Liberties lose their critical force once institutionalized

Evidence

Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were—just as free enterprise, which they served to promote and protect—essentially critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent material and intellectual culture by a more productive and rational one. Once institutionalized, these rights and liberties shared the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement cancels the premises. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 106

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing work on how moral panics over immodesty and liberties get co-opted once institutionalized. — connects to: Hyperspecialized institutions cease being functional and become deterrence nuclei — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 264; Renouncing thought under institutional pressure becomes an incapacity for it — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 151; Freedom lost its philosophical urgency once the 1960s liberation movements won. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 96 (+9 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The dialectical punch — success itself cancels the grounds of critique — is worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Institutionalizing a critical field can strip it of political meaning #expands (0.88)
• Universalistic norms lose force without status-group exclusionary sanctions behind them. #qualifies (0.72) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 271