Reactionary anti-modern viewpoints often yield the most penetrating analyses of the modern

Evidence

No doubt, depending on the width of our historical lens, this absolute break could be located earlier, perhaps around the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the French Revolution and German Romanticism. In this connection it is significant that the attitude of Lukács reproduces almost exactly that of Goethe and Hegel toward Romanticism itself. Classicism is the healthy, said Goethe, Romanticism the sick. And Hegel criticized the subjectivism of the Romantics in much the same terms that Lukács reserves for the modernists. The judgment is the inevitable one that a philosophy of the concrete must pass on the abstract, and it should be added that it is very often precisely from a relatively old-fashioned, anticontemporary, even reactionary viewpoint (see Yvor Winters and, indeed, Edmund Burke himself) that the most penetrating analyses of the actual are made. The advantage of Lukács over sympathetic theoreticians of the modern lies in the differentiating and profoundly comparative thought mode which is his. He is not inside the modern phenomenon, completely given over to its fundamental values, able to see it only through its own eyes: he can define it and mark off its limits as a historical moment from that which it is not; yet such comparisons will always, in their very structure, seem to imply a judgment on the side of the older term. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 399

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls book_so_far claim: ‘Totalitarian political regimes are symptoms of deeper economic systematization’ — the outsider’s comparative stance giving unique vision. — connects to: The concept of alienation functions as criticism without requiring a Utopian counterpart — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 343; Totalitarian political regimes are symptoms of deeper economic systematization; Critiques of modernism can be hijacked for reactionary cultural politics — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 178 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Critiques of modernism can be hijacked for reactionary cultural politics #corroborates (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 178
• A critique of modernity that stays within modernity’s framework only reinforces it #corroborates (0.72)