MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 14
UPDATE: The book is out in the U.S.; I received my copies today, and I know a professor at Northwestern who also got his copy. Thanks again to all those wh pre-ordered, I hope you will have your book in hand very soon.
=====August 14 post follows======
But I'm told it may ship even sooner, so order now. Two of the referees for Routledge kindly identified themselves and agreed to blurb the book. Allen Buchanan (emeritus Duke; Laureate Professor, U Arizona), author of Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (1982), said:
"A tour de force. Not only the best available introduction to Marx’s thought and to post-Marx Marxist theories, but also of interest to specialists. The organization is excellent, and the writing is always clear and jargon-free. It covers all the main topics that a book on Marx should address. It is remarkably fair and balanced, sympathetic to Marx’s ideas, but also appropriately critical of them."
David Leopold (Oxford), author of The Young Karl Marx (2007), said:
"A philosophical introduction to Marx which manages to be genuinely accessible without avoiding controversy or consigning its subject to history. Edwards and Leiter bring Marx into a productive conversation with current work in the social sciences in order to develop and defend distinctive accounts of his views on history, ideology, and capitalism. A very welcome addition to the literature."
I want to share a further set of comments from another referee report (whose author we do not know), not only because it is laudatory, but because it gives a really good sense of the book:
This book is very successful at its stated aim of providing a clear and accessible, philosophically sophisticated introduction to Marx. Indeed, I would say that it is the most successful such introduction I have ever read. Admittedly, the book is not exactly non-partisan. It has a definite point of view: skepticism towards moralizing forms of Marxism, as well as those which risk backsliding into Hegelian idealism. However, it is in no way dogmatic or doctrinaire. It sets out its arguments against these positions clearly. It is a model of philosophical argument and discussion, something that will reenforce its usefulness to students encountering Marx for the first time. More than this, it models interdisciplinarity, enriching its philosophical reflections with history, economics and psychology. I predict it would sell extremely well to educated lay-readers, and I would recommend it be marketed to them. Marx is in the ether these days, and people want to know what he was all about. This book will give them an answer that is sophisticated, but mercifully free of either (technical or Hegelian) pretentiousness and jargon.
To be perfectly frank, I had no strong negative reactions to any of the book’s major claims or arguments. In other contexts, I might wish to dispute them, but for the purposes of an introduction they are unobjectionable.
In reading the book, I sometimes wondered where to situate it on the ideological map of existing Marx interpretation; and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it does not fit cleanly into any one tradition, in part because it takes what is best in each one and leaves the rest.
Like Elster and the writings of analytical Marxists, the book is highly conversant with non-Marxist (bourgeois) social science. Indeed, it will likely be one of the only books on Marx to look seriously at Kahneman and Tversky, and to relate Marx’s theory of ideology to recent work in psychology and behavioural economics. Unlike the analytical Marxists, however, it is judicious about which social science it includes, and it does not integrate this material at the cost of accessibility, clarity or motivation (one often needs graduate level formal methods to understand some of Elster or Roemer’s proofs, and this book is mercifully free of them). In addition to its dubiousness as Marx-scholarship, analytical Marxism all too often degenerated into technical debates. None of that happens here. This is an “analytical” Marxism which honours the analytic tradition’s aspirations to clarity and rigor – without sacrificing the former on the altar of the latter. What I have said about the books’ relationship to analytical Marxism applies in the special case of its treatment of historical materialism, a topic treated by Cohen. This book’s treatment is much clearer and more convincing; and it improves upon Cohen, whose use of functional explanation is problematic....
A highpoint of the book is its account of a mechanism for class struggle: the ascendent class’s self-interest (43-48). This account solves a serious problem in prior accounts and is invaluable. It is also clear enough to be understood by students. It is one of several places in which the book goes beyond introducing Marx and makes genuine progress in our scholarly understanding of him.
Another example of a place the present manuscript improves on the needlessly technical and obscure writings of the analytical Marxists is in its discussion of the labor theory of value. Something nearly everyone wants to know when they read Marx is whether, and to what extent, his doctrines presuppose a labor theory of value. The question is treated by analytical Marxists, but not in a way that is accessible to the average philosophical reader. And the question is a common-sensical one, which demands a more plainspoken answer then, e.g., Wolff’s one using linear algebra. From now on, teachers who get this question from students encountering Marx for the first time will have a place to send them.
However, there is one major caveat to my endorsement, which is that the book somewhat deemphasizes the early Marx and expresses little sympathy with the later Western Marxist tradition (for example, the Frankfurt School). Indeed, it seems to me that this is the main reason for its greater clarity than other introductions. Often, these books proceed chronologically, beginning with the early Marx: Wood’s Karl Marx is an example. The result is that these books are front-loaded with some very obscure and inconclusive discussion. Then there are those books from the Western Marxist tradition, approaching Marx with the clear agenda of integrating his thought with Hegel, Kant or some other non-Marxist authors. This book is free of that questionable aspiration too. Yet it nevertheless manages to provide the clearest discussion I know of concerning the section of capital that is Hegelian-Marxism’s main inspiration: the fetishism of commodities. When reading the author’s clear overview of how capitalism effaces the dependence of value on cooperation one is led to wonder how Hegelians like Lukacs could have gone so badly off track in their interpretations of this chapter.
Just to be clear, I am not accusing the book of being insensitive to the historical background of Marx’s thought. Indeed, one very impressive feature of the book – rare among authors with its authors’ more analytical orientation -- is its deep engagement with the Hegelian and left-Hegelian background to Marx’s thought. One might have thought that a book focused on the later Marx would have a lacuna when it comes to Hegel and the left-Hegelians. However, this is emphatically not the case, and the discussion of Hegel’s philosophy of history as background to Marx’s own historical materialism is among the clearest and most helpful I have read (33-8). It surpasses what I would consider the best such discussion in English before it: the opening chapter of Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History, A Defence. No doubt part of the reason for this is the greater sophistication of Anglophone Hegel studies in the present time. Cohen’s Hegel is a kind of obscure mystic, and therefore a straw target. This is not true of the Leiter and Edwards’ Hegel at all, though they do not pull punches when it comes to criticizing him.
Recent Comments