French intellectuals’ declaration that history has ended abandons the masses they never knew concretely.

Evidence

What raised my political hackles is the comfortable way in which French intellectuals now take it upon themselves to declare when and for whom history ends, how the masses can or cannot be represented, when they are or are not a real historical force, when they can or cannot by mythically invoked in the French revolutionary tradition. French intellectuals always had a tendency to use “the masses” in the abstract to fuel or underpin their own intellectual positions. Now that the intellectuals have renounced critical thought, they feel no inhibition in renouncing it on behalf of the masses—whose destinies they have only shared abstractly. I find it ironic that the silent majority, whom the intellectuals only discovered yesterday, is fueling the postmodernist collapse. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 731

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘the end of history’ as intellectual abdication — those who declare history over are declaring it over for people they have never shared a fate with.