In an entertaining post at In Due Course, Joseph Heath (Toronto) tells the tale of the “death” of Marxism in analytic political philosophy.
many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description. So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals.
Why? Well, for one thing, they realized capitalism was not going to self-destruct and that they needed a “normative critique of capitalism”. But attempts to ground that critique on Marxian concepts like exploitation, Heath writes, failed:
One could write an entire book explaining why, but suffice it to say that several of the greatest philosophical minds of their generation took a crack at the problem, and none of them was able to generate a coherent critique of capitalism that took exploitation as its normative foundation.
While Rawls was more successful:
What Rawls had provided, through his effort to “generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract,” was a natural way to derive the commitment to equality, as a normative principle governing the basic institutions of society. Rawlsianism therefore gave frustrated Marxists an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot, by providing them with a normative framework in which they could state directly their critique of capitalism, focusing on the parts that they found most objectionable, without requiring any entanglement in the complex apparatus of Marxist theory.
The result is that it’s only “a slight exaggeration to say that no one is a Marxist anymore”:
The collapse of academic Marxism—as a body of normatively motivated social criticism—has been complete. Hence the fundamental unseriousness of contemporary Marxism in public discourse. Popular Marxism (along with the sort of Gramscian or “cultural” Marxism one finds in critical studies departments) has become a religion without a theology.
Heath’s rendition of the story is that “Rawls wound up triumphing over Marxism… by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.”
That’s all well and good, but it might be worth acknowledging a bit more explicitly that Rawls did this by incorporating Marxian ideas into his liberal theory, for example, by emphasizing the role that background institutions in society play in one’s life prospects and in the value of one’s liberties. Marx says, “a state may be a free state without man himself being a free man,” and Rawls seems to take this on by acknowledging that formal rights of non-interference, without an adequate material basis ensured by the basic structure of society, would be insufficient for freedom. See also Rawls’s idea of a property-owning democracy.
A different way to put this would be to say that, just as Heath could claim that Rawls killed Marxism with liberalism, one could imagine a classical liberal claiming that Rawls killed liberalism with Marxism (which I suppose is an interpretation of some of Nozick’s critiques of Rawls in Anarchy, State, and Utopia).
Some readers will no doubt take issue with Heath’s describing Rawls as “triumphing” over Marxism. This may be because they think the rumors of Marxism’s death are being exaggerated, but perhaps also because the language of victory and defeat may seem inapt. Maybe a better metaphor would instead be one in which Marxism is a ladder that is climbed and then set aside?
Heath’s whole post is here.
Discussion welcome.
UPDATE 1: “Only if one screens off, or take for granted, [various] structural background conditions does Heath’s story really make sense. As we move further away from these conditions, Heath’s story will become increasingly puzzling.” Eric Schliesser responds to Heath.
UPDATE 2: “Heath’s piece… contains some startling inaccuracies.” Chris Bertram comments.
For anyone interested in the topic, I would also recommend one of Heath’s older articles, “Habermas and Analytical Marxism“, where he tells broadly the same story but also tracks the development of Habermas’ thought.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249626021_Habermas_and_analytical_Marxism
Forgive me for sounding like a continental philosopher and a cynic, but any explanation of the paradigm shift from Marxism to Rawlsian liberalism which makes no reference to broader social and historical events (the Stalinist horrors and then collapse of the Soviet Union, the political despondency that followed the failures of the radical 60s) really strikes me as such an incomplete explanation as to be misleading at best.
Of course Rawls was an amazing political theorist and philosopher. But just as with any other political theory, liberal egalitarianism faces very serious objections. The discipline has decided that these objections are worth spending our time dealing with and responding to, while using objections of similar strength to reject alternative political theories out of hand.
That’s perfectly fine, working within a paradigm is inevitable, and this is our current paradigm. But I’m skeptical that this is purely or even mostly as a result of the strength of the arguments against Marxism or in favor of liberal egalitarianism.
The timeline seems a bit off. Cohen helped give birth to analytic Marxism *after* the publication of a Theory of Justice. Analytic Marxism petered out after a while, and even Cohen admitted the theoretical limits of Marx, e.g., in the second edition of his book on Marx’s theory of history, he admits that Marx did not anticipate the extent to which the need for social identity explains social change (or lack thereof). But the problem doesn’t seem to have been Rawls, except perhaps to the extent that for 30 years Rawls Studies dominated nearly everything in political philosophy.
One small correction to Heath’s claim about the analytical Marxists (NBSMG in particular). Some of the original NBSMG weren’t ever Marxists (Steiner, but I think others too); Erik Olin Wright identified as a Marxist till he died (albeit the political philosophy that underpins his Real Utopias book is basically a variant of Raz’s); and Bob Brenner still identifies as a Marxist as far as I know.
Any Marxist with integrity will readily acknowledge that there is no coherent research program called “Marxism.” That’s part of what makes the Pettit-inspired “republican” Marxisms interesting. Indeed, the latter also seems to have revived an interest in examining some largely forgotten parts of the history of Marxist politics, namely, those of Karl Kautsky and the early SPD.
Whatever we might think about it, my sense is that there is fruitful work to be done here—and by intelligent people, presumably. I just fail to understand Heath’s need to take shots at the Marxist “kids” and Jacobin magazine or whatever just because he finds them annoying. This piece is pretty silly.
Fair points. But you’re missing the real silliness in the piece, which is Heath claiming that British people would accuse Marx of “taking a piss.” That’s just urinating. “Taking the piss” — now you’re talking
I still didn’t get that part. Who’s the butt of the joke?
It’s not really clear (to me) whether Heath wants to make (1) a statistical argument about how many philosophy academics (implicitly: writing in English) identify with or “think within” the Marxist tradition, or (2) a Rorty/Hegel style narrative argument about the declining vitality of marxism in contemporary academic philosophy. I think it’s the latter, mostly. If so, it’s weird not even to mention the most important and influential contemporary marxist philosopher (alongside Angela Davis and Sylvia Federici, who he also doesn’t mention), Nancy Fraser.
Fraser does marxist philosophy in the “grand theory” style, in a manner that is not dissimilar to Habermas’s liberal theory: interdisciplinary, informed by contemporary social science and philosophy, but also rooted in classical traditions, in her case marxism. Not coincidentally, I suspect, although Fraser calls her work Marxist, she does not engage with or seem to take seriously the “analytical Marxism” that Heath straightforwardly identifies with “academic Marxism.” Compared to “analytical Marxism,” Fraser’s work is much more rooted in classical reference points, like Marx, Luxemburg, and Gramsci, and contemporary *critical* social science research, like social reproduction theory and ecosocialist theory, both of which are basically strands of marxism. (See her book, ‘Cannibal Capitalism’). Above all, compared to “analytical Marxism,” Fraser’s work is much more rooted in contemporary working-class social movements. (See ‘Feminism for the 99%,’ her book with Marxist philosopher Cinzia Arruzza and Marxist social theorist Tithi Bhattacharya). While the work of Roemer, Cohen, etc., may be in decline, no longer widely read, the opposite seems to be true of Fraser. My point here is that there’s enormous vitality and relevance to Fraser’s work in contemporary political philosophy, arguably more so than any contemporary liberal theorist writing so-called “grand theory” (if any!). So, there’s a great gulf separating “where the action is” in contemporary marxist philosophy in academia from the admittedly now defunct strand of “analytic Marxism,” which makes Heath’s argument too easy to make (re: analytic Marxism), but not really convincing (re: Marxism more broadly). If he were making a statistical argument about numbers, it would be a matter of counting, which he doesn’t try to do. But in that case the main explanation would be about generations and when people went to grad school, what was happening in society at the time, and so on. I don’t think he’s interested in that type of question. On the narrative side, meanwhile, his argument cheats a bit by ignoring non-analytical marxism in contemporary philosophy.
In short: If one wants to argue that Marxism lacks vitality in contemporary philosophy, one has to go through Fraser, first and foremost, and argue that her work isn’t important right now. I think that’s a tough argument to make.
It is interesting that Heath doesn’t mention Fraser in the essay at all, but it’s clearly not because he’s ignorant of her work. He was a grad student at Northwestern at the same time as she taught there, and he cites and makes some use of her work in this long (as far as I know unpublished, but available on-line) essay “Critical Theory: une histoire raisonnee”. He’s mostly pretty positive in his citations of Fraser, though less so when mentioning some of her more direct critiques of “capitalism”. So, I assume she’s simply to the side of the story he wanted to tell here, even if not unworthy of discussion on her own.
I tried googling that title, but couldn’t find it.
Here’s the link: https://www.academia.edu/94410153/Critical_Theory_une_histoire_raisonn%C3%A9e
I dispute Heath’s claim that Rawls’s social-contract argument was a way to “derive” the commitment to distributive equality; that commitment was presupposed rather than argued for in any non-question-begging way. That lots of people were eager to believe the argument was non-question-begging doesn’t mean it was. Of course a question-begging argument can have a true conclusion, but please let’s not credit Rawls with more than he did.
Rawls derives a substantively egalitarian conception of justice from liberal democratic premises (free and equal in social cooperation, etc.). Almost all of his work is comparing how other non-egalitarian conceptions of justice poorly ‘fit’ with these premises. For instance, he argues that classical utility must be derived from other premises, like the impartial spectator. Or, see his criticisms of restricted utility. This is all important for Heath’s point since Rawls saw utility as the best match for capitalism. Rawls’s argument is that egalitarianism is a better match for liberal ideals compared with classical liberalism and other options. This explains why Marxists moved to liberalism after Rawls.
If you think the commitment to distributive equality was presupposed by the ideas of free and equal citizens in social cooperation, I think you just agree with Rawls’s derivation. Egalitarianism comes from these ideas rather than say, utility.
The other option is that you think constructivism is question-begging. If so, what other options are there? Can we really find political foundations?
I like the principle behind the idea that 50 famous philosophers used to think A, then they changed their minds and thought B. Therefore, A was refuted.
I think the point was only that if the people trying to defend idea A against idea B eventually conclude that B is right and A is wrong, well, then that’s *some evidence* that B is right and A is wrong. Higher-order evidence, but evidence nonetheless.
yeah yeah, that sense of epistemic modesty is all over Heath’s piece.
Heath focuses on Cohen. It would have been helpful to briefly explain Cohen’s case against historical materialism in If You’re an Egalitarian… I think it is chapter 6. He argues that we need moral theory.
This piece strikes me as a decade or so out of date, and backwards: of course if you go looking for moral critiques of capitalism you become a liberal, but that happened just because liberalism was already hegemonic in elite Anglo academia.
Besides, it’s a false dichotomy that one can either do a moral critique or no normative critique at all. That’s why radical realists use epistemic normativity, for instance: like Marx, we can show via social science that things aren’t as they seem, by looking at who gets what and how, and so figure out that many more options are open to us than capital would have us believe. Yes, no duties and such prescriptive things will flow from this kind of evaluation, but who needs that other than a liberal moralist?
Yes, no duties and such prescriptive things will flow from this kind of evaluation, but who needs that other than a liberal moralist?
People who want to find ways to get along other than fighting?
Because any theory concluding that ‘might is right’ is necessarily self-defeating from a normative perspective, and that this is what realism amounts to?
If you don’t know the first thing about a position, it’s best not to comment on it.
Apologies, I thought you were talking about Morgenthau’s style stuff. Ooooops
I think I agree with Heath insofar as the dominance of liberalism and Rawls explains why there is little work being done by analytic Marxists in political theory, but I tend to suspect that this claim provides a sociological explanation and not a philosophical one.
At one point I thought I was interested in doing political philosophy but every class I took in political philosophy in both my undergraduate and graduate education was centered around Rawls and liberalism, with no alternative options. If these classes included critiques of Rawls and liberalism, they were usually internal critiques by other liberals/Rawlsians. Sometimes there would be a reading or two that critiqued Rawls or liberalism from the right, but I don’t remember ever reading a single critique from the left. Students who felt tempted by even these rather soft communitarian critiques were quickly corrected. I was told by a professor that being a communitarian was equivalent to siding with the Nazis, and by another that the communitarian critiques I was reading didn’t count as real philosophy.
As someone who is not a liberal and finds reading Rawls about as pleasant as nails on a chalkboard, I decided that political theory was probably not the place for me. It wasn’t until I started getting more involved in political activism that I started regularly hearing leftist and Marxist critiques of liberalism, and I have done most of my political thinking since in these spaces. I have found Marx useful for understanding the problems we are facing and useful for figuring out how to respond to them. I am certainly biased here, but it is hard for me to see how Rawls or contemporary liberal theory can be helpful in these contexts. Liberalism seems to be good at subsuming the solutions of other frameworks (e.g., feminism or critical race theory), but it rarely seems to propose solutions of its own that can be used in dealing with on the ground political problems. I suspect that I am not the only one who has experienced something like this, especially since I have encountered other analytic philosophers in activist spaces, though they are rarely political theorists. This is of course all entirely anecdotal, but, for the record, I don’t think that the level of evidence here falls below the level that Heath refers to in his piece.
For what it’s worth, Early Career, your experience closely resembles mine, all the way down to (re)discovering leftist critiques of liberalism in activist spaces.
I don’t have anything more to add other than to say that you aren’t alone!
Very interesting discussion. I would make three, rather unrelated comments based on how things looked at the time.
[1] Those of us educated in the late 60s/early 70s were constantly told that the problem with Marxism was that it was hopelessly muddled. What Cohen sought to do in his book was respond to this charge, to show that Marxist theory could be explicated according to the standards of analytic philosophy. This is what Charles Taylor praised in the book at the time. But Cohen’s version of Marxism was an old-fashioned, and implausible, version of technological determinism that hardly anyone sympathetic to the Marxist project held at the time–and which had little impact. On the contrary, I think was obvious to everyone Marxism needed a normative theory; this was the focus of the most sustained debate in the journals at that time about the status of justice in Marxism, prompted by Allen Wood’s articles. So I think it’s a mistake to identify the trajectory of analytical Marxism with Cohen’s trajectory; some of his preoccupations, like with Nozick, still mystify me.
[2] So what happened analytical Marxism? Don’t underestimate the enduring anti-Marxism in American academia, hence the professional pressures against identifying with that program–in contrast to identifying oneself with Rawls. However much some people may have respected analytic Marxism, going on the job market within AOS in Marxism remained a death sentence, in contrast to an AOS in Rawls. I am not the only member of my philosophical generation that people tried to fire for being interested in Marxism at all.
[3] A distinction should be drawn between how much Marxism needs rejecting versus how much it needs amending. I became convinced many years ago that Marxism, like every other political philosophy, pays insufficient attention to the role of war in modern society. So I think a Marxist type analysis of the sort you find in Wallerstein must be augmented by a sociology of war that you find in people like Michael Mann. But I still think that the heart of Marxism is an analysis of capitalism as a class society, and that anyone ignoring this ignores what strikes me as common sense.
Wallerstein argued that capitalism needed, and still needs, a political framework characterized by “a multiplicity of states” rather than “a unitary political structure.” (World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, ch.2) Hence he viewed the emergence of (embryonic) sovereign states in early modern Europe, and the concomitant failure of the Habsburg bid for empire (see The Modern World-System vol.1, ch.4) as very important for the development of the European capitalist “world-economy.” So he had to discuss war, and the financing of war, since it played an obvious role here. He wasn’t as directly concerned with it as Mann, Tilly, and some others, but I think he recognized its importance. And he doubtless goes into war also in vols. 2 and 3 of The Modern World-System (I’ve only read vol.1).
There’s so much wrong with this piece that it’s hard to know where to begin, but since Galen and Cheyney Ryan have pointed out what seem to me it’s most glaring flaws I’ll only add that Cohen deserves a lot better than this glib, dismissive treatment. That Cohen is deeply troubled by the Chamberlain argument and Rawls isn’t is not really a point in Rawls favor to my mind. Yes, once you’re inside the Rawlsian system there’s really nothing to the argument since the ideas it turns on are dismissed by Rawls. But the argument itself has a lot of intuitive punch. Where exactly does the right to redistribute Chamberlain’s earnings come from? Worse, if you’re a Kantian– as Rawls thinks himself to be– this looks a lot like using Chamberlain as a mere means. I’m not sure that Cohen’s response, which leans hard into Nozick’s own preferred method of bizarre toy cases, is the best one, but it’s to his credit that he takes the problem seriously. And he also makes some really interesting and useful points about how the problem of drawing baselines for being made worse off. That Rawls doesn’t take this problem seriously, and within the confines of his system can’t, seems to me to be one of Nozick’s best points against him.
As a different “nous” philosophy blog put it, Rawls was an awful reasoner.
I never said that nor do I think it’s true. In fact, I think Rawls is brilliant. The problem here is that Rawls is nothing if not a systematic philosopher and like many systematic thinkers he’s completely blind to things that don’t slot neatly into the system he’s built.
Probably too late, but…
(1) First, I have just a genuine question. I left my university post in philosophy in the late 1990s and came back to the academy in 2018. Rawls was dominate when I left, for sure, but seems much less so now. For example, I did a search on the abstracts of papers for the 2019 APA and got literally zero hits. Hardly conclusive, but this thread makes it seems like Rawls is still dominate in a way he certainly was but isn’t now. Am I too parochial? Does Rawls still rule political philosophy?
(2) As far as AM, especially in the case of Cohen, I think there were two related things that happened (repeating some of what others said). (i) No one has come up with a satisfactory account of “exploitation” that is not just another way of saying there is some kind of distributive inequality. Specifically, Cohen seems to have thought, ‘I’m no libertarian, but maybe we’ve got a different way in Nozick to approach exploitatio. Nope. That doesn’t work.”); (ii) Marx and most Marxist don’t think we need normative political theory. And AM started out as more empirical (Cohen reconstructing historical materialism, Roemer trying to find microeconomic foundations, and Elster writing about collective action problems). Eventually, they all went back to doing normative theory – and gave up on no normative theory marxism.
That seems the headline to me.
Political philosophy, like ethical philosophy, is bullshit. Analytic, critical, etc., makes no difference to the entire enterprise being spurious.
So, why do Marxists need it—unless and accept if Marxism is itself nothing more than an ethico-political theory masquerading as something bigger/deeper (e.g., as offering non-political explanations of class relations, of technology and related things being the real drivers of social-legal-political change and history, etc.).
(Personally, I find Marx’s own scant remarks on communism, the communism which will arise when socialism, the state, etc., withers away, to be proto-science fiction. So, “Marxism” could be something more than political philosophy; it could be a form of religious messianism. “Species being” could also fall under that category; it’s certainly mumbo jumbo.)
At any rate, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t a Marxist who sees all political values as being superstructural deem political philosophy to be a waste of time? Wouldn’t they see Rawls as being nothing more than an expression of false consciousness? (If it was pointed out that “false consciousness” is itself an inherently normative notion, one that presumes there’s a “real” consciousness, one that reflects one’s “real” interests, would or should the Marxist abandon that notion as well?)
Why, moreover, isn’t a Kuhnian explanation of political philosophy being done in late 20th century English-speaking countries entirely adequate? Is it because it’d be missing something, like government/CIA influence, about what elite institutions were permitted to write and teach about?
If Marxists nevertheless do require an normative theory, then why don’t they treat the notions of equality, personhood, etc., as being historical products, ones that themselves can fall by the wayside? Liberated from capitalist and religious notions, and so from the ethical and political philosophies that dominate philosophy departments, why isn’t it “just” and “fair” that the capitalist exploit the proletariat? Why do the proles deserve any better? What prohibits a Marxist from seeings the entrepreneurial capitalist imperialist as a hero other than their vestigial ethical values (the product of the religions, capitalist culture, etc.) If they claim to have tapped into the TRUE morality, and so aren’t reliant upon the dominant concepts of equality, etc., today, on what possible grounds should their fellow Marxists, or anyone else really, BELIEVE them?