Those Darn Continentals

"When Heidegger and Sarte entered the British field of consciousness after 1945 they astonished those who read or heard about them by their lack of intellectual decorum. Their successors in the leadership of intellectual fashion on the continent of Europe have kept up the bad work: Habermas, Foucault, Derrida. The gratuitous obscurity which is offered as a challenge and a reproach to the naive lucidity and pedestrian argumentativeness of the Anglo-Saxon empiricism more or less guarantees that what is said will be misunderstood, or, in the face of criticism, be help to have been misunderstood. "

Anthony Quinton (Baron Quinton of Holywell)

From: Values, Education and the Human World, ed. John Haldane