Talk:Philip Slater

Issues and errata

• It was not until the 1980s that Slater learned the truth. I think this is an error in the sources. The material about this subject was widely reported by the press around the world in the late 1970s. Slater would have learned about it around 1977 or maybe a few years later. I don't know why the later sources reported "the 1980s", but maybe this was an easier way for them to say it rather than just "late 1970s". I've thought about how to correct this, but haven't done anything just yet. Viriditas (talk) 21:34, 25 January 2026 (UTC)
  • One way forward is to just delete the entire sentence. Viriditas (talk) 21:36, 25 January 2026 (UTC)
• The way I have described Slater leaving each job, one after the other, reads funny. I am working on fixing that. Viriditas (talk) 21:41, 25 January 2026 (UTC)
• After spending several hours doing research on the subject, I did not mention anything about Slater being a left-wing postliberal. This is because it is generally ignored in academia and there are no sources that I am aware of that discuss it. However, it's quite evident that The Pursuit of Loneliness, a sociological critique of American culture, is identical in its complaints to those of postliberal critiques on the right which have defined the New Right. The difference is that Slater points the finger at right wing capitalism and authoritarianism, not secularism and liberal democracy. What's so interesting is that while the target and origin of his complaint is contrary to postliberal critiques on the right, it anticipates the grievances expressed by Occupy by more than three decades. Since nobody has yet picked up on this, I can't mention it, but I did find it surprising that the right and the left had the same complaints about classical liberalism, with both criticizing the glorification of the individual over the community, but arguing for different reasons. In Slater's case, he maintains that the problem is a lack of democratic values, while on the right, conservatives argue that democratic values are the problem. Viriditas (talk) 22:11, 25 January 2026 (UTC)
  • • I only just realized this is an example of horseshoe theory.
• Another major issue that Slater and the right disagree about is the value of wealth. Ten years after The Pursuit of Loneliness, Slater wrote Wealth Addiction (1980) which anticipated the greed and material excess of that decade. I believe that I need to add at least one additional paragraph about this to the current version of the article. Viriditas (talk) 22:11, 25 January 2026 (UTC)