Historical materialism and more∗

Abstract

The past dozen years have seen a steady increase of scholarly but sympathetic interest in Marx by philosophers informed by the analytical tradition. Implicitly repudiating the view (widespread among Continental Marxists) that understanding Marx requires a whole new way of conceptualizing the world, they have sought to rehabilitate Marx while retaining the commitment to precision and lucidity characteristic of Anglophone philosophy generally. In the English-speaking academic world, so much has changed in the past twenty years, both in philosophy and in Marxism, that the existence of such an intellectual current may now seem unremarkable. Yet its emergence and growth were a surprising development. Before the 1970s, few Anglo-American philosophers interested themselves in substantive social and political theory. Fewer still wrote about Marx, and those who did one thinks of H. B. Acton, John Plamenatz, and Karl Popper-were hostile, or at best condescending. Their criticisms, reflecting the canons of the time, were conceptual and a priori: Marx had made category errors, relied on incoherent definitions, advanced circular and unfalsifiable claims, and so on. 'In the fifties and sixties', as one philosopher has remarked, 'the point of most Anglo-American Marx studies was to show that Marx's theories were not worth studying, except as historically important relics.' Radicals in the 1960s and early 1970s generally ignored these criticisms or dismissed them as picayune, as simply reflecting the poverty of bourgeois philosophy. Marcuse had little trouble persuading them that mainstream Anglophone philosophy was irredeemably conservative and trivial. At the same time, other intellectual traditions seemed more open to Marxism, and Hegelian, phenomenological, existentialist, structuralist, and other exotic interpretations of Marx all found English-speaking audiences. The prestigious left-wing journal, New Left Review, for example, consciously embarked on the project of translating and importing fancy Continental Marxist theory into an English-speaking intellectual world seen as con-