right wingers tend to focus on individual responsibility, left-wingers on social culpability
But existentialism stresses individual responsibility too, including the responsibility to make a political commitment. You're on very thin ice when you start to tell people their destinies are outside their own control. Marxism -- with, for instance, the idea that a class-in-itself must become a class-for-itself, or that labour must become unalienated, or that theory must lead to praxis -- stresses taking control, and taking responsible (and sometimes revolutionary) action. I think the emphasis on social culpability is a modern heresy, more nanny state than anything I'd recognise as leftism. Or like those Americans who sue the cafe when they spill coffee on themselves.
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
But existentialism stresses individual responsibility too, including the responsibility to make a political commitment. You're on very thin ice when you start to tell people their destinies are outside their own control. Marxism -- with, for instance, the idea that a class-in-itself must become a class-for-itself, or that labour must become unalienated, or that theory must lead to praxis -- stresses taking control, and taking responsible (and sometimes revolutionary) action. I think the emphasis on social culpability is a modern heresy, more nanny state than anything I'd recognise as leftism. Or like those Americans who sue the cafe when they spill coffee on themselves.