Abstract
If we begin with the political calamities of the last one hundred years and add, as at least part consequence of these, the upheavals in philosophy, literature, art and science, we can appreciate the present attractiveness of a political philosophy without foundations: There is no truth; only an endless “conversation” in a self-sufficient linguistic realm which is totally disconnected from any extra-linguistic reality — if such there be. Because God is dead, “human nature” has no content, and history is meaningless, the dream of creating a new kind of human society — the dream of Utopian and revolutionary modern politics — is instead a nightmare. There is no knowable, objective, definable, trans-mittable common good; there are only “interests”, not to be judged, still less to be accommodated. There is no responsible politics which is not impotent: Either we irresponsibly offer “the masses” ungrounded hope or, more responsibly, we reject the quest for “glittering triumph”, perhaps even improvement, and settle for “the far more modest, though indispensable, concern to prevent ‘catastrophes’”. On this view of things, the belief that “everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed”, that efforts “to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain”.1
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Notes
Cf. Norman Jacobson, Pride and Solace, The Functions and Limits of Political Theory, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. Jacobson’s book is perhaps the most systematic effort to examine the implications of a foundation-less politics, but his moral is equivocal. See my review, The Crisis of Contemporary Political Theory’, Interpretation, 9 (September 1981). The texts quoted are from Arendt, as quoted by Jacobson, Chapter V, passim.
An anti-foundationalist politics need not reflect despair. Rorty suggests a version when he writes that “we should be more willing than we are to celebrate bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far, while regretting that it is irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the population of the planet” (‘Method, Social Science, Social Hope’, in Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 210). But of course, ideological certitude is an obvious feature of those American policies which, in the pursuit of triumph in what can only be called a Holy War, are as limitless in their means as any which Orwell, Camus or Arendt condemned. Indeed, “bourgeois capitalist society” is not “irrelevant” to most of the problems of most of the population of the planet exactly because it is a large part of the problem of these peoples — whether the societies are capitalist “miracles”, e.g., Korea, or “socialist” disasters, e.g., Nicaragua.
An excellent contextual reading of Marx’ politics is Alan Gilbert’s Marx’ Politics: Communists and Citizens, New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press. Gilbert, following a path marked by Michael Harrington (in his Socialism, Bantam, 1973), shows that Marx persistently altered his political strategies in the light of experience and that he was no economic determinist, inflexibly committed to pat formulas — unlike most of his later epigones. Paul Thomas’ Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) is an indispensable account of Marx’ relations, ideologically and politically, to nineteenth-century anarchism. See also his ‘Alienated Politics’, in Terence Ball et al (eds.), After Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia (Boston, Beacon, 1949) remains valuable. Barry Hindess offers a crisp account of the critical debates between Lenin, Kautsky, and Bernstein. Unfortunately, he does not discuss Rosa Luxemburg, who was perhaps closest to Marx on the critical issues. See ‘Marxism and Political Democracy’, in Alan Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1980.
On Luxemburg, see Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, London, NLB, 1976.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree, trans., New York, Dover, 1956, p. 452.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox, trans., London, Oxford, 1952, par. 279.
‘On the Jewish Question’, in Easton, L. and Guddat, K. (eds.), Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, Doubleday, 1967, pp. 225f., p. 231.
Thomas, Marx and the Anarchists, p. 196.
The German Ideology, in Easton and Guddat, p. 263f.
Communist Manifesto, in David McClellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 237. This is not to say that there are not difficulties and ambiguities in Marx’ writings on the critical issues. An excellent treatment is Frederic L. Bender, The Ambiguities of Marx’ Concepts of “Proletarian Dictatorship” and “Transition to Communism”‘, History of Political Thought, II (November, 1981). See also, Harrington, op. cit., pp. 54–60; Gilbert, op. cit. Chapter VIII.
Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’, in On the Paris Commune, Moscow, Progress, 1971, p. 97. As Bender points out, Engels confirmed that for them, the Commune was a new type of polity. In an 1875 letter to Bebel, Engels wrote: “The whole talk about the state should be dropped [from our party’s statements] especially since the Commune… was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word [because it was a state in-the-process of dissolving]… We would therefore propose to replace state everywhere by Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well convey the meaning of the French word ‘commune’.” (cited by Bender, op. cit., p. 549)
Ibid. p. 73.
Loc. cit.
Quoted from Thomas, op. cit., p. 184.
‘Civil War in France’, p. 75.
The German Ideology, in McLellan, p. 179.
Marx to Domela-Nieuwenhuis, 1881, in On the Paris Commune, p. 293.
Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871, New York, Quandrange Books, 1971), p. 360.
Marx to Domela-Nieuwenhuis, op. cit., p. 293.
‘Civil War in France’, p. 73. For an extended development of these ideas in the American Confederation period, see my The Foreclosure of Democracy in America’, History of Political Thought, (forthcoming).
Harrington, Thomas and Gilbert each provides ample evidence on this critical point.
The German Ideology, cited by Thomas, Marx and the Anarchists, p. 343.
Quoted from Thomas, p. 331.
Quoted from Thomas, p. 345.
Quoted from Thomas, p. 347. See M. Levin, ‘Marx and Working-Class Consciousness’, History of Political Thought, I (Autumn, 1980).
Thomas, p. 249.
Cf. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism, Cambridge, Ma., Harvard, 1955.
See F. Claudin, ‘Democracy and Dictatorship in Lenin and Kautsky’, New Left Review, 107 (Nov./Dec. 1977).
Essential Works of Lenin, New York, Bantam, 1966, p. 112, p. 109.
This is hardly the place to survey the literature on Lenin and Leninism. My views are influenced by Roy Medvedev, Leninism and Western Socialism, London, NLB, 1981;
Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, New York, Knopf, 1974.
German Philosophy and Politics, New York, Henry Holt, 1915), p. 130.
Democracy and Education, New York, The Free Press, 1966), p. 97.
Reconstruction in Philosophy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1957), p. 201.
In Characters and Events, Two Vols., edited by Joseph Ratner, New York, Henry Holt, 1929, II, p. 803.
Democracy and Education, p. 87. Compare, of course, Marx and Engels: “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the developments of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.” (Communist Manifesto, in McClellan, p. 235).
The Public and Its Problems, Chicago, Swallow Press, 1954), p. 148, p. 151, p. 39, p. 41, I have examined Dewey’s political philosophy from the vantage point of anarchism in ‘John Dewey, Anarchism and the Political State’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XVIII, 2 (1982), but the most extensive treatment of Dewey as a “vestibular” anarchist, “in the American grain”, is Arthur Lothstein’s excellent ‘From Privacy to Praxis: The Case for John Dewey as a Radical American Philosopher’, PhD Dissertation, NYU, 1979. See also his ‘Salving From the Dross: John Dewey’s Anarcho-Communalism’, The Philosophical Forum, 10 (Fall, 1978).
The Public and Its Problems, p. 83, p. 108.
Ibid. p. 126.
Individualism Old and New, New York, Capricorn, 1962, p. 85f., p. 61f.
Freedom and Culture, New York, Capricorn, 1963, p. 46. Compare Orwell, who longed to hear a human voice, instead of “fifty thousand gramophones… playing the same tune”.
Characters and Events, I, p. 424.
Individualism Old and New, p. 103, p. 109, p. 107.
Ibid. pp. 119f.
Ibid. pp. 114f.
Liberalism and Social Action, New York, Capricorn, 1963), p. 62.
Ibid. p. 78.
‘Force and Coercion’ (1916), in Characters and Events, TL, p. 789.
Liberalism and Social Action, p. 63, p. 65.
Individualism Old and New, p. 78f.
Barry Hindess, op. cit. p. 42. Hindess argues that the series of critical debates between Kautsky, Lenin and Bernstein, from 1891 to World War I, are “variations on a single theme”, viz., where to locate the boundaries “for non-economic, non-class determinants of political life and stop it from getting out of hand” (p. 37). Thus, while none of these writers was simply class-reductionist and while even Bernstein does not break completely with the conception that the economy is ultimately determining, they differ enormously on what and how much of what is political is not determined by the economy. But on Hindess’ view, the debate between them is irresolvable because “there is no one general mechanism of connection between politics and the economy that is characteristic of capitalism as such--or for that matter, of particular historical phases of its development” (p. 41). In other words, as in Marx’ own political practice, political questions must always be posed concretely, considering the particular details of the particular society under consideration. A “revisionist” politics becomes plausible, then, at the point where, in the liberal-democratic state, socialism is no longer primarily a class issue.
The phrase “historical materialism” is not used by Marx at all. Engels first employed the term “materialist conception of history” in a review of Marx’ Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy which has the famous Preface which became the authority for Second International versions of “historical materialism”. For a recent defense of this view, see G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, New York, Oxford University Press and the critique by Andrew Levine and Eric Olin Wright, ‘Rationality and the Class Struggle’, New Left Review, 123 (Sept./Oct., 1980).
Liberalism and Social Action, p. 81. In Individualism Old and New, Dewey had chastized Marx for reasoning “too much from psychological economic premises” and depending “too little upon technological causes” (p. 102).
See Phillip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay and Derek Sayer, Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory: Bolshevism and Its Critique, New York, Monthly Review, 1978;
Marc Rakovski, Towards an East European Marxism, London, Allison and Busby, 1978.
Liberalism and Social Action, p. 79f.
The expression is C. Wright Mills’. Mills made a similar critique of Dewey in his Sociology and Pragmatism, New York, Oxford, 1966.
Ibid., p. 80, my emphasis. See James Campbell, ‘Dewey’s Method of Social Reconstruction’, Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, XX (1984).
See Dewey, ‘The Need for a New Party’, ‘Who Might Make a New Party?’ and ‘Politics for a New Party’, New Republic, Vol. 66 (1931); ‘The Future of Radical Political Action’, Nation, Vol. 136 (1933); ‘The Imperative Need for a New Radical Party’, Commonsense, II (1933).
For a general account of the Socialist Party and its relation to the Dewey-led League for Independent Political Action, see Frank A. Warren, An Alternative Vision: The Socialist Party in the 1930’s, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1974, esp. Chapter V.
See my A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Oxford, Blackwells, 1987.
Freedom and Culture, p. 97.
Ibid. p. 94.
Ibid. p. 94 f.
Loc. cit.
Arthur Lothstein, ‘From Privacy to Praxis’, p. 80. Lothstein points out that the criticism of “a new kind of Stoicism”, was made a month after Dewey’s eighty-eighth birthday, in 1947. Dewey argued that on this view, “existence reduces pretty well to what the individual can make out of it on his own hook”, and added, “I think they are reactions of people who are scared and have not the guts to face life” (ibid., p. 60f., quoting from a letter to William Daniels, ‘Letters of John Dewey to Robert V. Daniels, 1946–50’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XX (October-December, 1959)).
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Manicas, P.T. (1988). Philosophy and Politics: A Historical Approach to Marx and Dewey. In: Gavin, W.J. (eds) Context over Foundation. Sovietica, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2903-6_7
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