Many moons ago, in college, a good decade before I made a conservative turn, I was regularly exposed to both Marxism and postmodernism (e.g., Foucault, Derrida). Both sets of ideas excited me at the time. As idea-systems, they were both… so new (to me anyways), so exciting and transgressive, and so totalizing.
I had something of an intellectual crisis as a I studiously compared, contrasted, and tried to fuse the philosophy of Nietzsche and Marx, two seemingly incompatible philosophies.
At Philosoblog, Jim wonderfully distills the essence of both thinkers, in terms of their influence on our current epoch:
Nietzsche correctly diagnosed the disease of envy…
Marx packaged the purified essence of envy in a delivery system which enabled the disease to destroy the Western world’s political and economic systems in about one hundred and fifty years.
