First let's sort out some historical and methodological issues. In a review of Raymond Tallis's Enemies of Hope a few years ago, the critic Robert Grant expressed what is now a familiar kind of historical assessment. About two nineteenth-century progenitors of contemporary theoretical discourses, he wrote:

Grant explains that late twentieth-century theorists like Foucault, Derrida, and the rest of the usual suspects have inherited what he takes to be the moral nihilism of Marx and Nietzsche. Here is the familiar rhetoric which liberal and neoconservative ideologues share. The argument asserts that a post-structuralist literary critic, for example, as a byproduct of her work, strips human beings of their moral dimension and aids and abets their dehumanization, leading to pessimism, cynicism, and, no doubt, the Rwandan genocide. I suppose it is easier to blame a post-structuralist reading of Moby Dick, via Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for the killing fields of the twentieth century, than get involved in the messy business of identifying the real culprits and causes.

I find it difficult to imagine why others, like Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Jeremy Bentham for example, have not been included on Grant's blacklist.