A New Look at Professor Tucker's Marx
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1967.tb01844.x |
| Published date | 01 June 1967 |
| Date | 01 June 1967 |
| Author | Alan Ryan |
| Subject Matter | Notes and Review Articles |
NOTES AND REVIEW ARTICLES
A
NEW
LOOK
AT
PROFESSOR TUCKER’S
MARX
ALAN RYAN
University
of
Essex
PROFESSOR TUCKERfinds Man in 1844
as
a young man beginning to stand
on
his
own
feet and
devotes
his
book’ to setting him on his head.
In
a
sentence, Tucker’s thesis is that Marx can only
be
understood
as
a
religious
or
mythic
thinker, following directly in Hegel’s footsteps.
This
is, of
course,
to make Marx’s debt to Hegel much greater than
is
generally recognized; more im-
portantly, it is to promise that the nature of this debt will undergo a radical reinterpretation.
This
thesis Tucker supports in part by
an
account
of
German philosophy after Kant which has
to
be
mentioned here to render Tucker’s account
of
Man intelligible, but which cannot
be
discussed in any kind of detail. What chiefly occupies us here
is
two major issues. The first
is
what exactly Tucker’s thesis amounts to; for it
is
clear that any
myrh
or
religion
which Marx
subscribed to must have
been
very different from traditional Christianity. The second is whether
Tucker’s thesis, duly elucidated,
is
plausible of
Marx
in
1844
when he wrote the Economic/
Philosophical Manuscripts. Tucker’s thesis
is
intended to explain Marx’s views throughout his
lifetime, but he devotes most of his attention to the EconomiclPhilosophical Manuscripts, and
we follow him in this. For, clearly, Marx is much more overtly Hegelian in style and vocabulary
in
1844
than he ever was thereafter,
so
that Tucker’s
case
must
be
valid for 1844 if it
is
valid at
all.
In
fact, our
case
is that Tucker’s thesis is loosely formulated and lamely argued,
so
that it
is
sometimes intelligible but implausible, and at others not obviously intelligibleat all. Accordingly,
this paper closes with
a
few suggestions about the proper way to approach the manuscripts
of
1844.
To
elucidate Marx’s views on Hegel, one has to rely mostly on the
paper
entitled
An
Introduction
to
the Critique
of
the Hegelian Philosophy
of
Right,
written in late
1843,
and on the
section of the third
of
the Economic Philosophical Manuscripts on Hegel‘s dialectic, written
in
the summer of 1844.2
To
define what he
means
by
a
religious system, Tucker produces four characteristic which a
typically religious
Welrunschauung
will possess. The first
is
‘aspiration to totality of scope’3 and
under
this
heading he maintains that, ‘Like medieval Christianity, Marx’s system undertakes to
provide an integrated, all-inclusive view of reality, an organization
of
all significant knowledge
in an interconnected whole. . .” Secondly, there is an element
of
historical drama-‘Communism
lost
and
Communism regained’s to match the traditional fall from paradise and its eventual
regaining. History must be seen
as
a
process with
a
goal, with
a
definite beginning, middle and
end.
The
third and crucial feature
is
the use of the concept of redemption,
an
emphasis on the
salvation of the individual soul. Marx does not talk of souls, nor explicitly of salvation, but for all
that ‘he has the concept of
a
total regeneration ofman.6And Tucker is in no doubt that this is the
central element in Marx’s religious thought
:
‘the meaning of Marxism turns in acrucial way upon
this idea. It is the thread that holds the entire system together,’7
so
that ‘there is no possibility
of
comprehending the system
of
Marx at all deeply unless this redemptive idea
is
seen to
be
at the
core of it.’8 It is this third aspect which many people will not find obvious
in
Marx, and which
most
of
the book is devoted to bringing to light. Fourth and last comes the unity of theory and
practice, an ‘integral relation between the world-view
as
such and a set of prescriptions for action
1
R.
Tucker,
Philosophy
and
Myth in Karl Murx
(London
:
Cambridge University
Press,
1961).
2 Text in Bottomore edition, Karl
Marx :Early Writings
(London: Watts,
1963).
3
Tucker,
op.
cit.,
p.
22.
6
Ibid., p.
24.
4
Ibid.,
p.
22.
7 Ibid.,
p.
24.
5 Ibid.,
p.
23.
8
Ibid., p.
24.
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