"The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards, and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification. Once such practices and institutions were no longer accepted as part of a way of ordering society that linked people to each other and ensured social cooperation and reproduction, most of their capacity to structure human social life vanished. They were reduced simply expressions of individuals' preferences, and claims that the law should recognize the supremacy of these preferences. Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless."
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CommunistsAcademics from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from the United KingdomMarxistsHistorians from the United Kingdom
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Chapter Eleven, Cultural Revolution, p.338-339
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm
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Eric Hobsbawm
1920 – 1991
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, CH, FRSL, FBA (9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian and author and a leading theorist of the Communist Party of Great Britain (1920–1991), and former president of Birkbeck College, University of London.
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