Daily Inspiration Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith lands the punch with the bland civility of a tenure committee memo, then lets the cynicism bloom. “Acknowledged right” is the key tell: he frames interpretive cherry-picking not as a regrettable tendency but as a quasi-constitutional entitlement inside Marxist scholarship. The line isn’t aimed at Marx so much as at the ecosystem that grew up around him, where fidelity is performed through exegesis and dissent is treated as bad manners rather than an intellectual problem.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a critique of sectarianism: if every scholar can “read into Marx” whatever their politics require, Marx becomes less a theorist than a ventriloquist’s dummy. On another, Galbraith is needling the prestige economy of ideological academics. The phrase “with indignation” matters because it names the enforcement mechanism. Indignation is cheap, rhetorically potent, and socially disciplining; it allows a community to punish deviation while claiming moral seriousness.

Context sharpens the jab. Galbraith wrote from within mid-century economics, a field trying to brand itself as empirical and policy-relevant while watching Marxism function, especially in Cold War debates, as both a serious intellectual tradition and a doctrinal identity. His own work skewered orthodoxies of all kinds, but here he’s targeting the hermeneutic move that turns a text into a mirror. The subtext: if your system needs constant reinterpretation to stay “true,” maybe truth isn’t what’s being protected. What’s being protected is the club.