Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> It sometimes amazes me how limited the repertoire of these guys is -
> it's free! It's voluntary! The perfect paradise of liberty, equality,
> and Bentham. You'd think that with a couple of centuries worth of
> advances in the technologies of apologetics they could do better than
> this.
>
Perhaps they really believe it. :-)
I just finished reading Michael McKeon's _The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740_, which among other things is a careful tracing of the development of modes of apologetics over that period. And the final form those apologetics for class society take by 1740 (in the works of Richardson & Fielding) is, crudely, "It's a really vile system, but any other would be worse" -- or, even, "It's a really vile system, but any other might be worse." That may be the most intellectually respectable even today of all the various conservative arguments.
Carrol