On the 'use of 'scare quotes': Edward P. Thompson (1978): The Poverty of Theory, or, an Orrery of Errors https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1978/pot/essay.htm: "Althusser... patiently explains it thus: 'The critique of Stalinist "dogmatism" was generally "lived" by Communist intellectuals as a "liberation". This 'liberation' gave birth to a profound ideological reaction, "liberal" and "ethical" in tendency, which spontaneously rediscovered the old philosophical themes of "freedom", "man", the "human person" and "alienation"' (F.Af. 10). (It must be difficult to ‘speak’ a theory like this, when at every second word, one must ‘contort’ one’s features into a knowing ‘leer’, to ‘signify’ to the reader that one ‘knows’ the true meaning of these words behind their apparent ‘meaning’).... In 1972 he had become more blunt; he had only one recourse to inverted commas; ‘after the Twentieth Congress an openly rightist wave carried off... many Marxist and Communist “intellectuals’.... This, then, is the missing protagonist with whom Althusser wrestles in For Marx and Reading Capital: the anti-Stalinist revolt... ‘socialist humanism.’... This, if anywhere, is where all these critiques and actions converged. This is the object of Althusser’s police action, the unnamed ghost at whom his arguments are directed...
Dylan Riley (2011): Tony Judt: A Cooler Look https://newleftreview.org/issues/II71/articles/dylan-riley-tony-judt-a-cooler-look: "Marxism and the French Left’s discussion of the post-war intellectual scene... fails the elementary test of chronology: The two greatest products of post-war French Marxism, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Althusser’s Reading Capital, were published in 1960 and 1968.... In the late 1980s, apparently bored by French history (and by his wife), Judt followed the trail blazed by Timothy Garton Ash and numerous others to Eastern Europe. Gorbachev’s diplomacy had removed any obstacles to humanitarian tourism.... A crash course in Czech, and meetings with Michnik, Havel and Kis, equipped Judt to present his credentials to Washington in the form of a paper given at the Wilson Center in 1987, ‘The Politics of Impotence?’... Freed—as the interrogative ironization of the title tried to indicate—from any concrete political engagement by the force of circumstance, intellectuals like Havel answered to a higher ‘moral responsibility’, just as Judt had told French socialists to do.... ‘The Politics of Impotence?’ reported that, since 1968, oppositional Marxism in Eastern Europe had been replaced by a healthy focus on ‘rights’...
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