"The two questions at the heart of this work are, first, how and why the critical or “Left” tradition became so impotent and irrelevant in the face of this, possibly the greatest crisis of human civilization, and second, whether we might not envision a new emancipatory politics to gather up the scattered energies and fractured remnants of the Left, give them a coherent form, and place them again on the stage of world history as a power to be reckoned with. These two questions have haunted me for the past twenty years, as I have tried to account for the painful failure of most contemporary social movements to succeed in dislodging dominant systems of power."
The awful part is not the prose, which is bad enough. It's that the guy doesn't have any historical sense. For instance, "the painful failure of most contemporary social movements to succeed in dislodging dominant systems of power" means . . . what, exactly? On the one hand, why would anyone assume that their good intentions and hard work would entitle them to being part of such a disruption of the dominant systems of power? (Does that include patriarchy? monotheism? capitalism? racism?)--I mean, how many such "dislodgings" have there been in the last 2000 years? 3? On the other hand, you have to ask, did feminism fail? Queer politics? the civil rights movement? Methinks their assumed irrelevance is a sign of how well they succeeded.
Finally, why on earth would this failure be hard to account for? If left intellctuals are good at one thing, it's describing the reasons why they fail.
Sheesh.
Christian