Then and Now: Marx and Marxism
| Date | 01 December 1999 |
| Published date | 01 December 1999 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00241 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Then and Now: Marx and Marxism
DAVID MCLELLAN
University of London, Goldsmiths' College
The way in which the academic study of Marx and Marxism has evolved over
the last thirty or more years has been strongly in¯uenced, as have most areas of
political theory, by broader shifts in intellectual paradigms. Thus a useful way
of looking at the history of the interpretation of Marx in the West is as a history
of the attempts to come to terms with, and even incorporate, the successively
dominant intellectual trends in these societies. After all, Marx himself evolved
his ideas in the shadow of the great Hegel and his later work, and even more that
of Engels, was marked by the nineteenth century enthusiasm for positivism and
science. This scientistic outlook continued to dominate the theoretical output of
the German SPD, then the centre of Marxist theory, in the two decades before
World War I. The spirit of Hegel was revived by the ¯ux and change that
followed the war, with its theoretical counterpart in the writings of the late
Lenin and, particularly, of the early Luka
Âcs. The impact of Freud's theories was
felt in the work of the Frankfurt School, in Reich, Marcuse and the early
Habermas. The rise of Nazism and its consequences shifted the centre of
Marxist theory in the West to France and saw the adventof existentialism as the
dominant mode of philosophizing, to be succeeded by the rapid rise and fall of
structuralism, the systematic anarchy of postmodernism and, in the 1980s, by
apparently oxymoronic `rational choice' Marxism.
Thus when I was ®rst attracted to the thought of Marx in the early and mid-
1960s, a form of existentialist humanism was in the air. The 1960s in Western
Europe and North America was a time which combined an auent society with
a severe critique of capitalist materialism, culminating in the upheavals of 1968.
As a Catholic interested in the attempt by Marx to anchor ideas in social reality
I was naturally drawn to the Young Hegelian movement, whose leading
members Bauer, Feuerbach, Stirner and Marx struggled to secularize the
Hegelian scheme and realize (make real) what appeared to them the overly
religio-metaphysical motifs in Hegel. The young Marx seemed to me then (and
still does) to present an extremely rich picture of human potential.
When in 1964 I began my doctoral work on the Left Hegelians, the amount of
work available in English on Marx was extremely limited. There was nothing to
rival the comprehensive French study of Jean-Yves Calvez La Pense
Âe de Karl
Marx.1In Germany, where I had just spent six months at the Frankfurt Institut
fu
Èr Sozialforschung, there was a comparative wealth. Adorno and Habermas,
although not primarily interested in the development of Marx's thought, were
#Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Political Studies (1999), XLVII, 955±966
1Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pense
Âe de Karl Marx (Paris, Seuil, 1956).
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