As much as they like to pretend otherwise, the intellectual left rarely actually read any leftist theory. They mostly absorb the ideas from osmosis, and now wikipedia particularly. It's not about rigor and building a coherent framework; it's about using the correct jargon to express whatever idea they have in order to gain prestige. This disinterest appears to have really taken off with the structural marxists, such as Louis Althusser who famously confessed he never read Marx. Zizek comes off the same way.

Spez: Chomsky is an exception and has clearly read Bernays, Lippmann, Foucault, etc.

As much as they like to pretend otherwise, the intellectual left rarely actually read any leftist theory. They mostly absorb the ideas from osmosis, and now wikipedia particularly. It's not about rigor and building a coherent framework; it's about using the correct jargon to express whatever idea they have in order to gain prestige. This disinterest appears to have really taken off with the structural marxists, such as Louis Althusser who famously confessed he never read Marx. Zizek comes off the same way. Chomsky is an exception and has clearly read Bernays, Lippmann, Foucault, etc.

As much as they like to pretend otherwise, the intellectual left rarely actually read any leftist theory. They mostly absorb the ideas from osmosis, and now wikipedia particularly. It's not about rigor and building a coherent framework; it's about using the correct jargon to express whatever idea they have in order to gain prestige. This disinterest appears to have really taken off with the structural marxists, such as Louis Althusser who famously confessed he never read Marx. Zizek comes off the same way.