Introduction, Marxist Ethics within Western Political Theory

Abstract

Marxist Ethics within Western Political Theory uncovers, through intellectual history and abstract philosophy, a specific tradition of Marxist ethics within the context of key debates in the history of Western political theory, and both builds upon and contrasts it with earlier excavations of Marxist ethics. For example, throughout the crisis-ridden 1920s and 1930s in the German-speaking world, political philosophers, such as the Hungarian Georg Lukacs, acutely aware of the context of German philosophical ethics out of which Marxism arose, probed the ethical question with intensity, a probing that continued throughout the twentieth century. A second overlapping ethical probing occurred during the events leading up to World War II, when Marxists such as Lukacs and the English classicist George Thomson, working with popular fronts against fascism, placed Marxist ethics within the broader framework of Western political thought. A third revival of the probing occurred against antiliberal versions of Marxism in nations outside or on the fringes of the Western world, when Marxist ethics became a rallying cry of dissent against the authoritarian Marxism in power. A fourth model for probing of Marxist ethics began in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when English-speaking philosophers took up the question again and raised it to an international debate. A different, fifth model for Marxist ethics developed during the same period in Spanish-speaking South and Central America and in Mexico, when liberation theologians took a very different path toward a Marxist ethics for Catholicism, and, more broadly, for Christianity and for religion in general.2