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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
‘Feuerbach,’ Marx famously complains in the first paragraph of the 6th Thesis, ‘resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.’ This paper takes it that Marx was saying more than that people’s identities are socially formed. In his day, as in ours, this must surely have been recognized as banal by everyone except those with obviously ideologically warped perspectives. At the same time, it is debatable that Marx meant this Thesis, or any of the other 10, to express a philosophical theory, for instance of epistemology or philosophical anthropology. In this essay the comment is taken just as a critique of Feuerbach for allowing philosophical bias to misdirect him from empirical study of real world conditions in the service of progressive practical activity.
A version of this paper was read at the 1988 World Congress of Philosophy meetings in Brighton at a roundtable devoted to the 6th Thesis, and subsequent presentations of aspects of the paper were made at Queen’s University, the University of Wisconsin and Rice University. I am grateful for the comments of participants in these sessions, and for comments by G.A. Cohen, Henry Laycock, and Robert Ware, whose criticisms did not entirely cancel one another out.
2 Marx, Karl, ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1974- ) Vol. 5, 3-5 at 4 (written in 1845)Google Scholar
3 Thus Marx and Engels in The German Ideology: ‘Individuals have always proceeded from themselves, but of course from themselves within their given historical conditions and relations, not from the “pure” individual in the sense of the ideologists,’ Collected Works Vol. 5, 19-539 at 78 (written in 1845-6).
4 This orientation toward Feuerbach and philosophy is in keeping with the comment in The German Ideology that when one conceives things ‘as they really are and happened...every profound philosophical question is resolved....quite simply into an empirical fact’ (ibid., 39). For a defence of a similar claim regarding the Theses on Feuerbach 1 and 3 see the article co-authored by Daniel Gold-stick and me, ‘Activism and Scientism in the Interpretation of Karl Marx’s First and Third Theses on Feuerbach,’ Philosophical Forum 8, 2-4 (1978), 269-88.
5 In his gloss of the 6th Thesis, Nathan Rotenstreich notes Marx’s use of Hegelian terminology in pejoratively describing an account of something in isolation from its relations as ‘abstract,’ Basic Problems of Marx’s Philosophy (New York: Bobbs-Merrill 1965) 72. The term ‘sociological perspective’ is, of course, not Marx’s and is used in this paper without the ahistorical connotations sometimes carried by it.
6 In The German Ideology Marx and Engels distinguish between a broad and a narrow use of ‘civil society,’ and say in respect of the latter: ‘Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie’ (89). I take it that the phrase in the 9th and 10th Theses is used in this narrower sense.
7 Levine, Andrew, Sober, Elliot, and Wright, Erik Olin, ‘Marxism and Methodological Individualism,’ New Left Review 162 67-84 (March/April 1987) 67-84Google Scholar
8 Ibid., 70
9 Ibid., 83
10 Elster, Jon, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985) 345-71Google Scholar; a similar approach is employed by Buchanan, Allen in Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld 1982) 88-102.Google Scholar
11 Levine et al. 81
12 Levine et al. wish to exempt from this judgment explanations of types (as opposed to tokens) of social entities, since, like ‘fitness,’ which may be realized in indefinitely many kinds of ways, but unlike ‘water,’ which is always and only realized as H2O, social types are supervenient on their micro-realizations (77-8). One might still argue that whether reduction is possible is an empirical question in two ways. To be supervenient, a macro entity must admit of no realistically enumerable ways of being realized, and it could be argued that which macro entities are of this sort is an empirical question. Alternatively, it could be argued that what concerns practically oriented social scientists are tokens, e.g., contemporary Western capitalism, about which Levine et al. admit the question of reduction is empirical.
13 Levine et al. 74
14 Ware, Robert, ‘Group Action and Social Ontology,’ Analyse & Kritik 10, 1 (June 1988) 48-70CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Levine et al. 81
16 Thompson, E.P., The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press 1978) 149ff.Google Scholar
17 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1981) 204-5Google Scholar
18 Walzer, Michael, Spheres of justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books 1983) xivGoogle Scholar; for examples of conventionalist views see 28-30, 88n, 134. A pertinent critique is in Joshua Cohen’s review of Walzer’s book in The Journal of Philosophy 83, 8 (August 1986) 457-68.
19 E.g., Sandel’s, MichaelLiberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983) 122ff.Google Scholar
20 MacIntyre, AlasdairAfter Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1981) ch. 15Google Scholar
21 Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975), 377-8, 384CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Miller, Richard, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984) 71Google Scholar; the specific target of Miller’s criticisms is Allen Buchanan’s, ‘Revolutionary Motivation and Rationality,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 9, 1 (1979) 59-82.
23 Ibid., 67; see 63-78.
24 Some sample articles debating the question of whether Marxism incorporates or ought to incorporate a moral theory may be found in Nielsen, Kai and Patten, Steven C., eds., Marx and Morality (Guelph: Canadian Association for Publishing in Philosophy 1981)Google Scholar; for contrasts to Miller’s position see the contributions of Allen, Reiman, and Shaw. I have criticised Miller’s theory in my Democratic Theory and Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987) 155-6.
25 Kymlicka, Will, ‘Liberalism and Communitarianism,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (June 1988) 181-203 at 188-9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Gutman, Amy, ‘Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985) 308-22 at 316Google Scholar
27 It was suggested to me by Erik Olin Wright that community traditions determine members’ senses of identity, but not their moral values; while by contrast Henry Laycock criticized my conflation of traditions with role-norms. This and a (by no means exhaustive) survey of relevant literature suggests that the concept of ‘community’ is a contested one, and that further analytic work is in order. I speculate regarding Olin Wright’s point that while not all aspects of people’s senses of their identity are community determined, some community conditioned beliefs implicated in a sense of self are either straight forwardly moral or at least colour, so to speak, one’s morally normative views. However, even if this judgment is mistaken, the prescriptive communitarian claim remains that protection of community-specific identities should be respected. Similarly, regarding Laycock’s objection, the communitarian prescriptions may be taken to apply to those cases where traditions are implicated in role-norms, granting that sometimes they may not be implicated.
28 Raymond Firth’s core definition of a community as ‘a body of people sharing common activities and bound by multiple relationships in such a way that the aims of any individual can be achieved only by participation in action with others’ is supplemented by the rider that community members ‘normally’ occupy a common territory. Firth adds as well that communities must include as ‘constituents essential to social existence’ social alignment, social control, social media, and social standards (Elements of Social Organization [Boston: Beacon Press 1963] 41-3). Even though Firth is addressing small communities, the latter three constituents can be brought into phase with the definition employed in this paper if regarded as aspects of the way that shared community norms ought to be implicated in ongoing daily life.
29 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 78
30 Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989) 101-2
31 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 78
32 Kymlicka, Liberalism, 101
33 Marx and Engels, The Germaliberalismn Ideology, 47
34 MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1988) 367Google Scholar
35 Ibid., 361-2
36 Ibid., 387-8
37 The reasons for this are twofold: First, the social-scientific rivals of Marxism, like Marxism itself, are bound to be of a largely speculative nature, and the data base for testing the relative merits of theories is hard to control or isolate (there are few occasions for crucial experiments or for rigorous application of the method of sameness and difference); hence, just as there will seldom if ever come a time when Marxism is indisputably verified as superior to any possible rival, there will also not come a time when it is falsified vis-à-vis rivals, and its vigorous defender will therefore not have occasion for doubt. Second, insofar as Marxism is a theory designed to be put to practice, the vigorous defender (as envisaged here against the background of MacIntyre’s perspective) will have the added impetus to minimize or overlook straining ‘anomalies’ that might necessitate undoing practices and institutions that have become entrenched (and perhaps gained at the expense of breaking a good many eggs).
38 Rotenstreich, 103-4; see, too, 38-9.
39 See my Democratic Theory 94-5, 153.
40 The treatment of tradition in Democratic Theory is at 110-13.
41 A main source of Macpherson’s views is his Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1973). I have defended Macpherson’s approach in ‘The Socialist Retrieval of Liberal Democracy,’ in International Political Science Review, forthcoming, and in Part Two of Democratic Theory.
42 Oakeshott, Michael, ‘Political Education,’ in Sandel, Michael, ed., Liberalism and Its Critics (New York: New York University Press 1984) 129-238, at 229Google Scholar. Oakeshott also thinks that politics requires traditions to be amenable to change. His analysis of how this takes place is by evolution, a conservative analogue of MacIntyre’s view whereby change results from contradiction with the demand for progress. MacIntyre’s own effort to make room for critical thinking in the face of conservative approaches is to maintain that one of the traditional virtues is to reflect on one’s own tradition so as to see what ‘future possibilities the past has made available to the present’ (After Virtue, 207). In addition to exhibiting a questionable optimism about traditional progress, this view does not easily capture the element of pluralistic tolerance I think is required for an adequately democratic critical attitude.
43 Engels, Frederick, ‘Speech on the 17th Anniversary of the Polish Uprising of 1830,’ Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works 6, Vol. 389-90 (made Nov. 29, 1847)Google Scholar
44 Wolff, Robert Paul, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press 1968), 192-3Google Scholar; italics removed and punctuation altered.
45 I discuss this topic in Democratic Theory 58-60, 188-91.
46 Charles Taylor opines that calls for the realization of a general will (of which Wolff’s endeavour is probably an example) result from the breakdown of traditions (Hegel, 411).
47 A concise example of a ‘contextualist’ approach is Macpherson’s The Real World of Democracy (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1965).
48 Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems (Denver: Alan Swallow 1957)Google Scholar; see, for example, 148.
49 Walzer, Michael, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books 1988)Google Scholar. The supposed ground of possibility for internal critique in Walzer’s approach seems that of MacIntrye’s regarding progress. Thus Walzer: ‘The critic starts, say, from the view of justice embedded in the conventional code or from the bourgeois idea of freedom, on the assumption that what is actual in consciousness is possible in practice, and then challenges the practices that fall short of these possibilities’ (19).
50 Chap. 4 of Democratic Theory argues this case.