No, John ('Jack') Rawls did not kill off Western Marxism!

The British Library is still malfunctioning as an effect of the hacker attack. So I have been unable to get my hands on T.H. Green’s “Speech to the Oxford Reform League” 25 March 1867), which supposedly is in volume 5 (additional writings) of the collected works. (In it he supposedly praises John Bright.) I wanted to look at it because I am traveling Stateside to give a lecture (co-authored with Nick Cowen and Aris Tranditis), “Democracy as a Competitive Discovery Process” at the PPE Workshop GMU on Thursday (here).

So, instead I’ll focus on Joseph Heath’s very entertaining and instructive “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism,” a widely shared Substack post [HT: Dailynous]. I just did a three-part series on Heath’s excellent book, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (OUP, 2020). [The first one is here; the second here; here.] And I may do a fourth in which I compare his take on cost-benefit analysis with Dave Schmidtz’s. Do read the first few paragraphs of my first post in the series, so you get a sense of my view of the significance of Heath (Toronto), whom I have never met in real life.

Before I get to my criticism — and I don’t need to remind regular readers I am no Marxist - Heath’s essay is a rare case of auto-biographical history of philosophy which gets something important right despite the polemical and boundary-policing efforts — note his repeated use of ‘bullshit.’ Usually, such retrospective first-person narratives are only instructive as polemics and boundary-policing (and a window into the anguished grievances of the author).

Heath’s piece on the death of Marxism seems to have ‘triggered’ the living (philosophical) Marxists and so generated quite a storm on social media—I fear this was almost certainly its purpose. So, on its own terms it must be judged a success. It also has (this is non-trivial) a true thesis: “the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.” This is right, and so is his judgment on the use of Pettit’s republicanism (go read the piece).

Heath plausibly suggests that it was the intellectual encounter with Rawls (and crucially Nozick) that was a key step in the process of analytic Marxism’s demise. As he puts it, “Rawlsianism therefore gave frustrated Marxists an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot, by providing them with a normative framework in which they could state directly their critique of capitalism, focusing on the parts that they found most objectionable, without requiring any entanglement in the complex apparatus of Marxist theory.” (Emphasis added.) Lurking here is the realization among analytic Marxists that inequality will remain even if one fixes exploitation. To put the point in a way that Heath wouldn’t, the analytic Marxists discovered they implicitly agreed with the Italian sociological (elite) school and reconciled themselves with liberalism.*

So much for set-up.

I have emphasized ‘normative framework’ because this should tell us that there is a puzzle here. The puzzle is something like this: why would any Marxists embrace a normative framework at all as their main intellectual instrument? I put it like that because I want to remain neutral among those who think Marxism diagnoses all normative frameworks as sources of bourgeois ideology (and opiate for the masses) and among those that think Marxism quietly presupposes its own normative framework — one that, say, helps recruit new members to the revolutionary cause — but doesn’t treat it as an important revolutionary and/or intellectual instrument. (My own view inclines toward the latter, but I am very eager to read Vanessa Wills’ new book, so may revisit.)

The key bit of background information is that analytic Marxism was founded on two bits of intellectual self-emasculation. First, it gave up on dialectical materialism. Oddly, this is the ‘bullshit’ that Heath doesn’t discuss. But dialectical materialism is the mechanism/method (in Marxist thought) between revolutionary and intellectual activity. Without commitment to something like it (analytic) Marxism is fundamentally not a revolutionary activity, but a part of the professional credit economy, or scholasticism. (Back in 2020, I wrote a post on G.A, Cohen’s rejection of dialectical materialism; see also this piece on Sydney Hook and the pre-history of Cohen’s argument [and more serious scholarship here].)

The second bit of self-emasculation among analytic Marixism is the rejection of social functionalism (and the simultaneous embrace of methodological individualism among some of them). This is, in fact, most puzzling because even a high bourgeois theorist like my teacher, the late Dan Dennett, could argue his way into it (just look at what he has to say about ‘reasons without a reasoner’)! Elster, in particular, was quite dogmatic on this point (see my other bit of real scholarship on this here).

But the commitment to a normative framework is also a feature of the professional (ahh) habitus that analytic Marxists opted to occupy. There are two structural mechanisms working here in the background that are path dependent features of twentieth century academic developments. First, to simplify: Marxism has two natural academic homes: professional economics and professional philosophy. These separated in the late nineteenth century and generated a division of labor where one (again to simplify) dealt with positive/empirical science and the other dealt with normative questions, including the setting of ends (for a scholarly version of that story see here). To be a professional political philosopher just meant to be a normative theorist (or a conceptual analysist of terms that may enter into purported normative theory [cf. Felix Oppenheim’s work back in the day (which I have discussed here)]). This automatically leaves those Marxists that reject normative theory without a home in philosophy. (Some did find a home in central bits of economics, of course, one only needs to mention say, Oskar Lange and Hirofumi Uzawa in addition to Roemer of more recent vintage.)

At this point one may well think that some Marxists might have snuck into professional philosophy as philosophers of science (or scientific philosophers), as they surely did. (Regular readers know that I argue analytic philosophy is incapable of gatekeeping against substantive worldviews.) However, and — this is the second path-dependent development — by treating the ‘context of discovery’' as ‘'unphilosophical,’ much of the ideology critique of Marxism became irrelevant. So, that left Marxism the slim slice of critical theory (which for contingent reasons has an awkward fit with analytic philosophy), or in neo-Hegelian history of philosophy.

As an aside, and to explain the pushback that Heath received on social media, in recent years these path dependent trajectories have been bypassed in all kinds of ways (effortlessly one can find many avowed Marxists in social ontology, philosophy of language, philosophy of biology, and formal epistemology/philosophy of science), and even in political philosophy (where Marxists reject the ethics first commitment of the field).

So, my point is this: only if one screens off, or take for granted, these structural background conditions does Heath’s story really make sense. As we move further away from these conditions, Heath’s story will become increasingly puzzling (I pontificate as a philosopher of history). There is, of course, an important remaining question lurking here: whether these path dependent, structural conditions also shaped the self-emasculation (apologies for the gendered language, but from afar analytic Marxism seems to have been a boys’ affair) I have diagnosed.

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*I warmly recommend Richard Bellamy (1987) Modern Italian social theory: ideology and politics from Pareto to the present alongside Burnham’s (1943) The Machiavellians in order to get the richer story. One need not accept the axioms that the analytic Marxists and Italian ‘elite’ theorists have in common.