The Collapse of Academic Marxism?
In an entertaining post at In Due Course, Joseph Heath (Toronto) tells the tale of the “death” of Marxism in analytic political philosophy. Who killed Marxism? According to Heath, it was Rawls. Back in the 1970s, many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description. So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Why? Well, for one thing, they realized capitalism was not going to self-destruct and that they needed a “normative critique of capitalism”. But attempts to ground that critique on Marxian concepts like exploitation, Heath writes, failed: One could write an entire book explaining why, but suffice it to say that several of the greatest philosophical minds of their generation took a crack at the problem, and none of them was able to generate a coherent critique of capitalism that took exploitation as its normative foundation. While Rawls was more successful: What Rawls had provided, through his effort to “generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract,” was a natural way to derive the commitment to equality, as a normative principle governing the basic institutions of society. Rawlsianism therefore gave frustrated Marxists an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot, by providing them with a normative framework in which they could state directly their critique of capitalism, focusing on the parts that they found most objectionable, without requiring any entanglement in the complex apparatus of Marxist theory. The result is that it’s only “a slight exaggeration to say that no one is a Marxist anymore”: The collapse of academic Marxism—as a body of normatively motivated social criticism—has been complete. Hence the fundamental unseriousness of contemporary Marxism in public discourse. Popular Marxism (along with the sort of Gramscian or “cultural” Marxism one finds in critical studies departments) has become a religion without a theology. Heath’s rendition of the story is that “Rawls wound up triumphing over Marxism… by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.”..
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/26/the-collapse-of-academic-marxism/
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"content": "The Collapse of Academic Marxism?\n\nIn an entertaining post at In Due Course, Joseph Heath (Toronto) tells the tale of the “death” of Marxism in analytic political philosophy. Who killed Marxism? According to Heath, it was Rawls. Back in the 1970s, many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description. So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Why? Well, for one thing, they realized capitalism was not going to self-destruct and that they needed a “normative critique of capitalism”. But attempts to ground that critique on Marxian concepts like exploitation, Heath writes, failed: One could write an entire book explaining why, but suffice it to say that several of the greatest philosophical minds of their generation took a crack at the problem, and none of them was able to generate a coherent critique of capitalism that took exploitation as its normative foundation. While Rawls was more successful: What Rawls had provided, through his effort to “generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract,” was a natural way to derive the commitment to equality, as a normative principle governing the basic institutions of society. Rawlsianism therefore gave frustrated Marxists an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot, by providing them with a normative framework in which they could state directly their critique of capitalism, focusing on the parts that they found most objectionable, without requiring any entanglement in the complex apparatus of Marxist theory. The result is that it’s only “a slight exaggeration to say that no one is a Marxist anymore”: The collapse of academic Marxism—as a body of normatively motivated social criticism—has been complete. Hence the fundamental unseriousness of contemporary Marxism in public discourse. Popular Marxism (along with the sort of Gramscian or “cultural” Marxism one finds in critical studies departments) has become a religion without a theology. Heath’s rendition of the story is that “Rawls wound up triumphing over Marxism… by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.”..\nThe post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/26/the-collapse-of-academic-marxism/\n.\n\nhttps://dailynous.com/2024/08/26/the-collapse-of-academic-marxism/",
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