[...] an intellectual circles that pays certain lip service to the ideals of Frankfurt School, interdisciplinary quasi-Marxian inquiry, that is actually more and more doing what I call 'freestanding moral and political and legal philosophy'. As if you could talk about morality, politics and law without talking about capitalism, without talking about the economy, without talking about the institutional structure of society, about the mechanisms through which relations of domination are entrenched.

[...] one side of the story is this creeping liberalism. The other reference was to postructuralist anti-normativism, and this is a reference to a French version of critical theory. It's a group of people who are also very brilliant and extremely interesting thinkers, but who have got the idea that the normative perspective of the moral critique of society was essentially useless. And so here you have two equal and opposite ideas. One is that morality is everything and ca be done frmo on high, and the other is that it's some kind of a ruse.

What is left out of this picture? Can I tell you in two words? Left Hegelianism, which is the idea that the people's moral indignation about living in the kind of world we live in actually comes out of a historically situated experience and, when developed, can point beyond it to a better world. [...]