Table Of ContentPAI A H I\
J. G. Mcrquior was born in 1941 in Rio de Janeiro
where he studied law and philosophy before undertaking
postgraduate studies in Europe. He holds a literary doctor
ate from the University of Paris and a PhD in sociology
from the London School of Economics. His interest in the
theory of culture matured at the Collège de France, where
he attended Claude Lévi-Strauss’s seminar for five years
before turning to political sociology in England under the
guidance of Ernest Gellner. A professor of political science
at the University of Brasilia until 1982 and a former visiting
professor at King’s College, London, he is the author of
several books, concentrating increasingly on the history of
ideas. These include: L ’Esthétique de Lévi-Strauss (1977), The
Veil and the Mask: essays on culture and ideology (1979), Rousseau
and Weber: two studies in the theory of legitimacy (1980), the
Fontana Modern Masters Series Foucault (1985) and a
forthcoming From Prague to Paris: structuralist and poststructur
alist itineraries. A member of the Brazilian Academy and of
the editorial board of Government and Opposition, he currently
lives in London.
I
J. G. MERQUIOR
WESTERN MARXISM
SERIES ED ITO R
JUSTIN WINTLE
PALADIN
Granada Publishing
Univ. library, UC Sonto Crux 1987
Paladin Books
Granada Publishing Ltd
8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3 LA
A Paladin Paperback Original 1986
Copyright © J. G. Merquior 1986
ISBN 0-586-08454-1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Collins, Glasgow
Set in Baskerville
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
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H)fc
CONTENTS <2 3 c7
th 7
Foreword vii
I A CONCEPT AND ITS BACKGROUND
1. What is Western Marxism? 1
2. The Heritage: Hegel 11
3. The Heritage: Marx’s Marxism 39
II THE FOUNDATIONS OF WESTERN MARXISM
1. Lukács and‘Culture Communism’ 60
2. Gramsci and Marxist Historism 93
III THE POST WAR SCENE 110
1. The Classical Frankfurt School 111
- The Lonely Work of Walter Benjamin 117
- The Spirit of Negative Dialectics 130
2. From Sartre to Althusser 138
3. From Marcuse to Habermas 155
-Jurgen Habermas and the Holy Grail of
Dialogue 163
IV A FEW GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 186
Notes 203
Bibliography 215
Landmarks in Western Marxism 240
Index 241
For Leandro Konder,
who would only half agree
FOREWORD AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In his oft-quoted eleventh thesis on Feuerbach Marx
enjoined philosophy to change the world instead of merely
interpreting it. The trouble with post-Marxian Marxism is
that historically it followed the advice to the letter: it
certainly changed the face of the modern world, yet scarcely
succeeded in interpreting it in an intellectually satisfactory
way. When Western Marxism, bom in the 1920s out of
the spirit of revolution, gathered momentum in the three
decades following World War II it voiced the dire need for
rethinking both Marxist theory and its relationship with
social praxis.
This short study is an attempt to assess critically the
main results of such a theoretical endeavour. It reflects, I
hope, many a pithy conversation on Marxism and its
problems with a number of first-rate minds, none of which
is the least responsible for the views presented here: the
late Raymond Aron, Leszek Kolakowski, Ernest Gellner,
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Perry Anderson, Leandro
Konder, Roberto Schwarz, Carlos Nelson Coutinho, John
A. Hall, F. A. Santos. I am grateful to Helio Jaguaribe for
the hospitality of his Instituto de Estudos Politicos e Sociais
(Rio), where I briefly sketched most of the analysis of
the Frankfurt School in 1984. Justin Wintle was a truly
sympathetic editor, as always very keen on the biography
of ideas, who actually much improved my text. Josette
Priest took excellent care of the typescript. Ophelia Vesen-
tini and J. M. Alkmin performed some detective-worthy
jobs in pursuit of an often elusive bibliography. And I
would like to thank the indexer, Rebecca Smith. In a sense,
Foreword and Acknowledgements
I have borne this book in my mind for many years - but I
could scarcely have written it in just one Autumn without
the help and encouragement of my friends and family.
JGM
London, June 1985
I
A CONCEPT AND ITS BACKGROUND
1. WHAT IS WESTERN MARXISM?
‘Western Marxism’ is generally taken to mean a body of
thought, chiefly philosophical, encompassing the work of
authors as different as Georg Lukács and Louis Althusser,
Walter Benjamin and the later Jean-Paul Sartre. It also
embraces theoretical interventions and historical analyses
as distant in time, scope and spirit as those of Antonio
Gramsci (d. 1937) and Jürgen Habermas, who began
publishing only thirty years ago. It is at once a typical
product of the creative inter-war culture and an ongoing
theorizing, recognizable (if often deeply transformed) in
the output of the second generation of the so-called Frank
furt school grouped around Habermas or, again, in what
came to be known as French structuralist Marxism.
Such diversity makes critical interpretation difficult. But
at least, roughly speaking, one knows who the western
Marxists are: Lukács, Gramsci, the Frankfurtians, Sartre,
Althusser, some ‘new Left’ theorists, and so on. It is much
harder, however, to say what Western Marxism (WM)
amounts to. When it comes to defining or even describing
Western Marxism as a whole, as a common denominator
among several trends in twentieth-century Marxism, the
label itself quickly turns out to be a tricky one. For instance,
it traditionally denotes non-Soviet, or non-Soviet-like,
Marxist thought. Yet, if taken too literally, its geographical
meaning bccomcs quite misleading. Several Marxist trends
in the West, while very different from the Soviet canon, arc
1
Western Marxism
far from qualifying as ‘Western Marxism’ in the philosophi
cal sense. Consider a few samples at random: a Trotskyist
like the influential Belgian economist Ernest Mandcl; a
theorist of revolution like the early Régis Debray; or an
East German dissident such as Rudolf Bahro - arguably
the most important case of communist heresy to have
surfaced since Milovan Djilas’s The New Class (1957). All
of these, in their most striking works (Debray’s Revolution in
the Revolution, 1969, Mandel’s Late Capitalism, 1972 and
Bahro’s The Alternative in Eastern Europe, 1977), were at
loggerheads with the Soviet persuasion. Yet nobody has
ever tagged the badge ‘Western Marxism’ on to any of
them. Clearly, being a Marxist in the West does not alone
make one into a ‘Western Marxist’, any more than it
makes one automatically obedient to Soviet theory. To that
extent, the tag is just a misnomer.
However, as soon as we look at it from a historical
perspective, the label becomes much more meaningful. For
‘Western Marxism’ was born in the early 1920s as a
doctrinal challenge, coming from the West, to Soviet Marx
ism. The main founders of Western Marxism - Lukács and
Ernst Bloch, Karl Korsch and Gramsci - were in sharp
disagreement with the deterministic historical materialism
of Bolshevik philosophy defined by Lenin or Bukharin.
Both Lenin and Bukharin, as Engels and Plekhanov before
them, believed in objective economic laws as the driving
force of all human history; and they also held a view of
consciousness as being essentially a reflection of nature
and social reality. In the 1920s, these key theoretical
positions were shared, in the Leninist camp, in such widely
read Marxist treatises as Bukharin’s Historical Materialism
(1921); and, on the anti-Bolshevik side, in Kautsky’s The
Materialist Historical Constitution of the State and the Development
of Mankind (1927); but they were strongly opposed by
thinkers like Lukács and Gramsci, who took issue with the
overt naturalistic outlook of the more dcterminist brands of
Marxism.
Nevertheless, few things would be more erroneous than
2
