Marxism and the Paradox of Contemporary Political ThoughtStanley RothmanThe Review of Politics, Vol. 24, No. 2. (Apr., 1962), pp. 212-232.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0034-6705%28196204%2924%3A2%3C212%3AMATPOC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-UThe Review of Politics is currently published by University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/notredamepolitics.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]://www.jstor.orgFri Nov 30 17:35:12 2007Marxism and the Paradox of Contemporary Political Thought Stanley Rothman wITH all the volumes that have been written about Marx and Marxism in recent years, there has been little or no attempt, in the English-speaking world at least, to relate his thinking to the general development of modern European philosophic speculation.1 Fundamentally this is because Marx has received short shrift as a philosopher. Both English and American commentators have been almost entirely concerned with his role as "social scientist" and polemicist, and hence have concentrated their attention upon his historical materialism and his critique of capitalist society. The preoccupation with this aspect of Marx's thinking to the neglect of his philosophical writings is at least partially understand- able when one considers that it is his historical economic and polemical writings which have been of the most immediate mo- ment.2 But the preoccupation has other and just as important roots which derive from the nature of contemporary philosophy. Many contemporary political theorists, at least, tend to agree with Marx, though for different reasons, that philosophy is dead and that the real tasks of politics lie in science, if not, as he argued, 1 Exceptions to this statement include: Sidney Hook, Toward an Under-standing of Karl Marx (New York, 1933), and From Hegel to Marx (New York, 1936) ; Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (New York, 1941); H. B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch (London, 1955), and Robert Tucker, "Self and Revolution'' (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Ilarvard University, 1957). For a variety of reasons, however, none of these works is completely satisfactory. Marcuse's, which is still in many ways the most useful, is written within a Marxist frame of analysis. Marx would have preferred it this way. He had concluded very early in his life that philosophy was dead, and that the task of the future was to make the ideals of the philosophers real. In other words the real tasks were those which could best be carried out by social scientists and revolutionaries. Thus, Man and Engels were quite happy to leave their early philosophic works to the gnawing of the "mice." These had served to clear their minds, to enable them to understand the nature of reality and thus to point the way to the real tasks. See: Karl Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, trans. R. Pascal (New York, 1947), pp. 1, 2, 15, 199. Hereafter cited as GI. Karl Marx, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Intm duction," in Karl Marx and F. Engels, Karl Marx and F. Engels on Religion (Moscow, 1957), pp. 42, 49. Hereafter cited as KMR.213 PARADOX OF POLITICAL THOUGHT in science and a~tion.~ And their interpretation of science informs them that existential and normative statements are of a different logical order and that the latter are merely personal preference^.^ Hence, to most contenlprary political theorists, theories either consist of certain types of empirical propositions or they are simply ideologies, that is, to be understood not in philosophic but rather in social or psychological terms. Thus iMarx's attempt to fuse the normative and the existential can only be the result of error. While it is possible to spend some time analyzing the social or psycho- logical sources of this error, it is silly to expend intellectual effort attempting to understand what one knows is false. As Plamenatz puts it : On the other hand the general philosophy supposed to lie be-hind Mads social theory, I have deliberately neglected. He was no philosopher and I am not one, and I have thought it kinder to both of us to neglect that part of his writings. Social and poli- tical theorists who dabble in philosophy too often bring their own subject into contempt; philosophers are astonished at the naivete and clumsiness of their philosophies.5 This view, which sprin'gs partially out of the same tradition to which Marx belonged and partially out of Marx's thought itself, unfortunately obscures the real content of that th~ught.~ By the statement "philosophy is dead" Marx meant, as do the positivists, that given a correct world view philosophic speculation had lost its function. In arguing that the task of philosophy was now to make philosophy real, Marx was referring to the ideals of the "left Hegelians" and the French and British "utopians" who, he felt, had correctly understood the nature of a truly humane society without having developed a correct, that is, scientific,