Sade and Mandeville predicted totalitarian virtue through private vice.

Evidence

In Sade as in Mandeville, private vice constitutes a predictive chronicle of the public virtues of the totalitarian era. Not to have glossed over or suppressed but to have trumpeted far and wide the impossibility of deriving from reason any fundamental argument against murder fired the hatred which the progressives (and they precisely) still direct against Sade and Nietzsche. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 92

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader study of Enlightenment critique and the culture industry thesis; also extends Burns’s invocation of the Adorno critique. — connects to: Totalitarian rule extends control into the private inner life of subjects — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 624
• SEED: Article angle: the moral panic against ‘immoral’ writers (Sade, Nietzsche) as a sign the critique hit a nerve — the powerful hate the truthful diagnostician more than the corrupt.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that reason cannot ground an argument against murder, and that admitting this is more merciful than moralistic consolation, is dense and paradigm-shifting.

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian rule extends control into the private inner life of subjects #expands (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 624