ABSTRACT
To answer the Name-Dropping or Dropping Names question, it is important to be clear that people are not talking about the citation of names by humanists for a variety of other purposes: as objects of inquiry, as convenient shorthand points of reference, or as honestly acknowledged sources of ideas or information. This chapter provides plenty examples of such uses. What concerns us instead is the often unacknowledged function of what can be called charismatic names in legitimating arguments. Freud and Marx might, for example, be derived instead from philosophical models of transcendental truth, such as that implied in the words of Socrates from the Phaedras cited as the epigraph of this chapter. Far more likely, however, as a mode of legitimation in chapter era of antifoundationalism is what sociologist Alvin Gouldner dubbed the 'culture of critical discourse'. For all guilt at name-dropping as a mode of legitimation, people still find it virtually impossible to drop names.
