Cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, and The Frankfurt School

In Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), Ludwig Feuerbach’s 1841 scathing criticism of Christianity, the German anthropologist pontificates on the nature of divinity by attributing divine qualities to man. Feuerbach and the philosophical materialists that he inspired assert that man can be perfected, once his environment is modified. This idea has ushered an overblown estimation of reason. Human reason, materialists contend, will continue to develop in a progressive evolutionary tract that will eventually emancipate man from less rational, hence oppressive people. The followers of Feuerbach and Marx believe that because transcendence of the religious kind, which has otherworldly, spiritual significance, is a fabrication of capitalist bourgeois manipulation, man must instead place his hope in the social-political order. Marxist utopians allege that it is man’s task to change the world at all cost, thus, creating the notion that the ends justify the means. The latter involves a perpetual re-education of man program.

One blatant technique of Marxism’s perpetual war on human reality is to change the names of social-political programs and initiatives in order to ensnare subsequent generations in the trap of Marxism’s shifty dialectical materialism. The latter has a built-in, self-serving defense mechanism that makes Marxism a win-win ideology for those who embrace it. This is why Marxism involves a program of negation, whereby theorists negate the work of previous Marxists as being incomplete. Though, it is important to understand that these superficial squabbles among Marxists remain in the family, as it were. According to Marxism and its many derivatives, spontaneity in human beings is the great enemy of statism. Instead, only theories that lay out a planned existence – by Marxists intellectuals – are consistent with man’s future emancipation. Like small children who must be closely guarded and watched for their own good, mankind cannot be allowed to waste its otherwise valuable energy on trivial endeavors – like reflection on the nature of God and contemplation on the self.

For instance, according to Fuerbach and Marx, religions that serve belief in God and its attendant values to Western man are a creation of capitalism. These two philosophical materialists believed that bourgeois man’s creation of God is a rather simple trick that explains capitalist exploitation. According to Marxism, the creation of God is a necessary opiate of the people that capitalism creates in order to alienate the working class. Alienation, proletariat, worker, and class warfare are catch-all words that serve as the foundation of the ever-shifting dialectic of power that Marxism employs. Marxists believe that eventually workers will liberate themselves from the veil that nourishes the illusion of God. Only then will workers take control of their lives. This will mean the end of capitalist alienation, and thus the beginning of genuine happiness for the masses. This theoretical assertion contradicts the historical record of people who have lived and continue to do so in communist countries.

Marxist ideology is a fundamental cause of the systematic spread of atheism through cultural channels, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century. Let us keep in mind that beginning in the twentieth century Western man witnessed an explosion in what is today referred to as the culture industry. In the twentieth century Marxism attempted to re-make itself by undermining emerging industries, technologies and new forms of work. The advent of critical theory and cultural studies is the brainchild of so-called neo-Marxists. In these disciplines of intellectual contortion, Marxist social engineers saw a powerful vehicle to showcase their perpetual slander of work, industry, and ultimately – human reality. Their program of misinformation, Marxists were confident, would be most effective if diligently applied to all aspects of human life. The media and cultural institutions would eventually be made to serve not as purveyors of what human reality is, but rather as a forum to forge the Marxists vision of what reality ought to be. This has proven to be a diabolically effective strategy. In the twentieth century, this is the story of the Frankfurt School.

Post-modern man suffers from the misconception that Marxism is merely an economic system that must supplant capitalism. This effective misinformation campaign informed the goal of Marxism during the twentieth century. This is what is taught to students in Western democracies to this day. Marxism’s influence on cultural institutions has been devastating. This course of action has proven to be an admission on the part of Marxists that their flawed ideology cannot make inroads in the human psyche by debating questions of economics. According to Marx, the idea of God is the sinister creation of bourgeois values. Without the conception of God capitalism must naturally give up its hierarchy of values, Marxists assert. Yet history has proven that given its parasitic nature, Marxism cannot succeed on its own. Marxism requires a host to nourish itself. Hence, the necessity for the creation of a Marxist ever-expansive, chameleon-like dialectic of misinformation and slander.

Marxism is not philosophy. Instead, Marxism is a negation of life, for Marxism is an intellectualized violent response to human reality. For this reason, Marxism can only exist as a reaction to capitalism and all forms of transcendence. Philosophy is a constructive effort to make sense of human reality, regardless of the often unsavory truths that man discovers. Philosophy is toil that comes about as the result of observation of the world around us, perspicuity, intuition and common-sense intelligence. Philosophy is not the result of theory-building bravado.

According to Marxism, when capitalism is eventually dissolved, only then can there exist universal suffrage. It is not difficult to realize that Marxism’s virulent attack on God and organized religion does not spring from sound metaphysical and epistemological reasoning concerning transcendence, the sublime and the complexity of physical laws, but rather from a pathological aversion to the nature of work. One example of this is that Marxism has nothing to contribute culturally or intellectually to man’s understanding of pre-capitalist societies. In other words, what amounts to the vast totality of human history. The only way that Marxism can relate to man’s nature throughout history is to enact retroactive Marxist theories, especially recent examples of cultural Marxism’s pathological fetish about sex, race and culture as forms of exploitation of the Other.

Because Marxism is a descriptive worldview of how man ought to exist in the cosmos, and not an economic system that leaves other aspects of human existence intact, Marxism must of necessity create a mechanism of disinformation of objective values in its quest for power. Without the insistent efficacy of the latter, Marxism and Marxist theories would have perished a long time ago. The French philosopher, Jean-Francois Revel, aptly explains this in The Totalitarian Temptation: “It is also agreed that this new order is the only framework in which solutions can be implemented to problems that, because of the interdependence of the groups that make up humanity, can no longer be resolved on a national basis. Socialism, therefore, can neither be conceived nor brought into being except on a global scale.”1

At the heart of Marxism in the twentieth century, we encounter the work of social-engineers like Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), and many other self-styled cultural theorists. They insist that in order to destroy capitalism, it is necessary to influence the masses through their culture. This includes religious belief and family life. This also means that music, art, philosophy, sex, sports, agriculture, technology, health – education at every level – and the way that people communicate must become the target of Marxism. In other words, no aspect of human existence can be left out of the grasp of Marxism’s all-engulfing program. Spontaneity must be obliterated.  All aspects of human existence must be made political. In this fashion, metaphysical and existential aspects of man are made to be filtered through a social-political prism. Marxism hopes to organize society by creating a priestly caste of elite intellectuals who rule over their subjects with bureaucratic planning. This is one reason why Marxism must castrate man’s appeal to God on a moral and spiritual basis. God is an obstacle in the creation of the new Marxist man.2

The lasting impact of the Marxist mind-set and worldview, what is in effect a brilliant intellectual application in doing the devil’s work, did not become consolidated in Western intellectual/academic circles until after World War II. This is the case because by World War I communist techniques of terror had become effective tools of misinformation to discredit traditional Western thought, and the pining of everything evil to capitalist societies. Marxism’s hedge on cultural Marxism has gained traction through universities, education systems, weakening of Christianity and cultural institutions. This is ironic, especially when we consider that for people outside of Western universities, Marxism is thought of as an economic theory that has seen its influence squashed by the fall of communist regimes and their criminal legacy.

Marxism is responsible for introducing intellectual fraud into philosophy. From the time of Thales in 600 B.C., the ancient Greek pre-Socratic thinker who is credited as being the first philosopher, philosophy has been a pro-active and constructive activity. Philosophers have always aimed to explain the nature of human reality. This is the essence and legacy of metaphysical reflection. As a noble activity, philosophy has always sought to embrace first principles and the wisdom that this dispels on the lives of prudent people. Marxism turns its back on philosophical reflection, that is, argumentation that pays heed to observation that is made coherent through logical principles. Most importantly, Marxism destroys man’s capacity to reflect in any manner that does not pay allegiance to social-political categories. This alone makes Marxism a modern form of philo-sophism.

Antonio Gramsci’s “Cultural Hegemony” and Atheism

Antonio Gramsci is a seminal intellectual figure of international communism for several reasons. The one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci concentrated his energy not solely on theoretical and critical class warfare, but on culture. Gramsci was a tactical intellectual who presented Marxist theory with a broad and new venue to exploit its social-political ideology of power. Communism, Gramsci fervently argued, must target what he called “cultural hegemony.” Gramsci’s philosophical influences include Marxist thinkers. One of these is Benedetto Croce. Gramsci’s influence on Western atheism is particularly poignant given that he embraced Marx’s fanatical idea that the role of philosophy should be to change the world, not understand it. This is what in Marxist circles is called philosophy of action (praxis). Action is what the world needs, Marxists contend, not philosophical reflection. How naive and arrogant does this contention appear when considered from a cosmic viewpoint?

For this reason, it is important to recognize that when Marxists attempt to philosophize – an activity that by definition is anathema to Marxist ideology – they can only do so in a destructive and negative fashion. This is because Marxists view philosophical reflection as a bourgeois activity. According to Marxists, philosophical reflection is fomented by the upper class in order to dominate the mind of the masses. Given this Marxist paranoia, Marxist ideology must out of self-preservation concern itself with the destruction of philosophical reflection. This philosophy to end all philosophy is what Marxist cynics mean by critical theory.

Reflection on the nature of God is generated through existential inquietude. Man can arrive at a concept of God through revelation and reason. Yet theists are rarely interested in proving the existence of God through elaborate intellectual arguments. This is not the essence of religious belief. Whatever God may be in its infinite intelligence, the prime mover cannot be addressed through any other means than its divine nature. A semblance of divinity is manifested in persons through their existential ability for self-reflection.

Gramsci’s intellectual craftiness emphasized a theory, whereby Western popular culture, religion and values were to be attacked through the creation of what he, and Georges Sorel before him, called “historic blocs.” These historical blocs are in essence the weakening, and therefore the discrediting of traditional values. One particularly important target of Gramsci’s wrath was the Catholic Church. Gramsci studied the Catholic Church and was impressed with its impermeability as a traditional source of moral and spiritual guidance. He realized that to destabilize the dogma of the church from the inside would prove to be a major step forward in spreading Marxist ideology, where hitherto it could make no inroads from the outside. Gramsci’s call to re-educate people, whereby they become the “organic,” not-so-spontaneous grass roots movements that will do battle with bourgeois culture, has proven an effective way to foment envy and resentment in Western culture and institutions.

According to Gramsci, belief in God reinforces the bourgeois notion of the separation of classes. The latter sly of hand, he contends, is a powerful tool utilized by the ruling class. Gramsci’s thought and that of other communists cannot afford  a free-thinking, that is, spontaneous conception of God that serves as the logos of the universe. According to Gramsci and his ideological cadre, belief in God is a dangerous delusion that works in the service of capitalism. With this understanding in hand, we are able to make better sense of one of the most fervent motivations today to discredit Christianity. Remaining true to the rhetorical premises of Marxism, Marxists contend that man’s notion of God, is just that, an idea. If belief in God is at best naive, or a sinister mechanism devised by capitalism to oppress the masses, then it is necessary to discredit belief in order to re-focus man’s social-political energy on the here-and-now.

Gramsci’s elaborate and yet poignant ideological machinations are the fabrication of communist techniques of terror and misinformation. Gramsci was a Marxist ideologue who had a vendetta for God and Christianity. This is the case on several counts. Let us consider three of these. First, Gramsci and other Marxists cannot account for the vast array of metaphysical – including folkloric and mythological – sources for the existence of God. In the absence of social-political organization, that is, in man’s nascent state, God is evoked as a first mover. Marxism attacks the latter as being a naive notion. In its place, Marxists assert that committed, that is, self-absorbed, social-political consciousness eliminates man’s existential inquietude by substituting it with class and culture warfare. This point will resurface in the third of the contentions that I am making.

Secondly, Gramsci’s notion of a capitalist bourgeoisie that controls the cultural hegemony can only be brought to an end by replacing it with Marxist dialectic. So, instead of capitalists controlling man’s values and enslaving the masses, Marxists assert that the take-over of the capitalist hegemony must be directed by Marxist intellectuals forging a new hegemony. These intellectual technocrats, as Gramsci thinks of Marxists social-political leaders, will regulate civil society. This involves mankind’s cultural, moral and religious inheritance. At all levels of society, Gramsci envisions totalitarian control by the calculative techniques of Marxist bureaucratic intellectuals. Yet he admits that all levels will eventually become subsumed by the state, given that man’s condition will be expunged of any existential considerations.

By the time of Gramsci’s death, in 1937, the Lenin/Stalin Soviet totalitarian pogroms had become well established and polished; political murder had taken firm root. The hegemony of Soviet state-control systematized the murder and starvation of over 6 million Kulacs in what is referred to as the dekulakization period, which extended into the mid-1930s. In December 27, 1929 Stalin demanded “the eradication of all Kulak tendencies and the elimination of the Kulaks as a class.”3 By all accounts, these are conservative estimates. Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin’s Great Terror (purge) – Ezhovshchina – sought the liquidation of nearly 700,000 people who were suspected of being fifth columnists. Considered a necessary stage of the implementation of soviet repression, Soviet hegemony was brutal and diabolical in its attempt to fracture the human person. It is intellectually dishonest to suggest that Gramsci was ill-aware of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by soviet totalitarianism.

Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony aims to destroy man’s spontaneity. The essential problem of the bourgeoisie, as he saw it, was and still remains, its embrace of human freedom. Only intellectual dishonesty can pretend that Marxist hegemony, for this is the intent of Marx’s thought, is compatible with basic civil liberties. Soviet totalitarianism and the hegemony that it has implemented is unprecedented in human history, not just because it foments an evil form of ruling and rulers, but because it is intellectualized evil. This form of rationalization makes Marxism a premeditated social-political quest for absolute power.

The Frankfurt School

The creation of the Frankfurt School is a significant turning point in Marxism’s attempt to destabilize Western culture in the twentieth century. The purported critical component of the Frankfurt School’s praxeology launched Western Marxist intellectuals into unprecedented territory. The secular messianism of the Frankfurt School declared war on God, truth and other objectives that were now re-packaged and vilified as being the tools of capitalism. The Frankfurt School made it fashionably expedient to disregard truth, data, information – in essence – any verifiable aspects of human reality that did not conform and promote Marxists causes and ideology. All members of the Frankfurt School were atheists.

Historically, the Frankfurt School serves as the intellectual pillar of today’s cultural war. In order for Marxism to stretch its talons as a social-political theory of human reality, it needed to take command of the popular psyche. This meant the creation of popular, social-political myths that would encompass the whole of human life. Marxism is an ominous ideology because every aspect of human reality and the human person must be viewed through a social-political spectrum. This is why post-modernity’s destruction of objective values has no precedent in human history. Rather than paying heed to historical periods – what has worked and what great suffering bankrupted ideas have brought about in the past – post-modernity pretends that history begins with the life of every individual. If everything is relative and human existence is no more than a social-political power play – then everything is permitted.

The legacy of Marxism that informs post-modernity circa 2018 is tantamount to a chameleon-like reworking of Marxism in the twenty-first century. The ability for Marxism to re-invent itself on demand is its great strength.  Because reason is only an illusion of Western thinkers, violence, both physical and intellectual, is condoned by Marxism. Post-modernity has proven itself to be infatuated with theoretical and intellectual violence, while decrying their physical offspring. Let us be cognizant of what is meant by post-modern:

“Modern debates were over truth and reality, reason and experience, liberty and equality, justice and peace, beauty and progress. In the postmodern framework, those concepts always appear in quotation marks. Our most strident voices tell us that ‘Truth’ is a myth. ‘Reason’ is a white male Eurocentric construct. ‘Equality’ is a mask for  oppressions. ‘Peace’ and ‘Progress’ are met with cynical and weary reminders of power-or explicit ad hominem attacks.”4

A third reason why Gramsci’s crafty talk of cultural hegemony is ultimately self-defeating is because in attempting to destroy man’s sense of transcendence, Marxism turns itself into one more timely theory of philosophical materialism. Gramsci argues that there is no objective truth that can exist beyond a given place and time. Truth, he tells us, is historically and culturally conditioned. God cannot exist because there are no transcendent truths. The discoveries of science are useful to Marxism because of their timely, practical utility as grist for Marxism’s ideological mill. This makes Gramsci’s thought another imaginative form of relativism. By asserting that truth and values are conditioned by a cultural group – the capitalist bourgeoisie – Gramsci cannot separate himself from the turbulence that subsequent waves of Marxism will unleash on his eventually passé ideas, for Marxism foments cannibalism of its prior stages of development. How else, Marxists understand, can Marxism replenish itself as a perpetual quest for power?

Gramsci’s cultural hegemony represents the expansion of Marxism into cultural affairs. The aim of Gramsci’s Marxism is the legitimization of social-political power. Marxism must re-new itself continually. For this reason, Marxism has a built-in rhetorical mechanism that negates and creates values on demand. With the dissolution of objective values that post-modernism has ushered, Marxism and its many derivatives enjoy a can’t-lose status quo. The modus operandi of Marxism is made explicit by the social-political and cultural demands of any given epoch. Marxism is patient, always taking a predatory wait-and-see stance. Marxism practices a chameleon-like logic. Let us contrast this ominous predicament with an address that the Catholic, first post WWII West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, gave at the 1953 Georgetown University graduation convocation. In the address, Chancellor Adenauer stressed the role and responsibility of universities in free societies to safeguard the essence of the individual as persons:

“We are in the midst of a decisive spiritual struggle in which universities have a great task to perform. Some educational institutions bear an ample share of responsibility for the false ideologies menacing the peace and freedom of the world through totalitarian systems of different kinds. Many of these destructive theories were taught from academic chairs long before politicians got hold of them, popularized them and made them into totalitarian party ideologies.”5

On one hand, it appears that the current militant wave of atheism in Western culture is a contemporary phase of a much older nihilism. Yet given that Marxism foments envy and resentment, atheism is utilized to denounce capitalist societies. While not every atheist is a Marxist, it is necessarily true that every Marxist is an atheist. Bolshevism is the creation of an unprecedented form of social-political terror that aims to weaken the human psyche’s ability to exercise autonomy. Marxism’s embrace of the role of devil’s advocate, in its perpetual incitement of class warfare, is a technique for the destabilization of democracy. It is naive not to realize that Gramsci’s thought is intellectualized Bolshevism.

Whatever predicates man can conceive about God, crafty dialectical materialism negates by asserting man’s alleged alienation under capitalism. For instance, because Jesus was a man of love, Marxism capitalizes on this and uses it as a valuable tool in forging a new secular man. Marxism does not view Jesus as a person, but as a means for social-political gain. Why would the Marxist inspired death of God theology movement squander a golden opportunity to attack the existence of God and its manifestation in the historical Jesus?

Jesus, the God/man, is useful for cultural Marxism because it opens up the field of timely and fashionable inspirational figures ad nauseam. These can be political figures, intellectuals or popular culture icons. In effect, Marxism will tap into the utility-value of anyone who has a forum at their disposition. In recent times, Pachakutig Inka Yupanki, the Inca leader who was considered to be the son of the Sun by his followers, is thought to have unified the Incas into an empire. A warrior and effective leader, Yupanki is remembered today, not as the son of the Sun, but through folklore. His reign lasted from 1438 to 1472.

Karl Marx gave the world Marxism, an ideology that evokes sensualism. As a pseudo-philosophy that venerates the-here-and-now, Marxism has currently a vociferous following of loyal zealots, mostly in universities. Today its cancerous sinews stretch to all aspects of life in Western democracies. Marxism brings out great fanaticism in those who value Marx as a supreme leader of the oppressed. Drawing adherents from the ranks of the hopelessly naive, rabid egomaniacs, social-political manipulators and agitators, as well as angry malcontents – in addition to irrational intellectuals – Marxism’s legacy is a form of base sensualism that exploits appearance at the expense of reality. Marxism’s systematic collapse of truth and human reality into appearance has played a vital role in damaging the psyche of Western man.

Jean Francois Revel, one of the giant philosophers of twentieth century social/political thought, argues that Marxism’s ranks are filled by those who possess a totalitarian impulse. Revel’s analysis of the Marxist mindset is one of the most insightful that philosophers have yet offered. Revel’s thought is as lucid and penetrating as Camus’ The Rebel, Milosz’s The Captive Mind, Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West, Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals, and most recently, François Furet’s masterful account of the totalitarian mind-set in The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Revel explains:

“The distinctive characteristic of communism, its very reason for being, is to eliminate the possibility of any challenge to its rule, thus to deny to the people, and indeed to the ruling minority itself, any opportunity to change their minds, once the regime is in power.”6

No doubt, Marxism is a secular religion. It comes with an operating manual – The Communist Manifesto – in order not to leave its faithful practitioners in the dark as to how to execute the day-to-day operation of Marx’s program. In addition, Marxism employs shameless innovative intellectual calisthenics and the perfection of slimy rhetoric and sophistry that do not adhere to reason and logic for its effectiveness. The latter two are deemed inventions of the bourgeoisie, thus they are not applicable to what Marxists refer to as the “science” that informs Marxism. Marxism’s most effective magic trick is dialectical materialism. The degree of sophistry and suspension of belief and reason that fuels dialectical materialism is unprecedented in human history.

The vulgarization of Socrates’ dialectic by Marxism allows for the creation of Being out of nothingness, while annihilating Being into non-Being. This is dictated by the social-political ends of Marxism’s practitioners during any given era. As a secular religion, Marxism has ministers, intellectual theologians, fanatical devotees and a dialectic that creates myths, thus enabling its true believers to transcend themselves through the praxis of the here-and-now. Again, such a secular religion is unprecedented in human history. Marx’s emphasis on sensual values resounds with many intellectuals and writers – disciples who preach Marxism. Marxism has enjoyed an iron grip over a vast empire and is responsible for over 200 million deaths. This is a conservative estimate. This is also a testament to the staying-power and breath of imagination of Marxist foot soldiers in their role as fanatical believers.7

Marxism requires a militant and corrosive form of atheism in order to erode man’s existential inquietude. No longer are people allowed to dwell on their own bitterness, misfortunes and personal tragedies. According to Marxism, human suffering can no longer remain a private affair. Suffering and misery must be exploited for Marxism’s power grab. Marxism catapults human suffering into the realm of angry social-political opportunism. Atheism is today a potent worldview that enjoys intoxicating power over people.

In the contemporary world, atheism has joined forces with crass forms of philosophical materialism. The latter form of radical empiricism employs science and technology to create a narrative about man’s salvation in the twenty first century. The assertion is that while God has failed man, science and technology will assuage man’s existential inquietude. Not surprisingly, radical empiricism leads to skepticism because it takes man’s capacity to know objective reality out of the equation. Ironically, while destroying genuine reflection on the nature of subjectivity – the interiority that man intuits as personhood – radical skepticism emboldens primitive subjectivism. In the last two hundred years Marxism has had ample time to demonstrate how philosophical materialism paralyses human aspiration and atrophies free will.8

Notes

1 Revel, Jean-Francois, The Totalitarian Temptation. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1977), p. 20.

2 Scruton, Roger, Thinkers of the New Left. (London: Claridge Press, 1985), p. 1. Scruton explains: “In the long run such shifts of opinion matter, and they have mattered disastrously. It is again necessary, I believe, to demonstrate the extent of the fraud that has been perpetuated in the name of the ‘theoretical correctness and the ‘moral superiority’ of socialism.”

3 Kramer, Mark, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Consulting Editor. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 147.

4 Hicks, Stephen R. C. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. (Ockham’s Razor Publishing, 2011), p. 20. Hicks adds: “Postmodern debates thus display a paradoxical nature. Across the board, we hear, on the one hand, abstract themes of relativism and egalitarianism. Those themes come in both epistemological and ethical forms. Objectivity is a myth; there is no Truth, no Right Way to read nature or a text. All interpretations are equally valid. Values are socially subjective products. Culturally, therefore, no group’s values have special standing. All ways of life from Afghani to Zulu are legitimate.”

5 Adenauer, Konrad, Memoirs: 1945-1953. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1960), p. 450. Chancellor Adenauer goes on to say: “I underlined the responsibility resting on institutions of higher learning to do everything by way of scientific research and teaching to disprove false theories endangering the future of the world and to discover and develop the principles best suited to guarantee to human society, as organized in the family, the State, and the comity of nations, healthy and peaceful progress.”

6  Ibid. The Totalitarian Impulse, p. 27

7 Polanyi, Michael, The Tacit Dimension. (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2009), p. 59. Polanyi writes of Marxism: “Marxism embodies the boundless moral aspirations of modern man in a theory which protects his ideals from skeptical doubt by denying the reality of moral motives in public life. The power of Marxism lies in uniting the two contradictory forces of the modern mind into a single political doctrine. Thus originated a world-embracing idea, in which moral doubt is frenzied by moral fury and moral fury is armed by scientific nihilism.”

8 Miceli, Vincent, The Gods of Atheism. (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1971).

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