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Quotes (Academic Theory)
Construction
Marxists

AUTHOR

Karl Marx

SOURCE

Critique of German Ideology

This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as “substance“ and “essence of man“.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Cultural

AUTHOR

Georg Lukacs

SOURCE

History & Class Consciousness

But historical evolution annuls the autonomy of the individual factors.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Critical

AUTHOR

Theodor Adorno

SOURCE

Negative Dialectics

human beings are unfree in their bondage to what is external, and that which is external to them is in turn also themselves.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Critical

AUTHOR

Herbert Marcuse

SOURCE

Eros And Civilisation

By “dissolving“ the idea of the ego-personality into its primary components, psychology now bares the sub-individual and pre-individual factors which (largely unconscious to the ego) actually make the individual: it reveals the power of the universal in and over the individuals. This disclosure undermines one of the strongest ideological fortifications of modern culture - namely, the notion of autonomous individual
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Critical

AUTHOR

Max Horkheimer

SOURCE

Traditional And Critical Theory

The existence of society has either been founded directly on oppression or been the blind outcome of conflicting forces, but in any event not the result of conscious spontaneity on the part of free individuals.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Postmodern

AUTHOR

Michel Foucault

SOURCE

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews And (...)

it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces. There is much that could be said as well on the problems of regional identity and its conflicts with national identity.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Postmodern

AUTHOR

Michel Foucault

SOURCE

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism And Schizophrenia

The individual is the product of power.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Postmodern

AUTHOR

Michel Foucault

SOURCE

Discipline And Punish: The (...)

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Postmodern

AUTHOR

Michel Foucault

SOURCE

Discipline And Punish: The (...)

This is the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Feminism

AUTHOR

Kate Millet

SOURCE

Sexual Politics

If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Ta-Nehisi Coates

SOURCE

Between The World And (...)

It does not matter that the “intentions“ of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, “intend“ for you is secondary. Our world is physical.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Richard Delgado

SOURCE

Critical Race Theory An (...)

Many critical race theorists and social scientists hold that racism is perversive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society is quite so innocent.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Education

AUTHOR

Peter McLaren

SOURCE

Critical Pedagogy And Predatory (...)

Few criticalists in education still subscribe to the notion of the freestanding autonomous subject self-fashioned through free will and good intentions. Subjectivity is now recognized as bearing a constitutive relationship to social power and the relationships to which it gives rise.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Education

AUTHOR

Peter McLaren

SOURCE

Critical Pedagogy And Predatory (...)

For the criticalist educator, agency is structurally located and socially inscribed, and while every formation of agency is an arbitrary imposition of meaning and value and not a transparent reflection of universal self-hood, it cannot be denied that subjectivities are shaped overwhelmingly by articulatory practices that include the social relations of production and consumption, as well as the social construction of race, gender, and sexuality.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Marxists

AUTHOR

Karl Marx

SOURCE

Critique of German Ideology

The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Postmodern

AUTHOR

Michel Foucault

SOURCE

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews And (...)

Between every point of a social body, between a man and a woman, between the members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between everyone who knows and everyone who does not, there exist relations of power which are not purely and simply a projection of the sovereign's great power over the individual; they are rather the concrete, changing soil in which the sovereign's power is grounded, the conditions which make it possible for it to function.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Feminism

AUTHOR

Simone De Beauvoir

SOURCE

Second Sex

But a situation does not depend on the body; it is rather the body that depends on it.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Feminism

AUTHOR

Simone De Beauvoir

SOURCE

Second Sex

It is clear that woman’s whole “character” - her convictions, values, wisdom, morality, tastes, and behavior - is explained by her situation.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Queer

AUTHOR

Judith Butler

SOURCE

Gender Trouble: Feminism And (...)

If the body is not a “being”, but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, then what language is left for understanding this corporeal enactment, gender, that constitutes its “interior” signification on its surface? Sartre would perhaps have called this act “a style of being”, Foucault, “a stylistics of existence“. And in my earlier reading of Beauvoir, I suggest that gendered bodies are so many “styles of the flesh”. These styles all never fully self-styled, for styles have a history, and those histories condition (...)
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Education

AUTHOR

Peter McLaren

SOURCE

Critical Pedagogy And Predatory (...)

We do not simply exist as bodies; weave bodies - not just because we are born into them, but because we learn our bodies, that is, we are taught how to think about and experience them. And in a similar fashion our bodies invent us through the discourses they embody (Turner 1984). We are not just male bodies or female bodies, but African-American bodies, White bodies, Chicano bodies, Jewish bodies, Italian bodies, Mexican bodies, and so on.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Cultural

AUTHOR

Georg Lukacs

SOURCE

History & Class Consciousness

The essence of scientific Marxism consists, then, in the realisation that the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological) consciousness of them.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Postmodern

AUTHOR

Michel Foucault

SOURCE

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews And (...)

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Feminism

AUTHOR

Germaine Greer

SOURCE

The Female Eunuch

Unconditioned subjects do not exist, and the conditioned ones are not uniformly so. If such tests did reveal intellectual inferiority in women we could discount them, but in any case they do not.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Race (CRT)

AUTHOR

Robin DiAngelo

SOURCE

Is Everyone Really Equal? (...)

We introduce the relationship between being an individual and being a member of multiple social groups (such as race, gender, and class).The chapter explains how important it is for us to understand that our ideas, views, and opinions are not objective and independent, but rather the result of myriad social messages and conditioning forces. We take the reader beyond the common conception of parents and families as the sole forces of socialization and describe how other institutions work to form our worldviews.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Postmodern

AUTHOR

Michel Foucault

SOURCE

The Archaeology of Knowledge

the rules of formation operate not only in the mind or consciousness of individuals, but in discourse itself; they operate therefore, according to a sort of uniform anonymity, on all individuals who undertake to speak in this discursive field.
Full screen Relevance: Best
Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Marxists

AUTHOR

Karl Marx

SOURCE

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (...)

the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man; he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Marxists

AUTHOR

Karl Marx

SOURCE

Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis (...)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Feminism

AUTHOR

Andrea Dworkin

SOURCE

Intercourse

Carried by life and sex toward death, the human experience is one of being pushed until crushed.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Queer

AUTHOR

Gayle Rubin

SOURCE

Thinking Sex

The new scholarship on sexual behavior has given sex a history and created a constructivist alternative to sexual essentialism. Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained.
Full screen Relevance: Best
Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)
Marxists

AUTHOR

Karl Marx

SOURCE

Critique of German Ideology

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.
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Aspect: 01. Determinism / Conditioning / Social essentialism (Not self constructed. Only self consciousness)