Marx as Sociologist
Coser, Lewis
This book is required reading for all DISSENT readers. Radicals needn't be Marxists, but they should know Marx. American students of Marx have long been hampered by the fact that some...
...Marx's thought is a synthesis of many elements and none of these in isolation represent the "real Marx...
...The editors have organized the material in topical rather than chronological order, devoting special sections to such topics as: the materialist conception of history...
...Let's soon have an American edition...
...No selection can possibly replace the study of the complete texts, but this book serves at least to suggest the immense richness of the materials that still await publication in English...
...This accounts in part for the seriously deficient interpretations of his work which one encounters not only among his adversaries, but also among the professed defenders of Marx...
...The complex and many-faceted structure of Marx's thought can be fully understood only if the manuscripts prior to the Communist Manifesto are taken into consideration, and it is these, precisely, which in their majority have not yet been translated...
...They claim that Hegel was a philosopher who "took no account of real social phenomena," and that Marx, on the other hand, was not a philosopher of history but an empirical sociologist and a pragmatic moralist...
...and it is similarly misleading to deny that Marxian sociology in many striking ways anticipated and complements modern sociology...
...the theory of existence and consciousness...
...In their effort to prove their thesis they are led to minimize the influence of Hegel and the German idealist tradition on Marx's thought, and to stress those elements in the Marxian corpus that are derived from British and French social thought...
...It is misleading to assert that Marx used only a Hegelian style of exposition in writing Capital while his method was strictly empiri cal—whatever that may mean...
...the future society...
...The present volume contains enough selections from earlier and later works to permit at least an overview of the whole of Marxist thought, from the early Introduction to the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law (1844) to the late proposal for an empirical study of working class conditions (1880...
...capitalism and alienation...
...This book is required reading for all DISSENT readers...
...the dynamics of revolution...
...Some years ago Herbert Marcuse in his brilliant Reason and Revolution (which the authors fail to cite in their bibliography) showed conclusively the many strands of continuity between the main themes of Marx and Hegel, at the same time that he attempted to prove that modern empirical sociology and Marxism had nothing in common...
...American students of Marx have long been hampered by the fact that some of his most important writings, especially the earlier ones, are not available in English...
...To try to compress a complex thinker into a single mold is always a fallacious procedure...
...Bottomore and Rubel now defend the reverse thesis...
...Both interpretations are equally untenable...
...To make Marx more acceptable to modern sociologists by denying his immense indebtedness, for better or for worse, to the currently unfashionable philosophical tradition which culminated in Hegel is perhaps good salesmanship, but it is bad intellectual history...
...Bottomore and Rubel have chosen to emphasize those contributions of Marx which they consider to be of special relevance to modern sociology, and with this initial bias there is no reason to quarrel...
...While this arrangement does not permit an appreciation of the gradual development of Marx's thought, it facilitates reference to specific subject matters...
...Yet they feel also the need to claim that the "real Marx" is an empirical sociologist...
...and that, to say the least, is a dubious assertion...
...The editors have prefaced their selections with a lengthy essay on Marx's social thought that is in many ways an admirable introduction yet is open to serious criticism...
...the ideology of capitalism...
...But whatever quarrel one may have with their introduction, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the editors and the translator...
...Radicals needn't be Marxists, but they should know Marx...
...It is symptomatic of the times that the most obscure writings of medieval theologians are being splendidly translated and that no end of uninformed 'anti-Marxist" dribble comes off Brit ish and American presses each year, while no press has yet seen fit to publish an edition of the most powerful social thinker of the nineteenth century...
...social classes and class conflict...
Vol. 3 • September 1956 • No. 4
