Abstract
The more Marx ignored and devalued civil society the more he formulated a socialism without safeguards, a socialism whose rise to power could only take the form of centralization. Marx had inherited the idea of civil society as one of a pair of concepts, the other being, of course, the state. We are told that Marx himself even noticed civil society’s importance for capitalist development, although, once again, if we look at the texts they seem pretty modest to support such a heavy hypothesis. The most important is a letter Marx wrote Engels on 27 July 1854.
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Notes
Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 155. I use Avineri’s reading of this letter because it is the most generous possible interpretation of it, attributing insights to it that less imaginative scholars might not find. My own reading sees Marx saying considerably less; and my own reading of Avineri sees him as transforming Marx into Weber. Here I think Avineri makes a mountain out of a molehill as he had earlier reduced a mountain to a molehill in discussing the Marxist position on technology.
H. Draper 1977. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Part I: The State and Bureaucracy. Monthly Review Press: New York 32.
For a good discussion, see Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Part I: The State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 32ff.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 83–84.
Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, (Anti-Dühring), trans. Emile Burns, ed. C. P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1939), pp. 182–83.
Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past and Present, February 1976, pp. 56–57.
Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 2, 3, 10, 13, 29.
Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 23.
S. N. Eisenstadt with M. Curelaru, The Form of Sociology: Paradigms and Crises (New York: John Wiley, 1976), p. 16.
Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Selected Writings (1760–1825), ed. F. M. H. Markham (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), pp. 74, 76, 78, 79.
Emile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), pp. 213ff.
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1947), p. 399. Italics added.
Göran Therborn, Science, Class and Society (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 302.
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© 1980 Alvin W. Gouldner
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Gouldner, A.W. (1980). Civil Society in Capitalism and Socialism. In: The Two Marxisms. Critical Social Studies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16296-3_12
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