"empty abstraction" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to something that is vague and has little or no meaningful content. For example: "Despite all of his rhetoric, his policies proved to be nothing more than empty abstraction."
There's another reason why the appeal to "hard-working families" is an empty abstraction.
The neutral scientific stance, they say, so appropriate to the laboratory, becomes outside of it an exercise in ethnocentrism, a reduction of rounded character and subtle nuance to empty abstraction and meaningless data points.
It has been the nature of Angelenos to be heedless about their landscape, to have taken what was an oasis in the semi-desert and made it an empty abstraction.
But if either candidate were to stop playing politics -- if Mr. Bush were to cease assembling his cabinet in public and Mr. Gore were to cease fighting and concede -- he would be performing an immoral action because he would be abandoning the hope of his supporters for the sake of some empty abstraction.
No Arab Spring protester, however much he or she might identify with the plight of the Palestinians or decry the cruel policies of Israeli occupation in the West Bank (as I do), would think today to attribute all the ills of Arab polities to empty abstractions like "imperialism" and "Zionism".
Yet despite such important differences, both might be pegged with the same fundamental flaw: both could be characterized as empty "abstractions" that falsely paraded as causally "explanatory" notions.
Or they begin in empty textual abstraction — "the drift of the signs," as he put it — before being rejuvenated by an encounter with something solid and actual: The books: he tore them all apart.
You can't have a more blatant image than this of a missing person — or an emptier use of abstraction.
Like Tagore and Tanizaki before him, Tanpinar upheld the felt experience of ordinary life against the dehumanising abstractions and empty promises of modern ideologies.
Non-corresponding thoughts, he argues, are not empty if they are abstractions.
From Gaitonde's hands (and silent thoughts) the Indian intuition of abstraction, its emptied conduit for higher consciousness, would evolve into the embodiment of fleeting raptures frozen in paint.
