitude, but there are innumerable abuses that can be exposed by investigative student
journalism. The law school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, banned
representatives of the U.S. military from setting up recruiting tables there, despite
receiving  federal  tax  dollars  from  the  Defense  Department.  An  article  about  this
outrageous assault on freedom that ran in both the student-run Carolina Review and in the
national student newspaper published by ISI, CAMPUS, raised a hue and cry on and off
campus. North Carolina legislators took immediate action and passed a bill prohibiting
taxpayer-supported schools from discriminating against the military when prospective
employers come to the university.
5

At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the UWM Times, a conservative student
newspaper, revealed that a university administrator had been soliciting signatures for
local Democrat candidates for public office, in direct violation of a state law forbidding
university employees from engaging in political campaigning. The university chancellor,
despite having issued a directive against such campaigning, refused to reprimand the
administrator in question - perhaps because the chancellor himself violated both the state
law and his own directive by signing one of the petitions while at work. The story was
picked up by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the abuse was brought to an end.
Now that alternative newspapers and organizations dedicated to academic reform
are spreading the word, the larger communities that surround our institutions of higher
education are getting more involved in serious academic reform. For example, the
National Association of Scholars is encouraging university trustees to take a more active
and vocal role in opposing the excesses of Political Correctness.  Efforts of this type must
be expanded and intensified.
In the long run, the most direct method of defeating the inquisitors of Political
Correctness is simply to stand up to them. Individual acts of defiance often entail serious
risks: students can face star-chamber proceedings that are humiliating and demoralizing
while faculty can lose their bids to receive tenure.  But every act of resistance causes a
ripple, encouraging others to stand up to ideological intimidation. With the support of a
significant number of parents, donors and alumni, these Davids may yet slay the Goliaths
who tower over them.
The Fire of True-Learning
Perhaps the strongest force for true academic reform is that which seeks to defeat
the ideological depredations of Political Correctness by winning the war of ideas. The
best students have a questioning intelligence that cannot be satisfied with political
slogans. When such students have access to serious scholarship they respond with
enthusiasm.  Even  today  acculturation  still  takes  place  under  the  mentorship  of
outstanding scholars at various institutions around the country.  Moreover, some colleges
and universities continue to swim against the ideological tides of our time.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), in conjunction with the Templeton
Foundation, has identified the best professors, departments, colleges and textbooks in
American  higher  education  today.  This  program,  the  Templeton  Honor  Rolls  for
Education in a Free Society, celebrates excellence and serves as a guide for parents and
students contemplating the daunting choice of which college or university to attend. By
singling out the best in higher education, the Templeton Honor Rolls also encourage
donors to reward universities that preserve the traditions of the free society.
Prospective college students, their parents and donors can also benefit from a
comprehensive guide to 100 of the top institutions of higher learning in America
published by the ISI. The guide contains substantial, essay-length treatments of all 100
6

institutions, including 80 elite schools that were selected on the basis of competitive
admissions  standards  and                                                                   20  schools  that  ISI  particularly  recommends  for  their
commitment to a liberal arts education. The ISI college guide warns students about the
ideological dangers on the campuses and steers them in the direction of the best
professors and departments. As best-selling author William J. Bennett wrote of this
project, “All too often, Americans treat colleges and universities with a deference that
prevents them from asking hard questions and demanding real results.  But if there is ever
to be genuine, long-lasting education reform, parents and students will have to become
shrewder and better-informed consumers of education. The ISI guide is a powerful tool in
this effort.”
One of Edmund Burke’s most famous sayings is that “the only thing necessary for
the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” For generations, Americans have
treated higher education with respect and awe - a token of their faith in the liberating
power of the liberal arts. But in the face of Political Correctness, it is time for the
American public to temper its respect with a critical sensibility and to undertake a more
direct effort to call academia to account.  It is time for good men and women to demand
that American higher education live up to its best traditions and eschew the tyranny of
Political Correctness.
7

Chapter IV
Political Correctness: Deconstruction and Literature
by
Jamie McDonald
Literature is, if not the most important cultural indicator, at least a significant
benchmark of a society’s level of civilization. Our nature and environment combine to
form each individual mind, which in turn expresses itself in words. Literature, as the
words society collectively holds up as exemplary, is then a starting point of sorts - a
window into the culture.
Today’s literary field is therefore worth examining for the insights it provides into
our current cultural milieu.  The contemporary American literary field is awash in “isms:”
Marxism, Freudianism, feminism, and so on. Most of these are the academic cousins of
what is called in the common culture “Political Correctness.”  Literary theorists take their
particular brand of criticism and apply it to literature in an effort to find self-affirmation
in a “discovered” meaning of the text.  For a feminist critic, for example, no longer does
Andrew Marvel’s “Upon Appleton House” have the beauty of the grounds as its theme; it
speaks instead of the evils of a patriarchal line of inheritance. These “cultural critics,” so
named because they critique literature based on the point of view of a particular culture,
arose in the 1960s, but their schools of criticism only truly began to pick up steam with
the arrival of the school of deconstruction in the 1970s.
The works of the father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, began to be translated
from the French by American professor Gayatri Spivak in the mid-1970s, a time when
the U.S. literary scene was ripe for its influence. The economic Marxists were alive and
well on American campuses, and the cultural critics were still being fed by the radicalism
of the times.  Feminists, “queer theorists” and “literature-by-people of color” critics had
gained a foothold in the earlier decade, but they had in their meager arsenals only a vague
feeling of repression. What they lacked was philosophical backing                                - the courage
prompted by having their own logos.  The arrival of deconstruction from France provided
that philosophy.
At that time, that generation of academics was doing what all academics do,
telling the previous generation that it had it all wrong. In this case the rebellion was
against the New Critics - so-called even now, decades after their prime. The New Critics
specialized in finding the meaning of texts without regard to background information
such as authorial intent, a process that had                                                     “the text is everything” as its guiding
principle.
The new generation of critics set out to turn that principle on its head.  Instead of
“the text is everything,” the new generation claimed that “everything is text” and turned
to analyzing anything and everything in relation to the literary work. If a poet wrote a
1

poem that included a female character, the critics would look into the poet’s relationship
with his mother, his wife, his sister and so on in an effort to offer up an interpretation of
the work. This could have (and often did have) the positive effect of using biographic
information to gain new understanding of the work; however, these new interpretations
were not attempts to discern the true meaning of the work (as the New Critics had done)
or even to discover the author’s intended meaning (as traditional readings attempted).
This new generation of critics instead became prime practitioners of what is known in
literary circles as                                                                             “cultural criticism.”  They strained to view literature from the
“woman’s point of view” or the “gay point of view” or the “radical minority point of
view.” Their attempts were not to find meaning - they were influenced too greatly by
relativists for that - but to find sexism, racism or “homophobia” in the works of male,
European or heterosexual authors.
Derridean deconstruction became a tool for these cultural critics. Simply stated,
deconstruction is a school of thought that posits that words have no meaning. Instead,
words have “traces” of meaning. The meaning of a word is continually disappearing,
leaving us with only the memory, or trace, of what that meaning once was. (Similar to
Heidegger’s term being, Derrida often uses the crossed-out word trace in an effort to
indicate a meaning that is simultaneously present and disappearing.)
A  metaphor  may  be  helpful  to  understand  the  underlying  philosophy  of
deconstructionism.  If I say the word “pen,” then you think of the object there in the desk
drawer.  But if I throw the pen at someone, then the word “pen” begins to lose the benign
meaning of a writing apparatus with ink; to use deconstructionist terms, the original
understanding of the word “pen” undergoes erasure to leave only a trace. Instead the
word “pen” becomes associated with a weapon, a projectile, a means of expressing
(perhaps) anger. If the pen strikes someone, then the word “pen” to that person means
something painful, a personal injury, impetus for striking back and so on. These
meanings constantly grow and change because the human mind is always interpreting and
reinterpreting.  Because of this, deconstruction argues, it never fully settles on the stable
meaning for the word “pen.” Based on this linguistic argument, deconstructionists
conclude that since any meanings in words are so quickly diffused, we can never really
communicate at all. Words no longer have meaning.1
The postmodern catch word “differance,” along with terms like “erasure” and
“trace,” entered American scholarship through Derrrida’s writings. By combining the
concepts of (and the French words for) “deferment” and “difference,” Derrida came up
with this name for the endless deferment of meaning that takes place.  Derrida claims that
differance  is  the  reason  that  words  cannot  have  meanings;  the  mind  continually
understands things in different ways so that the original meaning loses its importance as
the proper meaning -  it becomes a mere trace.
Ultimately this is insufficient for today’s cultural critics - they need words to
mean things so that they can point to artistic works and bemoan how they illustrate or
exemplify the repression of minority cultures. But other than its general philosophy,
1 I am indebted to Dr. Orrin Wang of the University of Maryland for this illustration.
2

deconstruction offered something more important. It offered the techniques to “show”
how all language deconstructs itself.
The deconstructionists specialized in “deconstructing” literary works - although
they steadfastly insist that the works deconstruct themselves and the critic only illustrates
how this happens. These techniques of deconstruction usually involve isolating the
surface meaning of the literary work - the “traditionalist” meaning - and attempting to
show how the work itself violates that traditional meaning.  For example, they will take a
love poem and pick apart the language until they find something that they can interpret as
unloving. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count
The Ways,” ends with the words “I shall but love thee better in death.” The clever
deconstructionists might combine these with Browning’s earlier words, “when feeling out
of bounds for the edge of beauty and ideal grace,” to conclude that Mrs. Browning is
actually reaching for her husband’s death. “Why is she looking for the edge of beauty?”
the deconstructionist asks. “She clearly does not want to remain in or before beauty;
instead, she is seeking some way around it.”  The deconstructionist attributes this
apparent disparity to the problem with language, “differance,” and quickly concludes that
the poem - like all other language - has no meaning.
Once they realized the power of this school of thought, the cultural critics
embraced it readily, for here they discovered a method of attack on the traditional
interpretations of literary works. They used deconstruction to remove traditional meaning
and replaced it with new meaning. That meaning was the Political Correctness that infests
our society today.  For example, after the traditional meaning of “How Do I Love Thee?”
has been destabilized in the process described above, a feminist critic might come along
and - in the absence of a stable traditional interpretation - declare that the poem is
“really” concerned with how women in nineteenth-century England were conditioned to
see themselves as secondary to men.
Since “everything is text” in the postmodern mantra, the cultural critics did not
hesitate  to  apply  their  methods  to  music,  movies,  television  and  anything  they
encountered.  They  found  that  they  could  remove  the  meaning  from  all  cultural
phenomena and substitute the values of whichever group they preferred. For example,
homosexual analysts could remove the truth from the Bible and instead interpret it as full
of homophobic hate - God’s truth was torn down, and a human political agenda was
inserted.
This  example  is  not  particularly  outrageous,  as  Derrida’s  stated  goal  in
deconstructionism  was  to  remove  the  idea  of  what  he  called  the                        “transcendental
signified.” Standard models of linguistics operate with respect to a signifier-signified
pair.  The signifier is the word, and the signified is that which the word represents. When
differance enters the picture, the thing signified is deferred continually until it can be
deferred no longer - that is, until it reaches into the realm of metaphysics. The final
meaning reached by any word is God, as He is the ultimate meaning of traditional
3

Western thought.2  The “transcendental signified” of which Derrida is trying to rid
himself and the Western world is in fact God.  Derrida labels belief in God a product of
deficient Western thinking, and in true Nietzchean fashion he claims that God is a
construct of language rather than the other way around.
Naturally,  Derrida  quickly  became  the  darling  of  the  American  university
establishment. He lectured at universities along the Eastern seaboard, and grew to love
that area of America.  Soon America returned that affection by granting him a position in
the  English  department  of  Yale  University.  Yale  then  began  to  draw  to  other
deconstructionists and postmodernists; J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman and others.
Another   European,   Paul   DeMan,   also   came   to   America   and   began   teaching
deconstruction. DeMan’s history provides yet another reason why deconstructionists
sought so avidly to remove meaning from language. In pre-World War II Belgium,
DeMan had worked for an explicitly pro-Nazi newspaper. DeMan’s detractors note that
removing the meaning from language was an excellent way to dismiss his pro-Nazi
writings.
Through deconstruction the cultural critics adopted a tool that turned literature,
philosophy and culture into nonsense.  For instance, in his own writing, in order to
remain true to his own philosophy, Derrida eschews all forms of the verb “to be.” In
deconstructionist terms the verb “to be” implies meaning; thus, it cannot exist. Derrida
therefore goes back and crosses out all                                                                     “to be” verbs, making his writing all but
incomprehensible. In beginning to attack the signifier-signified construction, Derrida
writes “the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question
of philosophy: ‘What is…?’” At the same time Derrida is attempting to communicate his
ideas about traditional linguistic models, he is forced by his own philosophy to scratch
out the very words that allow him to communicate.
If Derrida were to follow the logic of his own theories he would find that the very
concept of communicating his ideas by written or spoken word should be impossible.  If
deconstructionist theories were even remotely accurate, all verbal communication - and
by extension all other forms of communication - would be impossible. As New Critic Dr.
M. H. Abrams of Cornell University states, “I hope that Derrida remembers that words do
mean things next time someone warns him of an oncoming bus.”
Not only does the embrace of deconstruction harm logical philosophy, it also
renders the creation of literature virtually impossible. If words mean nothing, then they
are nothing more than sounds. True, Lewis Carroll did create a well-known poem using
nonsensical but pleasant-sounding words, but how many poems like “jabberwocky” can
be created before we reach the saturation point? (Some would argue that we have already
reached that point.)
2 A simple way to comprehend this concept is this: If you ask any question and when given an answer ask
“why?,” then you ask “why?” of that answer and so on, you will ultimately arrive at the answer “God.” The
answer to “why God?” is also “God.”
4

As university literature departments “progress,” the divide widens between those
who produce literature and those who analyze and teach it. While Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, T.S. Eliot and an entire cadre of great authors were well-educated men, it
seems that a literary education in an American university actually hinders one’s ability to
write well.  As professors of literature embrace the philosophy of deconstruction they
lose the ability to write beautifully because meaning is necessary for beautiful writing. As
a result, a distinction has emerged within English departments between M.F.A. (Master
of Fine Arts) and Ph.D. programs - to the extent that they now have distinct faculties.
America’s greatest hope for good literature today lies not in the universities, but in the
“amateurs” writing after their nine to five work days or while the kids are at school.  The
intelligentsia has forgotten its literature in its haste to promote its politics.
Already there is a backlash against deconstructionism.  Just as the current thriving
generation of critics looked upon New Criticism as passé, so the students of today are
beginning to look upon deconstruction as obsolete. Derrida still lectured up to his recent
death (he spoke in Washington, D.C. as recently as 1995), but, like their forebears,
today’s literature students are beginning to rise up and tell their predecessors that they
had it all wrong. A primary factor in this backlash is the difficulty that lies in
communicating deconstructionist ideas (note that what is offered here is merely an
outline, not the actual methods of deconstructing a literary work). As a result of this
difficulty, today’s MTV generation has stumbled upon a positive side effect of their
fifteen-second attention spans: They lack the patience to wade through Derrida’s nearly
unintelligible syntax and decipher his terminology.
Unfortunately, that has not stopped the cultural critics from indoctrinating this
new generation in feminist interpretation, Marxist philosophy and so-called                          “queer
theory.”  Requirements for reading Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and other dead white
males are disappearing to be replaced by options to take studies in “the Roles of Women
in the Renaissance” (an excuse to lament the sexism of the past) or “The Bible as
Literature” (a course designed to denigrate the Bible as cleverly crafted fiction instead of
God’s truth).
Deconstruction has succeeded in destabilizing the traditional meanings of texts.
What happens next remains to be seen, but there are indications that its influence is
waning.  Already we see Shakespearean plays revived in the cinema; “Much Ado About
Nothing,” “Hamlet,” and “Romeo and Juliet” - all recently adapted for the screen - have
long since been abandoned by the American academy in favor of lesser works. Jane
Austen’s novels, once highly touted by the intelligentsia as undiscovered works of a
female author, are now derided in our universities as being too conservative because of
their themes of love and marriage. The popular culture has, in a moment of taste, seen the
worth of these and revived them as cinema adaptations.
But the real death knell for deconstruction will sound when the next generation of
literary critics realizes that the very nature of what it does - read, think, analyze - is
antithetical   to   deconstruction’s   philosophical   goals.   The   reliable   savior   of   the
intelligentsia is the common man and his common sense. Common sense dictates that
5

words do mean things, and as deconstruction posits otherwise it will be relegated to the
margins of society.  Sadly, its effects will linger on - it has given a sense of validity to
cultural criticism and established a marketplace for its ideas.
The deconstructionists are already abandoning their enclave at Yale as their
school of thought is eclipsed by trendier, simpler and narrower ideologues. These are the
feminists, Marxists and queer theorists - none of whom are leaving their tenured offices
peacefully. Instead, they have begun to recruit and train new graduate students to take
their places. Applications for graduate and teaching degrees are at an all time high as
these campus establishment                                                                     “radicals” encourage the next generation to help them
enshrine their ideology permanently in the American university system.
6

Chapter V
Radical Feminism and Political Correctness
by
Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson
Perhaps no aspect of Political Correctness is more prominent in American life
today than feminist ideology. Is feminism, like the rest of Political Correctness, based on
the cultural Marxism imported from Germany in the 1930s? While feminism’s history in
America certainly extends longer than sixty years, its flowering in recent decades has
been  interwoven  with  the  unfolding  social  revolution  carried  forward  by  cultural
Marxists.
Where do we see radical feminism ascendant? It is on television, where nearly
every major offering has a female “power figure” and the plots and characters emphasize
inferiority of the male and superiority of the female. It is in the military, where expanding
opportunity for women, even in combat positions, has been accompanied by double
standards and then lowered standards, as well as by a decline in enlistment of young men,
while “warriors” in the services are leaving in droves. It is in government-mandated
employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use “sexual harassment”
charges to keep men in line. It is in colleges where women’s gender studies proliferate
and “affirmative action” is applied in admissions and employment. It is in other
employment, public and private, where in addition to affirmative action, “sensitivity
training” is given unprecedented time and attention. It is in public schools, where “self
awareness”  and                                                                                 “self-esteem”  are  increasingly  promoted  while  academic  learning
declines. And sadly, we see that                                                                “a woman’s right to choose” leads many fellow
Americans, including many with stewardship of public law and culture, to believe it is
“the right thing to do” to allow the most helpless to be put to death.
While it is the theme of this essay that the radical feminist movement is embraced
by present day Political Correctness ideology, derived from cultural Marxism, feminism
as such does have earlier roots. Feminism was conceived and birthed in America in the
1830s, in the generation experiencing the first stage of the industrial revolution. Women,
who for centuries had shared the challenges of surviving in an agrarian life, were
becoming part of a middle-class gentry with more time and energy to spend writing
newspaper articles and novels for their “sisters.”  The initial stages of the feminization of
American culture had started. 1
These  feminists,  radical  in  their  time,  became  a  staple  of  the  idealistic
Transcendentalists, who included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and
many radical Unitarian ministers of the day. They were also abolitionists, bent on
destroying slavery and Southern culture as well. Spurred by the rhetoric of Harriet
Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Julia Ward Howe (author of the words to
1 Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
1

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), and Margaret Fuller (the first radical feminist
newspaper columnist), the men and women of this idealist Transcendentalist generation
propelled our nation toward Civil War.
Who were these Transcendentalist idealists, and why should we be reminded of
them today?  They were the precursors of today’s idealistic Boomer generation. While we
cannot draw a continuous link between the Transcendentalists and today’s Boomers, their
characteristics are very similar. We may glimpse where the elite Boomers are leading us
by reviewing the history of the Transcendentalists and their causes.
The   Transcendentalists   supported   abolition   of   slavery,   women’s   rights,
temperance, pacifism (but not in the anti-slavery cause), and other causes which we now
observe in New Age popular culture. They developed into spiritualism (talking with the
dead), Eastern mysticism and phrenology (discerning personality by the shape of one’s
skull). They would be right at home in today’s New Age milieu.  Luther George Williams
points out, referring to women’s groups and civil rights groups that:
Freed slaves secured the vote only after the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments
(ratified in 1870), but women fared worse. They did not receive the vote until the
passage of the                                                                                   19th Amendment in 1920. However, the substantial political
victories that these groups achieved (during the Civil War period) guaranteed that
they would remain allies. Today, their political organizations dominate every
aspect of society, politics and education in America - including the military.2
Indeed, the present-day radical feminist assault on VMI and the Citadel has a
political parallel to the Transcendentalist activism of the Civil War period. This current
assault is in part a continuation of a century-old effort to destroy Southern culture.
In contrast to today’s radical feminists, social feminists of the 1890s and early
20th century were of a less totalitarian character. They stood for women’s suffrage but
also advocated the strengthening of the family.
Today, the feminization of American culture, moving rapidly since the 1960s
continues to intensify. Radical Feminists demand that women be allowed to “choose”
entry to the infantry, artillery, special forces and combat engineering positions in the
Army and Marine Corps. These demands follow the Feminization of combat aviation in
the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Army since 1993.
The feminization of American politics was advanced in the 1996 presidential
election, when parties produced                                                                  “feminized” conventions featuring soft, emotional,
Oprah Winfrey-type orations and sentimental film clips of the presidential candidates.
Both candidates were portrayed as soft, gentle, emotion-driven creatures sufficiently in
touch with their feelings that all women across America would feel “comfortable” in their
2 Williams, Luther George. A Place for Theodore: The Murder of Dr. Theodore Parkman. Holly Two
Leaves, 1977. p. 161.
2

care.3 With                                                                                               60 million female votes at stake, both parties pandered to America’s
“feminine” side. 4
There is no doubt in the media that the “man of today” is expected to be a touchy-
feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.  He is a staple of Hollywood,
the television network sitcoms and movies, and the political pundits of talk shows.5  The
feminization is becoming so noticeable that newspapers and magazines are picking up on
it.  For example, the Washington Times and National Review magazines combined to tell
us that “behind the breezy celebration of ‘guy stuff’ in today’s men’s magazine lurks a
crisis of confidence. What does it mean to be masculine in the 90s?” It is revealed that
today’s men’s magazines (Esquire, GQ, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Journal,
Details, Maxim, Men’s Perspective)”are all geared to a new feminized man….”6 Some
examples? The old masculine attitude toward personal appearance is disappearing. If
memory serves, our fathers’ acts of personal upkeep were mostly limited to shaving and
putting on a tie. According to Lowry:
[I]t’s hard to imagine [them] interested in articles on ‘A Flat Belly for the Beach’
(Verge), or the three new men’s fragrances for the fall season (GQ), or even ‘The
New Fall Suit’                                                                                            (Esquire). But somewhere along the line men became less
concerned  with  being  strong  and  silent,  and  more  worried  about  making
themselves pretty.7
Indeed the feminization of American culture is nearly completed. And the last
bastion of male domination, the U.S. military, is under assault.
If this “feminization” trend were driven only by radical feminists seeking to pull
down a perceived male-dominated hierarchy, there would be more hope that the cycles of
history would move America toward a stable accommodation between men and women.
But the drive is deeper, and it will not be satisfied by any accommodation. The radical
feminists have embraced and been embraced by the wider and deeper movement of
cultural Marxism. For dedicated Marxists, the strategy is to attack at every point where an
apparent disparity leaves a potential constituency of “oppressed” persons - in this case
women, who are the largest of all constituencies.  Cultural Marxists, men and women, are
making the most of it, and the theory developed by the Frankfurt School provides the
ideology.
The Frankfurt School theorized that the authoritarian personality is a product of
the patriarchal family. This idea is in turn directly connected to Engels’s The Origins of
the Family, Private Property and the State, which promotes matriarchy.  Furthermore, it
3 Kristol, Irving. “The Feminization of the Democrats.” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 9, 1996. Kristol
reported that 50% of the Democratic convention delegates were women. Women were described as tending
to be more sentimental, more risk-adverse, and less competitive than men, and also more permissive and
less judgmental.
4 Blair, Anita. Independent Women’s Forum. “Mitchells in the Morning,” NET-TV, Dec. 5, 1996.
5 Cladwell, Christopher. “The Feminization of America.” Weekly Standard, Dec. 23, 1996.
6 Culture, et Cetera. “Sissifaction.” The Washington Times, Oct. 17, 1997.
7 Lowry, Rich. “Ab Nauseum.” National Review, Oct. 13, 1997
3

was Karl Marx who wrote in The Communist Manifesto about the radical notion of a
“community of women.” He also, in 1845, wrote disparagingly in his The German
Ideology of the idea that the family was the basic unit of society.
The concept of the                                                                                “authoritarian personality” is not just to be interpreted
primarily as a model for the conduct of warfare against prejudice as such. It is a
handbook for psychological warfare against the American male, to render him unwilling
to defend traditional beliefs and values. In other words, the aim was to emasculate him.
Undoubtedly the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University meant this, as it
used the term “psychological techniques for changing personality.”
The “authoritarian personality,” studied in the 1940s and 1950s by American
followers of the Frankfurt School, prepared the way for such psychological warfare
against the male gender role. The aim was promoted by Herbert Marcuse and others
under the guise of “women’s liberation” and under the New Left movement in the 1960s.
Evidence that psychological techniques for changing personality are intended to focus in
particular on the emasculation of the American male has also been provided by Abraham
Maslow,   founder   of                                                                            “third   force   humanist   psychology”   and   promoter   of
psychotherapeutic techniques in public school classrooms. 8 He wrote that “the next step
in personal evolution is a transcendence of both masculinity and femininity to general
humanness.”9
Cultural Marxist stalwarts apparently know exactly what they want to do and how
they plan to do it. They have actually already succeeded in accomplishing much of their
agenda.
How  did  this  situation  come  about  in  American  universities?  Gertrude
Himmelfarb has observed that it slipped past traditional academics almost unobserved
until it was too late. It occurred so “quietly” that when they “looked up”, postmodernism
was upon them with a vengeance. “They were surrounded by such a tidal wave of faddish
multicultural subjects such as radical feminism, deconstructed relativism as history and
other courses” which undermine the perpetuation of Western civilization.10 Indeed, this
tidal wave slipped by just as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School had envisioned -
a quiet revolution that could not be resisted by force.
The Frankfurt School had devised the concept of designating the opponents of the
Marxist  cultural  revolution  as                                                                 “authoritarian  characters.”  According  to  available
accounts:
There was a meeting of American scholars at a conference on religious and racial
prejudice in 1944. Over the next five years, a Frankfurt School team under the
8 See “Hidden Danger in the Classroom” Pearl Evans, Small Helm Press, 1990. The authors of this
classroom approach have since disavowed it, but it continues on in public and other schools.
9 Raehn, Raymond V. “The Roots of Affective Education in American Schools.” March 1995. p. 17.
10 Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Panel on “Academic Reform: Internal Sources.” National Association of
Scholars, Sixth General Conference, May 3-5, 1996.
4

direction  of  Max  Horkheimer  conducted  in-depth  social  and  psychological
profiles of Americans under a project entitled “Studies of Prejudice.” One of the
results was a book entitled “The Authoritarian Personality” by Theodor Adorno,
et al, that summarized one of the largest public opinion surveys ever undertaken
in the United States. It was published in 1950, and conformed to the original
Critical Theory in every respect. As a document which testified to the belief
system of the Frankfurt School revolutionaries it was essentially anti-God, anti-
Christian,  anti-family,  anti-nationalist,  anti-patriot,  anti-conservative,  anti-
hereditarian, anti-ethnocentric, anti-masculine, anti-tradition, and anti-morality.
All of these are elements in critical theory. 11
“Cultural Marxism,” as preached by the Frankfurt School alumni in the U.S., is being
implemented by the elite Boomers. This has laid the foundation for and spurred the
widely popular and destructive concepts of “affirmative action,” “multiculturalism” and
“diversity.”  One can’t escape these terms today.  They have grown from the study of
anti-Semitism and discrimination by the Institute for Social Research during the 1940s
and the systematic infusion of the language of “discrimination,” “civil rights,” ‘women’s
rights,” and other “minority rights” into American culture.
According to Raehn:
Critical Theory as applied mass psychology has led to the deconstruction of
gender  in  the  American  culture.  Following  Critical  Theory,  the  distinction
between masculinity and femininity will disappear. The traditional roles of the
mothers and fathers are to be dissolved so that patriarchy will be ended. Children
are not to be raised according to their biological genders and gender roles
according to their biological differences. This reflects the Frankfurt School
rationale for the disintegration of the traditional family.12
Thus, one of the basic tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to break down
the traditional family.  The Frankfurt School scholars preached:
Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to
increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change.13
The transformation of American culture envisioned by the cultural Marxists goes
further than pursuing gender equality. Embodied in their agenda is “matriarchal theory,”
under which they purpose to transform American culture to be female-dominated. This is
a direct throwback to Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School member who considered
matriarchal theory in psychoanalytic terms.  In 1993, he wrote in “The Mass Psychology
of Fascism” that matriarchy was the only genuine family type of “natural society.”
11 Raehn, Raymond V. “Critical Theory: A Special Research Report.” April 1, 1996.
12 Ibid.
13 Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social
Research, 1923 - 1950. University of California Press, 1973.
5

Erich Fromm, another charter member of the Institute, was one of the most active
advocates of matriarchal theory. Fromm was especially taken with the idea that all love
and altruistic feelings were ultimately derived from the maternal love necessitated by the
extended period of human pregnancy and postnatal care:
Love thus was not dependent on sexuality, as Freud had supposed. In fact, sex
was more often tied to hatred and destruction. Masculinity and femininity were
not reflections of “essential” sexual differences, as the romantics had thought.
They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part
socially determined.14
This  dogma  was  a  precedent  for  today’s  radical  feminist  pronouncements
appearing in  newspapers and in  TV  programs,  including  TV newscasts.   For  its
promoters, male and female roles result from cultural indoctrination - an indoctrination
carried out by the male patriarchy to the detriment of women.
Indeed, cultural Marxism has, in the 1990s, melded with radical feminism in the
elite Boomer generation, that throwback to the dangerous Transcendentalists of the early
19th century.  A cauldron of discontent is forming in our nation, a discontent which has
the potential to dismantle American civilization.
Destructive criticism of primary elements of American culture inspired the 1960s
counter-culture revolution. Idealistic Boomers coming of age strove to transform the
prevailing culture into its opposites, in the spirit of social revolution. Now the elite
Boomers are in positions of power, and they are working to destroy the nation’s historic
institutions. They aim to destroy as well the heritage we call “Western Civilization.”
Richard Bernstein has written in his book on multiculturalism, “the Marxist
revolutionary process for the past several decades in America has centered on race and
sex warfare rather than class warfare” as in earlier times.15  This reflects a scheme more
total than economics to restructure American society. As the social revolutionaries
readily proclaim, their purpose is to destroy the hegemony of white males. To accomplish
this, all barriers to the introduction of more women and minorities throughout the “power
structure”  are  to  be  brought  down  by  all  means  available.  Laws  and  lawsuits,
intimidation, and demonizing of white males as racists and sexists are pursued through
the mass media and the universities. The psycho-dynamic of the revolutionary process
aim for psychic disempowerment - decapitation - of those who oppose.
Steve Forbes has emphasized:
14 Ibid.
15 Bernstein, Richard. The Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future.
Knopf, 1994.
6

This country’s founders recognized three primal values in the Declaration of
Independence, and they ranked them properly: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.16
Forbes observes that if the order of these fundamental human rights is switched -
with happiness before liberty or liberty before life - we come to moral chaos and social
anarchy.
This very condition is what Judge Robert Bork describes as “modern liberalism.”
He defines its characteristics as “‘radical egalitarianism’ (equality of outcomes rather
than of opportunities) and                                                                               ‘radical individualism’        (the drastic reduction of limit to
personal gratification).”17
Judge  Bork  also  identifies  radical  feminism  as                                                     “the  most  destructive  and
fanatical” element of this modern liberalism. He further describes radical feminism as
“totalitarian in spirit.”
Most Americans do not realize that they, through their institutions, are being led
by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the continuing destruction of the existing
social order in order to create a new one. The revolutionaries are New Age Elite
Boomers.18  They now control the public institutions in the United States. Their “quiet”
revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearing
completion. A key, or even a dominant element because purportedly it represents that
largest political and social constituency among their potential followers, is feminism. The
Marxist movement in its “quiet” cultural latter-day phase is seemingly sweeping all
before it. With its sway over the media, fully in the grip of feminism, it is hard to discern
the stirrings of a counter-culture. Are the elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians, the most
dangerous generation in America’s history? William Strauss and Neil Howe suggest so,
in their book Generations: The History of America’s Future - 1584 - 2069. 19 James
Kurth writes:
The United States itself has become a great power that opposes much of what was
once thought of as Western Civilization, especially its cultural achievements and
its social arrangements. The major American elites - those in power in politics,
business, the media, and academia - now use American power, especially the
“soft power” of information, communications, and popular entertainment, to
displace Western Civilization not only in America but also in Europe.20
16 Snow, Tony. “Moral of the Story: Forbes Virtue Stance.” The Washington Times,  Oct. 27, 1997. Mr.
Snow reports on an article by Forbes in the November 1997 Policy Review magazine.
17 Bork, Robert H. Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. Harper
Collins, 1996.
18 Atkinson, Gerald L. The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America’s Future. Atkinson
Associated Press, 1996.
19 Strauss, William and Neil Howe. Generations: the History of America’s Future. William Morrow & Co.,
1991.
20 Kurth, James. “NATO Expansion and the ideas of the West.” Western Civ in World Politics, Orbis
Magazine, Fall 1997.
7

Will American men, of every race, and more traditionalist women of every age
and circumstances - who may well be a silent majority of their sex - rise to challenge
Political Correctness? Or will American men continue in voluntary submission toward a
future of peonage under a new American matriarchy? Would that be a precursor to a
condition of anarchy, and an end to America’s experiment with democracy? It may well
be that the fate of American civilization depends on American men steadfastly resisting
Politically Correct feminism. Even more, they must resourcefully oppose the wider grip
of Political Correctness, the cultural Marxism for which radical feminism is only one
avenue of attack.
8

Chapter VI
Further Readings on the Frankfurt School
by
William S. Lind
This is the sixth and final chapter in the Free Congress Foundation’s book on
Political Correctness, or - to call it by its real name - cultural Marxism. It is a short
bibliographical essay intended not as an exhaustive resource for scholars but as a guide
for interested citizens who want to learn more about the ideology that is taking over
America.
As readers of the earlier chapters in this book already know, to understand
Political Correctness and the threat it poses it is necessary to understand its history,
particularly the history of the institution most responsible for creating it, the Frankfurt
School. The Frankfurt School, or the Institute for Social Research as it was formally
known, was established at Frankfurt University in Germany in 1923. This fact alone is
important, because it tells us that Political Correctness is not merely a leftover of the
American student rebellion of the 1960s.
Another fact from that long-ago year, 1923, is equally significant: the intended
name for the Frankfurt School was the Institute for Marxism. The Institute’s father and
funder, Felix Weil, wrote in 1971 that he “wanted the Institute to become known, and
perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism as a scientific discipline…”1
Beginning a tradition Political Correctness still carries on, Weil and others decided that
they could operate more effectively if they concealed their Marxism; hence, on reflection,
they chose the neutral-sounding name, the Institute for Social Research (Insitut für
Sozialforschung). But “Weil’s heartfelt wish was still to create a foundation similar to the
Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow - equipped with a staff of professors and students, with
libraries and archives - and one day to present it to a German Soviet Republic.”2 In 1933,
this disguised “Institute for Marxism” left Germany and reestablished itself in New York
City, where in time it shifted its focus to injecting its ideology into American society.
The most readable English-language history of the Frankfurt School is Martin
Jay’s book, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
Institute for Social Research, 1932 - 1950 (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA,
1973 - new edition in 1996). This book is in print in paperback and can be ordered
through any bookstore. The reader should be aware that Jay’s book is, in the words of
1 Martin, Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social
Research, 1923 - 1950 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996) p. 8.
2 Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. by
Michael Robertson (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995) p.24.
1

another work on the Frankfurt School, a “semiofficial’ history3, which is to say that it is
largely uncritical. Like virtually all other English-language authors on the Institute, Jay is
on the political left. Nonetheless, the book provides a solid factual introduction to the
Frankfurt School, and the reader should have little trouble discerning in it the roots and
origins of today’s Political Correctness.
In his first chapter, “The Creation of the Institut für Sozialforschung and Its First
Frankfurt Years,” Jay lays bare the Institute’s Marxist origins and nature, and equally its
efforts to conceal both:                                                                            “The original idea of calling it the Institut für Marxismus
(Institute for Marxism) was abandoned as too provocative, and a more Aesopian
alternative was sought (not for the last time in the Frankfurt School’s history).”4 Of the
Institute’s first director, Carl Grünberg, Jay writes, “Grünberg concluded his opening
address by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology.
Just as liberalism, state socialism, and the historical school had institutional homes
elsewhere, so Marxism would be the ruling principle at the Institut.”5 Jay’s first chapter
also introduces the Institute’s critical shift that laid the basis for today’s Political
Correctness, a.k.a. cultural Marxism: “if it can be said that in early years of its history the
Institut concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic
substructure, in the years after 1930 its prime interest lay in its cultural superstructure.”6
The second chapter, “The Genius of Critical Theory,” gets at the heart of the
“Critical Studies” departments that now serve as the fonts of Political Correctness on
American college campuses. All of these are branches and descendants of the Critical
Theory first developed in the 1930s by the Frankfurt School.  The term “Critical Theory”
is itself something of a play on words. One is tempted to ask, “OK, what is the theory?”
The answer is, “The theory is to criticize.” Jay writes, “Critical Theory, as its name
implies, was expressed through a series of critiques of other thinkers and philosophical
traditions…Only by confronting it in its own terms, as a gadly of other systems, can it be
fully understood.”7 The goal of Critical Theory was not truth, but praxis, or revolutionary
action: bringing the current society and culture down through unremitting, destructive
criticism. According to Jay, “The true object of Marxism, Horkheimer argued (Max
Horkheimer succeeded Carl Grünberg as director of the Institute in July, 1930), was not
the uncovering of immutable truths, but the fostering of social change.”8
The central question facing the Institute in the early 1930s was how to apply
Marxism to the culture. The title of Jay’s third chapter gives the answer: “The Integration
of Psychoanalysis.” Here, Jay’s book falls down to some extent, in that it does not offer a
clear understanding of how the Institute integrated Marx and Freud.  The answer appears
to be that Freud’s later critiques were made conditional on a capitalist, bourgeois order: a
revolutionary, post-capitalist society could “liberate” man from his Freudian repression.
3 Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, ed., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Continuum, New York
1997) p. vii.
4 Jay op. cit., p. 8.
5 Ibid., p. 11.
6 Ibid., p. 21.
7 Ibid., p. 41.
8 Ibid., p. 46.
2

Here again one sees key aspects of Political Correctness emerging, including a demand
for sexual “liberation” and the attack on “patriarchal” Western culture.
If the precise nature of the blending of Marx and Freud is left open by Jay, his
next chapter makes the blend’s application clear:                                                “The Institute’s First Studies of
Authority.” The Institute left Germany for New York in 1933 because the Nazis came to
power in Germany. Not surprisingly, one of the Institute’s first tasks in New York was to
oppose  Nazism.  It  did  so  largely  by  concocting  a  psychological                          “test”  for  an
“authoritarian personality.” Supposedly, people with this authoritarian personality were
likely to support Nazism. Both the concept and the methodology were doubtful at best.
But the Institute’s work laid down an important tool for the left, namely a notion that
anyone on the right was psychologically unbalanced. And it marked a key turning for the
Institute in the birth of Political Correctness in America, in that the empirical research the
studies demanded was done on Americans. Ultimately, the result was Institute member
Theodor Adorno’s vastly influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, published in
1950.
Jay’s fifth chapter, “The Institute’s Analysis of Nazism,” continues the theme of
the “authoritarian personality.” But his sixth, “Aesthetic Theory and the Critique of Mass
Culture,” provides an answer to the question of why most “serious” modern art and music
is so awful. It is intended to be. Theodor Adorno was the Institute’s lead figure on high
culture - he began life as a music critic and promoter of Schönberg - and his view was
that in the face of the “repressiveness” of bourgeois society, art could only be “true” if it
were alienating, reflecting the alienated society around it. Jay quotes Adorno:                  “A
successful work…is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious
harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the
contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”9
Adorno despised the new mass culture - film, radio, and jazz - in what seems to
be a case of missed opportunity: today, the entertainment industry is the single most
powerful promoter of Political Correctness. Another key Frankfurt School figure, Walter
Benjamin, did see the potential: “he paradoxically held out hope for the progressive
potential of politicized, collectivized art.”10 At some point, someone - the question of
who lies beyond the boundaries of Jay’s book - put Benjamin’s perception together with
the Frankfurt School’s general view, which Jay summarizes as “the Institut came to feel
that the culture industry enslaved men in far more subtle and effective ways than the
crude methods of domination practiced in earlier eras.”11
In the remainder of the book, Jay traces the (sort of) empirical work of the
Institute in the 1940s, which was beset by the same problems as their earlier survey
“research,” and follows the Institute in its return to Frankfurt, Germany after World War
II. But by this point, the reader will already have the picture. He will have seen how
Marxism was translated from economic into cultural terms; discerned the themes of
9 Ibid., p. 179.
10 Ibid., p. 211.
11 Ibid., p. 216
3

sexual  liberation,  feminism,                                                                 “victims”  and  so  on  that  make  up  today’s  Political
Correctness; and found in Critical Theory the origins of the endless wailing about
“racism, sexism and homophobia” that “PC” pours forth. One key piece of history is
missing: “an analysis of Marcuse’s influential transmission of the Frankfurt School’s
work to a new American audience in the 1960s,”12 as Jay puts it in his epilogue.  Also,
Jay curiously passes over with only the most minimal discussion the effective move of
the Institute, in the persons of Horkheimer and Adorno, to Los Angeles during the war.
Did the connections they built there play any role in injecting the Frankfurt School’s
philosophy into American film and, after the war, television?  Jay does not touch upon
the subject.
But for the reader new to the Frankfurt School as the source of today’s Political
Correctness, Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination offers a solid base. The book concludes
with an extensive                                                                              (though not annotated) bibliography of works by and about the
Frankfurt School.
As to other accessible works about the Frankfurt School, the definitive modern
work in German has recently been translated into English: The Frankfurt School: Its
History, Theories and Political Significance by Rolf Wiggershaus, (translated by Michael
Robertson, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, first paperback edition 1995). This covers
much of the same ground as Martin Jay’s book, although it also follows the Institute from
its post-war return to Germany up to Adorno’s death in 1969. Wiggershaus is more
detailed than Jay, and, although he too is on the left politically, he is more critical than
Jay.  In the book’s Afterword, Wiggershaus offers a brief look (and a hostile one) at some
German conservative critiques of the Frankfurt School. A picture emerges that will seem
familiar to Americans entrapped in the coils of Political Correctness:
Since the publication in                                                                       1970 of his book The Poverty of Critical Theory,
Rohrmoser has promulgated, in constantly varying forms, the view that Marcuse,
Adorno, and Horkheimer were the terrorists’ intellectual foster-parents, who were
using  cultural  revolution  to  destroy  the  traditions  of  the  Christian  West.
Academics such as Ernst Topitsch and Kurt Sontheimer, who saw themselves as
educators and liberal democrats, followed in Rohrmoser’s footsteps. In 1972
Topitsch, a critical rationalist who was Professor of Philosophy in Graz, had
stated that behind the slogans of “rational discussion” and “dialogue free of
domination” there was being established at the universities “a distinct terrorism of
political convictions such as never existed before, even under Nazi tyranny.”13
12 Ibid., p. 287; Herbert Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research in 1932.
13 Wiggershaus, op. cit., p. 657.
4

Additional works on the Frankfurt School include:
•                                                                                            The Frankfurt School by T.B. Bottomore (Tavistock, London, 1984). Another
history written by a sympathizer; you are better off with Jay or Wiggershaus.
•                                                                                            “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’” by
Michael Minnicino, in Fidelio, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1992 (KMW Publishing,
Washington, DC) One of the few looks at the Frankfurt School by someone not a
sympathizer, this long journal article explains the role of the Institute for Social
Research in creating the ideology we now know as “Political Correctness.”
Unfortunately, its value is reduced by some digressions that lack credibility.
•                                                                                            Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis (Random House, New York
1974) Angela Davis, a leading American black radical and Communist Party
member, was described by Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse as “my
best student.” She also studied in Frankfurt under Adorno. This book shows the
link between the Institute for Social Research and the New Left of the 1960s
through the eyes of a key participant.
•                                                                                            The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism by Andrew Arato
(Seabury Press, New York, 1979). The author is, as usual, a sympathizer, but this
work shows the key role Lukacs played in the thinking of the Frankfurt School
and, later, the New Left.
•                                                                                            The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and
the Frankfurt Institute by Susan Buck-Morss (Free Press, New York, 1977). An
important book on the relationship of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory to
the New Left.
•                                                                                            Introduction  to  Critical  Theory:  Horkheimer  to  Habermas  by  David  Held
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980). Yet another history by a fan of
the Frankfurt School, but valuable for its discussion of the impact of Nietzsche
on key Frankfurt School figures.
Beyond these secondary works lies the vast literature produced by members of the
Frankfurt School itself. Some key works were written in English, and many of those
written in German are available in translation. As is usually the case with Marxist works,
the prose style and vocabulary are often so convoluted as to make them almost
unreadable. Further, the refusal of the Frankfurt School to make its own future vision
plain led many of its members to write in aphorisms, which adds yet another layer of
impenetrableness.
One work, however, is of such importance that it must be recommended despite its
difficulty: Eros and Civilization by  Herbert  Marcuse                                       (Beacon  Press,  Boston,  first
paperback edition in 1974 and still in print).  Subtitled A Philosophical Inquiry into
5

Freud, this book holds center stage for two reasons. First, it completes the task of
integrating Marx and Freud. While the Marxism is sotto voce, the whole framework of
the book is in fact Marxist, and it is through the framework that Freud is considered.
Second, Eros and Civilization and its author were the key means of transmission by
which the intellectual work of the Frankfurt School was injected into the student rebellion
of the 1960s. This book became the bible of the young radicals who took over America’s
college campuses from 1965 onward, and who are still there as faculty members.
In brief, Eros and Civilization urges total rebellion against traditional Western
culture - the “Great Refusal” - and promises a Candyland utopia of free sex and no work
to those who join the revolution.  About two-thirds of the way through the book, Marcuse
offers this summary of its arguments:
Our definition of the specific historical character of the established reality
principle led to a reexamination of what Freud considered to be universal validity.
We questioned this validity in view of the historical possibility of the abolition of
the repressive controls imposed by civilization. The very achievements of this
civilization seemed to make the performance principle obsolete, to make the
repressive utilization of the instincts archaic. But the idea of a non-repressive
civilization on the basis of the achievements  of  the  performance  principle
encountered the argument that instinctual liberation                                                   (and consequently total
liberation) would explode civilization itself, since the latter is sustained only
through renunciation and work (labor) - in other words, through the repressive
utilization of instinctual energy. Freed from these constraints, man would exist
without work and without order; he would fall back into nature, which would
destroy  culture.  To  meet  this  argument,  we  recalled  certain  archetypes  of
imagination which, in contrast to the culture-heroes of repressive productivity,
symbolized creative receptivity. These archetypes envisioned the fulfillment of
man and nature, not through domination and exploitation, but through release of
inherent libidinal forces. We then set ourselves the task of “verifying” these
symbols - that is to say, demonstrating their truth value as symbols of a reality
beyond the performance principle. We thought that the representative content of
the Orphic and Narcissistic images was the erotic reconciliation (union) of man
and nature in the aesthetic attitude, where order is beauty and work is play.14
Marcuse continues after this summary to lay out the erotic content of the “reality
beyond the performance principle,” i.e., a new civilization where work and productivity
were unimportant. “The basic experience in this (aesthetic) dimension is sensuous rather
than conceptual,”15 that is, feelings are more important than logic: “The discipline of
aesthetics installs the order of sensuousness as against the order of reason.”16
14 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Beacon Press, Boston,
1955), p. 175-176.
15 Ibid., p. 176.
16 Ibid., p. 181.
6

“In German, sensuousness and sensuality are still rendered by one and the same
term: Sinnlichkeit. It connotes instinctual (especially sexual) gratification…17 No
longer used as a full-time instrument of labor, the body would be resexualized…
(which) would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones and,
consequently, in a resurgence of pre-genital polymorphous sexuality and in a
decline of genital supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of
cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed - an instrument of pleasure. This change in the
value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the
institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized,
particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.”18
This in a book which Marcuse dedicated to Sophie Marcuse, his wife of fifty years!
It is easy to see how this message - “If it feels good, do it” - published in 1955
resonated with the student rebels of the 1960s. Marcuse understood what most of the rest
of his Frankfurt School colleagues did not: the way to destroy Western civilization - the
objective set forth by George Lukacs in 1919 - was not through abstruse theory, but
through sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Marcuse wrote other works for the new generation
that spawned the New Left - One Dimensional Man (1964), Critique of Pure Tolerance
(1965), An Essay on Liberation (1969), Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972).  But Eros
and Civilization was and remains the key work, the one that put the match to the tinder.
Other central works by members of the Frankfurt School include:
•                                                                                           The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno (Harper, New York, 1950).
This book is the basis for everything that followed that portrayed conservatism as
a psychological defect. It had enormous impact, not least on education theory.
•                                                                                           Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (trans. by
John Cumming, Verso, London, 1979). A complex philosophical work written
during World War II largely in response to Nazism (and extensively devoted to
discussions of anti-Semitism), this work seeks to find a kernel of “liberating”
reason in the ruins of the Enlightenment.
•                                                                                           Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life by Theodor Adorno (trans.
E.F.N. Jophcott, New Left Books, London, 1974). A book of aphorisms, almost
entirely incomprehensible, but the effective conclusion of Adorno’s work.
•                                                                                           Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm (Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1941, still
in print in paperback) Fromm was the Institute’s “happy face,” and this book was
often required reading at colleges in the 1960s. The thesis is that man’s nature
causes him to throw his freedom away and embrace fascism unless he “masters
society and subordinates the economic machine to the purposes of human
happiness,” i.e., adopts socialism. At this point Fromm was in the process of
17 Ibid., p. 182
18 Ibid., p. 201.
7

breaking away from the Institute and his subsequent works cannot be considered
as part of the Frankfurt School corpus.
•                                                                                          Eclipse of Reason (Oxford University Press, New York, 1947). Essentially a
sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment, the book is heavily the work of Adorno and
other Frankfurt School personages, although only Horkheimer name appeared on
it. Its contents are based on a series of lectures Horkheimer gave at Columbia
University in 1944. The prose style is surprisingly readable, but the contents are
odd; there is throughout a strong nostalgia, which was normally anathema to the
Frankfurt School. The key chapter, “The Revolt of Nature,” reflects a strange
Retro  anarchism:                                                                          “The  victory  of  civilization  is  too  complete  to  be  true.
Therefore, adjustment in our times involves an element of resentment and
suppressed fury.”
•                                                                                          Critical Theory: Selected Essays by Max Horkheimer (trans. Matthew O’Connell,
Seabury Press, New York, 1972). The essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory” is
especially important.
•                                                                                          The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. By Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt
(Continuum, New York, 1982, in print in paperback) Not an introduction to the
Frankfurt School, but rather a reprinting of Frankfurt School essays not available
elsewhere, this book is more useful to the specialist than the novice. Nonetheless,
both the editors’ lengthy introductions and some of the essays are useful (once
again, the editors are solidly on the Left politically, and their style is as heavy as
that of the Frankfurt School’s members).
This small bibliography will be enough to get an interested reader started; the full
literature on and by the Frankfurt School is immense, as the bibliographies in Jay’s
and Wiggershaus’s books attest. What has been missing from it, at least in English, is
a readable book, written for the layman, that explains the Frankfurt School and its
works in terms of the creation of Political Correctness. This short volume is at least a
start in filling that gap.
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