Mark Phillips: The American Question

I found this use of the word "incantation" in Draper's great essay "The Two Souls of Socialism":

Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capitalism (1966) flatly rejects "the answer of traditional Marxist orthodoxy -- that the industrial proletariat must eventually rise in revolution against its capitalist oppressors." Same for all the other "outsider" groups of society -- unemployed farm workers, ghetto masses, etc.; they cannot "constitute a coherent force in society." This leaves no one; capitalism cannot be effectively challenged from within. What then? Some day, the authors explain on their last page, "perhaps not in the present century," the people will be disillusioned with capitalism "as the world revolution spreads and as the socialist countries show by their example that it is possible" to build a rational society. [Emphasis added.] That is all. Thus the Marxist phrases filling the other 366 pages of this essay become simply an incantation like the reading of the Sermon on the Mount at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

I have no point to make here except that I thought it was interesting that Draper means the same thing that we've meant as we've begun to use the word.