Customer Reviews

Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left

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Although there are certainly valid criticisms to be made of the anti-PC right, Feldstein does not make them. He seeks to discredit PC critics by attacking their supposed motivations, unconscious or otherwise. As someone who has had two decades of firsthand experience with the PC academy, I found Feldstein's book to be a travesty of scholarship.

This book was truly great. As a judge in the New Orwell Awards, I am personally going to recommend this book for the category "Orwellian Defence of Repression in Academia: Postmodern Styling".

This book is a rare find in Doublespeak. Using the ideas of freedom to attack freedom, using the concepts of 'hierarchy' and 'patriocentrism' to excuse the destruction of the free exchange of ideas is wonderfull and piquant.

But the essential goodness of this book comes from pure cynicism. The idea of calling an attack on political repression as political repression itself is simply superb. It's been one of the best bits of verbol locution and butchered logic since Herbert Marcuses "Repressive Tolerance".

I hear the baeuty of his boots crashing down, the symphony of his totalitarian character coming into full bloom page after page. Stalin in his full glory and apogee of enlightenment could still have learned something from this humble genius we all know of as Richard Feldstein.

Well now, what can one honestly say about this muddled mess of mixed up nothingness? Richard's one achievement is hiding his complete lack of clear thought or convincing argument behind overcomplicated, pretentious language. He seems to be only bashing people in this book instead of engaging in any vaild academic debate. After great struggle over one rambling paragraph, I did manage to decipher one of his bolder facts however: "A good way to not be objectified is to avoid being objectified." Thank you Richard!

I would recommend anyone to read a book as important and TRUTHFUL as this. It has been a long time coming, but finally someone has articulated what I always felt to be true - that PC was a fabrication of the right all along. In Britain the media is just as guilty of jumping on the PC bandwagon as anywhere else - it has always been a convenient get-out clause, a 'justifiable' scapegoat. Newspapers and magazines in Britain should all have a copy of this book - maybe they would realise then how foolish they have been. This should also be recommended reading for any media or sociology course!

Well, I suppose I found this book to be more enjoyable than the other posters here did. There is quite a bit in this book on how conservatives use their own objections to progressivism as a means of complaining when the Left appears to be imitating the Right; i.e., the authoritarianism, the stand-offs and gridlock, etc. Feldstein certainly does have trouble getting his point across, but I would attribute this rather to a wooden style and tendency to defensiveness, rather than insincerity, as the other posters suggest. All in all, an interesting book; a better one remains to be written (I hope it will be.)

It seems that whenever an academic like Feldstein pretends to radicalism, it is everyone else's fault that his writing is so wishy-washy and confused. As a lesbian and radical feminist who has dedicated herself to the fight against white male patriarchal and heterosexist tyranny, it is always distressing for those of us on the front lines to find a complacent and educationally priviledged white male like this muddling the true radical's position. Perhaps it would be best to sum up this book as "Nice try, perhaps next time you will listen to those neglected voices a little more closely, won't you?" But then again, it might be best to regard Feldstein's book as a mere preliminary to the discussion at hand, namely, did the conservative agenda of hatred create the myth of 'political correctness'? Obviously, the answer is yes, but Feldstein has an enormous amount of trouble articulating that fact. Oh well, maybe it is harder than it looks.

I'm afraid that Mr. Feldstein's valiant effort to defend multiculturalism and feminism is a bit condescending, especially coming from an affluent white academic. Nevertheless, those of us who are on the front lines combatting the white male eurocentric agenda of hatred can be grateful that there are people who are exposing how the conservative right has invented the whole notion of 'political correctness'. I'm afraid Feldstein's frame of reference is too narrow to properly interrogate cultural discourse about 'political correctness', but there are other feminists and cultural critics who can use his book as a basic, if somewhat simple-minded, introduction.