A fierce critic can inadvertently reinforce the very system he attacks.

Evidence

Like Keynes, Said believed in the soundness of the overall structure of the system, of its liberalism, secularity, and humanism, and even of its capitalism and bourgeois ethic. Said’s culture, for all the reservations he expressed in The Text, the World, and the Critic and elsewhere, “resembles nothing so much as that of Arnold, Eliot or Leavis—there seems to be no irony intended at all when Said, the great campaigner against racism and ethnocentrism, laments in Leavisite tones the loss of culture’s ‘discrimination and evaluation.’ ” His New York City, the highest manifestation of capitalism and liberalism in the world, was for him iconic; it was not only where Columbia University was found, but also where Bach’s “rational music” and Gould’s sonatas could be heard. Through his powerfully dissenting voice, Said reinforced modern academia and the foundations on which it stands. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 341

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradoxical thesis: that Said’s dissent — through its commitment to the same liberal-humanist culture he critiques — functions to prop up modern academia. This is a sophisticated double-move worth sitting with.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the dissenter’s alibi’ — how institutions absorb and even benefit from their sharpest internal critics because both share fundamental premises.
• XREF: connects to: Critics are implicated in the systems they condemn; The political facade’s illusion sustains the very individuals who criticise it.; Severe repression can accelerate the very mobilization it targets. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 578 (+1 more)