Marxist Social Thought, History Of

See also: Development: Socioeconomic Aspects;Human–Environment Relationships; Marxian Eco-nomic Thought; Marxism in Contemporary Socio-logy; Marxist Social Thought, History of; ResourceGeography

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Harvey D 1982 The Limits to Capital. University of ChicagoPress, Chicago

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and-imagined Places. Blackwell, Oxford, UKWallerstein I 1974 The Modern World System. Academic Press,

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R. Peet

Marxist Social Thought, History of

1. Critique of Political Economy

In the twentieth century Marxist social thought hastaken many different and opposing forms: revisionist,revolutionary, structural, critical, humanist,New Left,

social relations, rational choice, etc. Their commondenominator is that they appeal to Marx as theiroriginal source.

Marx himself began with a critique of modernnatural law theory; that is, the way of thinking whichdominated the Western tradition of political andeconomic thought. Modern natural law theory tooktwo main forms, empirical natural law which prevailedwithin political economy and idealist natural lawwhich prevailed in political philosophy. Marx arguedthat modern natural law theory made vast strides inadvancing social thought and in identifying the do-main of the social. However, he thought that thediscursive framework within which classical politicaleconomy and philosophy moved failed to distinguishadequately between what is social and what is natural,or more precisely failed to distinguish the place of thesocial in nature as a whole (Fine 1984).

Marx saw classical political economy as havingmade great advances in understanding the socialcharacter and historical origins of the economic formsof the modern age—value, exchange value, price,money, capital, interest, rent, profit, etc. It recognizedthat human labor is the ground of value and that theeconomic system as a whole only reached fruition inthe modern age—at the end of history rather than atits beginning. Marx argued, however, that classicalpolitical economy naturalized labor as the source ofvalue and never questioned in what kind of socialorganization or under what social circumstances laborwould take the form of value. The way Marx put thisis that in analytical terms political economy wasstrong: it perceived that the magnitude of value wasdetermined by the average amount of labor time thatgoes into the production of a commodity. But dialec-tically political economy was weak: it treated the factthat things take the form of commodities and arebearers of value as a natural fact of life rather than asthe product of determinate social relations, and ittreated the historical emergence of the modern com-mercial, commodity-producing economy as the tri-umph of reason over the manifold forces whichconstrained its fruition in the past (see PoliticalEconomy, History of ).

Vis-a� -vis empirical natural law theory, Marx sawhimself as the first to comprehend adequately thesocial character of the value form and to release itfrom the naturalistic framework in which it had beencaptured by natural law. The claim to be the first wastrue, although he did not recognize that Hegel’scritique of natural law pre-empted and prefigured hisown—a fact which has only recently been recognizedby Marx–Hegel scholars (Rose 1981). Marx wroteCapital as a critique of political economy: not as aneconomics text but as a study of a society dominatedby the dull compulsion of economic forces; not as aneconomic determinism but as an analysis of a societyin which the economic is determinant. The subjectmatter of Capital concerned the inhuman, alienated,

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and exploitative social relations that lie hidden behindthe fetishized forms of modern economic rationality.

To read Marx as an economic determinist as manyof his followers have done, or to accuse him ofeconomism as many of his critics have done, is to missthe mark in as much as Capital was a critique of asocial world in which:

(a) The exchange of things is a primary condition ofintersubjectivity.

(b) Things appear as bearers of exchange value orprices.

(c) Access to things is primarily mediated by theability to purchase them.

(d)Humanactivity is subordinated to themovementof things and the fluctuations of the market (for themore traditional reading of Marx’s economics, seeDobb 1946, Meek 1973, Sweezy 1969, Mandel 1978).

Capital was a critique of a society which actualizeseconomism. It treated the very idea of ‘the economic’as a product of definite social relations of productionand conceived a truly human, social world in terms ofthe overcoming of ‘the economic’ as such. Capital wasan attempt to understand a social world in whicheverything has its price, even the capacities of ourbody and soul, and humanity is a slave to the productsof its own labor (for this social reading of Marx’seconomics, see Sayer 1979, Clarke 1982).

The key proposition in Marx’s ‘economic’ writingswas that economic forms and categories are the visibleexpression of determinate social relations of pro-duction. It is misleading, therefore, to say that Marxcalled the economy the base on which legal, political,and ideological superstructures rest (Williams 1983).Marx was not consistent in his use of terminology butif we can still speak of a ‘base,’ it is constituted bysocial relations and not by their economic forms. Theimagery that informs Capital is not that of base andsuperstructure but of form and content—economicform and social content. The approach that Marxadoptedwas to start by analyzing the forms themselves(commodity, value, use value, price, money, capital,interest, profit, etc.), then uncover the alienated socialrelations concealed behind these forms, and finallyexplain why these social relations manifest themselvesin the formofmaterial relations between things (Rubin1972). Marx called this post-enlightenment form ofsuperstition and domination the ‘fetishism of thecommodity.’

2. Critique of Political Philosophy

One potential weakness of this social approach toMarx’s ‘economic’ writings is that it might give theimpression that the economic forms of capitalist socialrelations are its only forms, or at least that they are itsessential forms. Other noneconomic forms of modernsocial life—moral, legal, political, cultural, etc.—might thus be perceived as being in some sense

epiphenomenal or inessential. Even when it wasrecognized that Marx offered a social critique ofpolitical economy rather than an economics, there stillremained something rather arbitrary in the way inwhich he treated the economic as a privileged sphere ofsocial life. Within traditional Marxism this led to anumber of possible solutions. At one pole, that ofrevisionist Marxism, legal, political, and culturalforms usually appeared to be entirely dissociated fromand independent of capitalist social relations (as inEduard Bernstein’s E�olutionary Socialism). At theother pole, that of revolutionary Marxism, theyusually appeared to be entirely determined by capi-talist social relations (as in Lenin’s State and Re�-olution). In the middle they have often appeared in themanner of structuralist Marxism to be ‘determined inthe last instance’ by economic forces or to be ‘relativelyautonomous’ and have their own efficacy (Althusser1965, Poulantzas 1980). Within most forms of con-temporary Marxism, it still seems that there areimmediate internal connections between capitalistsocial relations and economic forms that are notshared between capitalist social relations and themoral, legal, political, and cultural forms of themodern age.

For some Marxists, particularly those confrontedby the rise of fascism in the 1930s, there was a need torescue Marxism from the grip of economists andrevive it as a theory of the whole social totality. Thekey to achieving this was to reconsider the relationsbetween Marx and the tradition of German idealismout of which he emerged, and in particular the relationbetween Marx and Hegel. This was characteristic ofthose Hegelian Marxists who belonged to or wereinfluenced by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.They argued that, if economic determinism is oneaspect of our social world (the aspect which Marxanalyzed in detail), the other is that which Hegel calledthe ‘right of subjective freedom’ which he analyzed inits various legal, moral, political, and aesthetic dimen-sions (e.g., Hegel, Philosophy of Right). The basicinsight of Hegelian Marxism in all its forms was thatthere is more to capitalism than the circuits of capital:there is Kant as well as Bentham, political philosophyas well as political economy, the fetish of the subject aswell as the fetish of the commodity, free will, morality,and personification as well as determination, instru-mental rationality, and reification (Luka� cs 1971,Luka� cs 1975, Marcuse 1989, Adorno 1973). However,the most characteristic gesture of critical theory was totreat the forms of right, law, and morality either interms of the logic of illusion (the illusions of liberalindividualism) or a logic of anachronism (treatingaspects of bourgeois society in the period of itsascendancy as if they were still operative in its periodof decline; see Critical Theory: Frankfurt School ).

The one-sided, economic view of capitalist socialrelations has also been unconvincing to non-Marxistswho have recognized that the modern age conveys

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ideas of personality, free will, moral agency, individualrights, legal equality, collective self-regulation, etc. aswell as material relations between things (Kolakowski1978, Lichtheim 1964). In response, Marxists ofvarious stripes have wanted Marxism to acknowledgethat the individual is a juridical, moral, political, andcultural subject as well as a ‘bearer’ of economic forcesand that bourgeois society produces ‘high’ moral,political, and cultural values as well as the bare cashnexus. If it is inadequate to say that the language ofindividual right and moral agency is merely an illusion,or that it is an anachronism inappropriate to our ownage, then the difficulty is how to understand the placeof this language within the totality of social life andhow to move, as it were, from the circuits of capital tocapitalism as a whole.

3. Humanist Marxism and Stalinism

In the latter half of the 1950s, a new wind wasbeginning to blow. In the East it was marked bymounting dissidence partly in reaction to the reve-lations made at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU,the 1956 Hungarian uprising and its suppression bySoviet troops. In the West it was marked by the birthof the New Left and of the new social movements(antiwar, antinuclear, shop stewards, etc.), whichfought against the moral myopia characteristic of theCold War and for a perspective capable of lookingbeyond existing social forms and comprehending newsocial forces. In the Colonies it was marked by anti-colonial and anti-imperialist revolts whose main aimwas national self-determination (Fanon 1965). Withinall of these movements there were residues, oftenstrong, of a more traditional Marxism. However therewas also growing evidence of a Marxism which puthuman needs before dogma, and social relationsbefore institutional arrangements, which recognizedthat choices can and must be made along the way tosocialism and that conscious human agency plays apart in the making of history. It was a Marxism whichrejected the coupling of socialism and barbarism thatwas the mark of Stalinist rule and which sought toreconnect Marxism to the idea of humanity (seeTotalitarianism).

As an alternative to the deformed socialism of thepost-Stalinist states, there was posited a humanistMarxism which reaffirmed faith in the revolutionarypotential not of the human race or of the dictatorshipof the proletariat, but of real men and women. Suchdissidents were denounced by the official communistpress, and sometimes by the more orthodox Trotskyistopposition, for the sins of idealism, subjectivism,romanticism, clericalism, and humanism. But theyrepresented the rediscovery of the ‘social’ in socialismthat had been squeezed out of existence once thelatter was turned into a ruling abstraction (seeDunayavskeya 1964, Draper 1977, James 1992).

Marxist humanism emphasized Marx’s own aware-ness of the limitations of a critique in which ‘theconnection of political economy with the state, law,morality, civil life, etc. is only dealt with insofar aspolitical economy itself professes to deal with thesesubjects,’ as well as his ambitious life-project: to‘present one after another a critique of law, ofmorality, politics, etc. … and then finally … to showthe connection of the whole.’ However, as the Marxisthistorian Edward Thompson put it, there was also agrowing sense that Marx himself was ‘trapped withinthe circuits of capital’ and ‘only partly sprung that trapin Capital’ (Thompson 1978). It seemed that Marx wasincreasingly sucked into the theoretical whirlpool ofpolitical economy whose categories were interrogatedand re-interrogated but whose main premise, thepossibility of isolating the economic from other fieldsof social study, was left intact. The structure of Capitalappeared to be dominated by the categories of itsantagonist, namely the economic sphere itself, and toremain fixed within this order of things.

It was widely argued that, although Marx could notbe blamed for the deformations of traditional Marx-ism, neither could he be simply exonerated. There wasno ‘virgin untouchable purity of original Marxism towhich Stalinism owes no kinship’ (Thompson 1978). IfMarx’s one-sidedness appeared, like Antigone’s com-mitment to family love, wrong only because it wasone-sided and to be valid within its own terrain, theideology of Stalinism was seen to justify the exercise oftotalitarian terror against both its ‘own’ people andsubject nations, and to conceal the social relations(within the workplace, within the party, within thetrade unions, within everyday life) which lie beneathabsurdly idealized conceptions of state property andworkers government.

Affirming the unity of human experience, humanistMarxism treated Marx’s failure to explore othersubjects systematically as symptomatic of a certainimprisonment within the very economic categorieswhose social content he dedicated himself to under-standing. It argued that law, morality, culture, etc.belonged to a different logic from that of capital andthat the influence of the latter should be conceived asone of corruption rather than constitution. Thisattitude might be exemplified in Thompson’s assertionat the end of his study of class law in eighteenth-century England that the rule of law itself is an‘unqualified human good’ (Thompson 1977). Mostimportant, Marxist humanism maintained that thephilistine character of official Communist ideology layin its denial of the creative agency of people. Whenpeople are considered merely as units in a chain ofdetermined circumstances, what disappears is the factthat we are moral and intellectual beings capable ofmaking our own history, confronting adversity, andsurmounting the limitations imposed by circum-stances. It was this denial of human agency thatThompson called a ‘heresy against man’ and which

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destroyed from within the social dimension of Marx-ism. In the Communist world this heresy againstpeople took the shape of a pseudo-Marxist ideologywhich served only to buttress the ruling bureaucracy.

4. New Left Marxism

The rise of nontraditional forms of Marxism—criticaltheory in the 1930s, humanist Marxism in the 1950s,and then New Left Marxism in the 1960s—wasaccompanied by the discovery, translation, and dis-semination of the young Marx’s early writings. Theseincluded his analysis of alienated labor as the key tounderstanding private property (in the Economic andPhilosophical Manuscripts), his attack on the latentauthoritarianism of the modern state that he (wrongly)attributed to Hegel’s philosophy of right (Critique ofHegel’s doctrine of the state), and his revolt against theanti-Semitism he detected within some sections of theGerman socialist movement (On The Jewish Question).The recovery of Marx’s analysis of the modern socialdivision between the self-interested atomism of civilsociety and the abstract community of the politicalstate—and its manifestation as a split within everyindividual between the bourgeois and citoyen—helpedrescue the social character of Marx’s critique fromboth the stagnant depths of economic determinismand the giddy heights of political philosophy. Inpractice this meant the renewal of the critique of thecultural, legal, and political forms of modern society.This included state property as well as private prop-erty, collectivity as well as individual personality,bureaucracy and the Party as well as representativegovernment, and the endeavor to overcome the bour-geois and socialist mystifications which surroundedthese forms of cultural, legal, and political life (Colletti1974, McLelland 1969).

The exposure of Marx’s early writings to publicdiscussion was accompanied by the publication (inGerman in 1953 and translated into English in 1973),of Marx’s rough draft of Capital, known as theGrundrisse and written in a rush of revolutionaryexpectation in 1857–8 (Nicolaus 1973, Rosdolsky1977). This made Marx’s debt to Hegel in his later‘scientific’ writings far clearer than it had been. Therewas interplay between the revelation of previouslyunknown, untranslated, or obscure writings by Marxand what contemporary Marxists themselves wantedto find in Marx’s work. It brought to the fore athematic present on the margins of Capital but moreevident in the Grundrisse, namely Marx’s critique ofthe alienated social forms of modern ‘subjectivity’: theforms taken not by the products of human labor butby the producers themselves, the subjects of humanlabor who produce goods, bring their commodities tothe market, interact with one another, express theircreativity and take their leisure.

New Left Marxism, with its very strong spirit ofrebellion, discovered an implicit hypothesis in Marx’swork: that the fetishism of the commodity (the productof human labor) is accompanied by the fetishism of thesubject (the producer or laborer) as the split halves ofan original unity. Now everything was conceived as a‘social relation’—money, capital, the law, the state,abstract right, etc.—and the times looked promisingfor Marxist social thought. There was a revival orresurgence of Marxist writings on the critique of law(Pashukanis 1983, Fine 1984), the critique of thecapitalist and socialist state (Holloway and Picciotto1978, Clarke 1991), the critique of bourgeois culture(Jameson 2000), the critique of alienation (Meszaros1970, Ollman 1973), the conditions of radical democ-racy (Miliband 1988, Habermas 1974), etc.

In post-1968 politics, Marx’s early writings wereoften cited in order to dismiss the whole complex,differentiated edifice of bourgeois authority and demo-cracy as a sham and to put in its place an alternativeconception of ‘true democracy.’ New Left Marxismdistinguished between two traditions: that of formaldemocracy aligned to representation, and that of truedemocracy aligned to an anti-representational tra-dition of natural law indebted to Rousseau. The ideawas taken from the young Marx, that the so-called democratic state allows the people to appearonly as ‘fantasy, illusion, representation,’ that it offersno more than a ‘ceremony’ or ‘spice’ of popularexistence, that it expresses ‘the lie that the state is in theinterest of the people,’ and that the existing world hasto be ‘turned on its head’ if the people are to enter thepolitical stage as they should, in person rather thanthrough representation, in flesh and blood rather thanin name alone, in actuality rather than in mere form.

This was the thread that Lucio Colletti picked up inhis introduction to the Penguin edition of Marx’sEarly Writings (1974). He argued that the revolution-ary tradition From Rousseau to Lenin (1972) had as itscenter the critical analysis of parliamentarism and ofthe modern representative principle itself, and theconviction that sovereignty must no longer be trans-ferred to government by the people but be retained bythe people themselves. The idea of revolution wasrepresented not as a transfer of power from one classto another but a transition from one form of power toanother—from the alien form of the political state inwhich the people are only ideally present, to a powerthat is ‘directly into the hands of the people.’

This spirit of radicalism was caught, for example, inGuy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1977). Hedirected the critique of representation east and west: ata Leninism where the representation of the workingclass radically opposes itself to the working class, andat a parliamentarism where the people in miniatureopposes itself to the people themselves. He depictedthe representative principle as ‘the quintessence ofmodern domination … the concrete inversion of life… the heart of the unrealism of the real society.’ The

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Commune�Council, by contrast, was shown as theform in which all prior divisions between rulers andruled are finally overcome and where specialization,hierarchy, and separation end. Debord construed thelatter as an institution that is fundamentally anti-institutional, a form of representation which onlyactuates the generalization of communication, a formof organization which recognizes its own dissolutionas a separate organization, a power which can nolonger combat alienation with alienated forms.

This vision of the Commune�Council was vulner-able to the criticism that it was as abstract as the poweragainst which it protested. It encountered the realistcriticism that, viewed as an institutional system andbared of its revolutionary mystique, the Commune�Council manifests its own tendency toward hierarchyand alienation. The rationalist criticism argued that,judged in terms of its capacity for rational decision-making, the face-to-face structures of the Commune�Council fall victim to the vagaries of public opinion orthe contingencies of the loudest voice. The modernistcriticism argued that the idea of a true democracyechoed an old European tradition of natural lawtheory, eventually going back to Aristotle, whichconceived the political state and civil society as anundifferentiated unity.

5. Contemporary Marxism

Marx often defined himself through his opposition toHegel. He praised Hegel for having discovered the‘correct laws of the dialectic’ but indicted him formystifying the dialectic. He argued that in Hegel thedialectic was ‘standing on its head’ because it trans-formed the process of thinking into an independentsubject; while he, Marx, recognized that ‘the ideal isnothing but the material world reflected in the mind ofman and translated into forms of thought’ (Postface toCapital 1). He argued that Hegel’s mystical dialecticserved as a philosophy of the state to ‘glorify whatexists,’ while his own dialectic was by contrast ‘ascandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie’because it ‘included in its positive understanding ofwhat exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation,its inevitable destruction.’ Hegel was Marx’s Doppel-ganger: the ghostly double that allowed Marx to beMarx. By making Hegel logical and conceptual, Marxconstructed himself as historical and material.

This account was deceptive both in respect of Hegeland Marx himself. In fact, Marx’s analysis of thevalue-form was no less logical and no more historicalthan Hegel’s analysis of the form of abstract right.Their respective methodologies were almost identical(Fine 2001). Within contemporary Marxism therelation between Marx and Hegel continued to con-found scholars who echoed Marx’s own convictionthat Hegel got everything upside down and that Marxwas the one who put the world and Hegel back on their

feet. There was a tendency within Marxism to treatwhat Marx said about Hegel as the truth of Hegelwithout any independent judgement, and to fixate onthe logic of inversion which overshadowed Marx’sown writings. One result of this was an increasingstress on the historical specificity not only of theobjects of Marx’s analysis (such as the economic formsof value, money, capital, etc.) but also of the criticalconsciousness that attempts to grasp them.

For example, in his critique of traditional Marxismand revival of critical theory, Moshe Postone (1996)radicalizes Marx by pushing the idea of historicalspecificity to its limit. He argues that not only are theeconomic categories of Marx’s theory historicallyspecific but also the categories Marx employs toanalyze these economic forms, especially that of labor.Postone’s charge against traditional Marxism is that itdoes not historicise enough, that it treats certain aspectof Marx’s theory, say the mode of production incontrast to the mode of distribution, as transhistorical.Postone pushes to the fore the historical specificity notonly of the commodity form, but also of industrialproduction, the working class, the category of labor asa tool of analysis, and even the epistemologicalopposition between subject and object. He looks to thetransformation, abolition, supersession, destructionand�or transcendence not only of the historicallyspecific forms of social life characteristic of our age,but also of the historically specific critical conscious-ness whose aim is to abolish both these forms.

This type of Marxism takes to the limit Marx’scritique of bourgeois ideology: that is, the tendency touniversalize the particular and to eternize what are infact historically specific values, including those ofscience and critique themselves. Its conception ofhistory has in turn opened up new areas of debate. Theidea that a relation is historically specific, however,tells us little about the nature of the relation itself orabout whether it ought to be abolished. It reflectsrather the culture of a historically self-conscious agethat declares that both knowledge and reality aretransitory and surpassable and that what seemsunquestionably true to one age differs from whatseems unquestionably true to another. It is a culturethat discloses a variety of conflicting historical ‘truths’with no transhistorical criteria for judging betweenthem. It opens the door to a variety of ‘post-Marxist’outcomes: a skeptical paralysis which abandons allfaith in knowledge and enlightenment; a pragmaticmake-believe which hopes that a pretended faith mightdo the work of an actual faith; a new faith indemocracy and democratization which offers a singu-lar political solution to all the alienated forms ofsocial life; or even a new kind of ideological fanaticismwhich seeks to achieve certainty only by making itselftrue (see Ideology, Sociology of ).

Marx argued in The Communist Manifesto that thefleeting transitoriness of all values, relations, forms,and types of knowledge was an expression of a

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practical nihilism inherent in bourgeois society: ‘Allfixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancientand venerable prejudices and opinions, are sweptaway, all new formed ones become antiquated beforethey can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.’Bourgeois society, Marx wrote, drowns religiousfervor, chivalrous enthusiasm, and philistine senti-mentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation; itresolves personal worth into exchange value; it stripsof its halo every occupation hitherto honored; itreduces the family to a mere money relation; itprofanes all that is holy; it substitutes expansion,convulsion, uncertainty, motion, smoke for everythingthat was permanent, fixed and certain. The bourgeoisin this account sees only the transitoriness of things ina world where nothing lasts, nothing has value. Marxemphasized the revolutionary character of the modernbourgeoisie in confronting traditional philosophy andin devaluing all eternal values and timeless ideas. Yetto the extent that Marxism turns the idea of historicalspecificity into a doctrine of movement, transitoriness,and surpassability, rather than into an investigation ofthe burden of history bearing down on the present, itbegins to mimic the destructive aspect of bourgeoisconsciousness. It sees the historicity of things only inthe sense that every existing social form is equallydeprived of value.

In the face of these difficulties within contemporarycritical theory, Ju� rgen Habermas (1996) and the NewGerman School of Critical Theory have reaffirmed therational aspect of Marxism by appealing to therational structures of an ideal speech situation. Haber-mas launched a major critique of the attachment ofMarxist social thought to what he reads as the nihilisticways of thinking characteristic of postmodernism andhas endeavored to reconnect Marxism with a repub-lican tradition as indebted to Kant as to Rousseau. Inpursuit of a postmetaphysical theory of right, he drawsheavily on Kant’s Metaphysics of Justice in re-conceptualizing radical democracy as a differentiated,complex, lawful, and representative system of right,buttressed by an active civil society and open publicsphere. Habermas achieves this re-appropriation ofKant by proceduralizing natural right and by thusovercoming what he sees as Hegel’s emphatic stat-isation of right and Marx’s equally emphatic soci-alization of right. Hegel and Marx’s radical critiquesof natural right theory are both viewed with sus-picion.

6. Conclusion

The problem of what Marxist social thought is, is notresolved. One wing of contemporary Marxism, some-times called the Social Relations School, has perhapsprotested too much that x and y and z are ‘socialrelations’ and has thereby lost sight of the natural

world of things and people, use values, and humanbeings, which inhabit these social relations. Socialrelations are turned into a subject in their own rightand everything else appears by comparison inessentialand derivative. The reification of ‘the social’ as thefoundation of all cultural, political, and economicforms has in turn sparked either antifoundationalistcritiques of Marxism or attempts to reconstructMarxism as a form of antifoundationalism (Nancy1991, Derrida 1994). The other wing of contemporaryMarxism is known as analytic or rational choiceMarxism. It has been characterized not only by itsrespect for traditional canons of argumentation towhich it subjects Marxist propositions, but also by amethodological and normative individualism whichseeks to reinstate the individual in Marxist thought,both in terms of historical explanation of existingsociety and the formulation of a just society. Rationalchoice Marxism may be seen as reflecting the rational-ization and individualization of contemporary West-ern society. However, the proposition that it is possibleto analyze social life as if its basic units were rationalindividuals is a statement of social ontology whichtakes the perceived weakening of social bonds withinthe modern age as its starting point (Cohen 1978,Elster 1985).

Marxist social thought is now considered ‘dead’ bymany commentators. This perception is due partly toexternal reasons, such as the decline and fall of officialCommunism, but also to internal deficiencies withincontemporary Marxism itself. Thus the sociology ofErving Goffman and the discourse theory of MichelFoucault seem to have more to say about powerrelations in the prison, asylum, factory, family, army,school, police, everyday life, etc. than Marxist state-theorists. Yet Marxism remains a crucial resource ifthe drive to dissociate power from social life or tosubordinate social life to the unidimension of power isnot to be entrenched.

Marxist social theory is an international phenom-enon with strong roots in the West, the East and theColonies. It has now entered into a new era. It has lostthe state support it received from the Soviet Union andits satellites. It has lost the ideological closure withwhich it was once associated. Its attachment to socialmovements has also declined. It is now part of a post-Communist age and has to respond to new problemsof globalization. In this transition, the history ofMarxist social thought is itself being reviewed. Marx’srelation both to the natural law tradition and to theother nineteenth century rebels against the tradition,from Hegel to Nietzsche, has been revisited in moreopen and critical ways. The distinction betweenMarxism and other forms of twentieth century socialthought has been made less sharp and severe. Whatcomes to mind is the thought that Marxist socialthought does not have its own history and that whatwe call its history is a manifold of stories eachconstruing itself as the narrative heir to Marx’s

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writings. The potentiality this opens up is of a newwave of social thought which will draw inspirationfrom Marx’s writings without all the old demarcationsand dependencies.

See also: Aristotelian Social Thought; Communism;Critical Theory: Frankfurt School; Existential SocialTheory; Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937); Marx, Karl(1818–89); Marxian Economic Thought; Marxism inContemporary Sociology; Marxism�Leninism; Mar-xist Archaeology; Marxist Geography; NostalgicSocial Thought; Pragmatist Social Thought, Historyof; Socialism; Utilitarian Social Thought, History of;Weberian Social Thought, History Of

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