A critical review of Kenneth A. Strike's Liberal Justice and the Marxist critique of education: A study of conflicting research programs

Abstract

Kenneth Strike in his book, Liberal Justice, defends liberalism against the Marxist critique. Strike maintains that liberalism and Marxism are different "research programs," or analysis of social phenomena. He argues that "lil~eralism can be restructured to deal with the Marxist critique without abandoning its core values more readily than Marxism can accommodate itself to the defensible features of liberalism." (p. 2) The central premises of Strike's argument is the following: (1) That Marxists have not been able to dispense with the need for a theory of justice; (:2) That Marxists, especially those who have recently written about education, have tended to abandon the hard core of a Marxist view...; (3) that capitalism is not part of liberalism's hard core; and (4) that liberals can modify their defective conceptions of growth and human development in ways that meet Marxist criticism, yet do not abandon the liberal hard core. (p. 11)