In a sense, the Frankfurt theorists did what leftist intellectuals have always done. First they collapsed European and American society’s bewildering variety of mediating institutions—churches, charitable organizations, debating societies, pubs, brass bands—into a single lifeless word, “capitalism.” Second, they set the present “capitalist” society against a future state of total equality, a state that by definition couldn’t be measured or even described.
Compare and contrast with global warming theory. (Yesterday in Philadelphia the temperature tied the record for that date. The record was first set in 1931, 84 years ago. So it has been just as warm in the past as it was yesterday. Probably, it was just as warm on that date some time even earlier. We just don't have any record of that. In other words, no grand inference can be drawn from yesterday's temperature to use in support of some Platonic view of climate.)
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