Marxist conspiracy theory

 All conspiracy  -  all the time

For John Rawls, the most influential exponent of postwar liberalism, Freudianism, like Marxism, ‘destroys the game of reasoning’ by reducing ‘men’s opinions’ to hidden causes, whether repressed wishes or material interests.* In an unpublished paper from 1955 Rawls wrote:

What disturbs us about psychoanalysis ... is that it suggests ... that the self is a system of powers which doesn’t know itself in vital respects; although it is significant that for Freud the self as a system of full conscious powers was the goal to be won. What common sense takes for granted he regarded as a rare and difficult achievement. Thus what psychoanalysis might lead us to think is that people are not really, or not fully, persons.

For Rawls, to treat one’s fellow citizen as an analyst might treat her patient – to diagnose, say, their Zionism as resulting from a state-cultivated trauma, or their hostility towards immigration as expressing an infantile drive for safety and control – is to cease thinking of them as a person, and so to abandon an axiom of liberal democracy.