Would you classify Marx as a thinker of the Enlightenment or of Romanticism?

[kaiser2011]

Just want to see other people's opinions as i had argument with someone over this.
Do any of you know some good literature that supports either or both of these assertions?

[RedAtheist]

I would say neither. He goes beyond both. His ideas are consistent with certain Enlightment ideas (reason, science, etc.) but he takes those ideas further by asserting that another revolution is needed to fully realise the ideals of equality and freedom. He was also a materialist rather than an idealist, believing that certain economic conditions which led to the emergence of a certain class (the working class) were necessary in order to bring about socialism, rather than the rational arguments of a bunch of intellectuals.

Not that I personally am against rational arguments, I think reason is very valuable, its just not the thing that will bring a socialist society into existance.

I'm no expert on Marxism though, so if I'm wrong feel free to correct me.

I recommend reading Engels' 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific' since it discusses the development of socialist theory in response to events like the French revolution. Its not written by Marx, but we know they had very similar ideas.

[Blanquist]

I think he was a thinker of Communism..

[Deicide]

I tend to think of Marx as an excrement of the enlightenment.

[Blake's Baby]

I think he's pretty firmly an Enlightenment thinker. I can't see why there'd be any question about that to be honest.

What makes you think that he could be considered a Romantic?

[Armchair War Criminal]

Marx was a Victorian and a modernist (with, to be sure, many of the problematic things those imply) through and through, but the Enlightenment was before his time, and Romanticism is a tougher question because where exactly that category begins and ends - both temporally and thematically - really depends on what you mean by Romanticism.

What Marx definitely isn't is an Enlightenment thinker in the sense that he just thinks people need to cast aside their idiotic delusions in order to be free - what you might call the New Atheist mindset. There absolutely would have been no Marx if not for the Enlightenment, but in order to think what he did he also needed the Romantic critique of Enlightenment epistemology as manifested in German Idealism. Like RedAtheist said he goes beyond both. He also becomes less romantic and more modernist over the course of his life.

[Luís Henrique]

Just want to see other people's opinions as i had argument with someone over this.
Do any of you know some good literature that supports either or both of these assertions?

He was against both. Specifically, he was against what both had in common.

Luís Henrique

[Raúl Duke]

Would you classify Marx as a thinker of the Enlightenment or of Romanticism?Definitely Enlightenment

Marx has a teleological view of history as always progressing to better forms of social organization. There's also a focus on "science" and "materialism," which are Enlightenment
ideas.

However, while his framework is Enlightenment, he was probably skeptical of certain Enlightenment ideas and/or probably did not want to be intellectually associated with certain other "enlightenment thinkers."

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

He was a child of the Enlightenment, but his thinking clearly incorporated some of the best from that and moved beyond it. That's why he's so important. Marx as a Romantic is really a silly notion. Goethe he was not.

[Kronsteen]

The two are not mutually exclusive - Romanticism was a reaction against the enlightenment, but it was also informed by enlightenment values.

You could say the things Romanticism was romantic about were often the same things the enlightenment was enlightened about - individuality and responsibility, freedom and independent thought.

It's just that the romantic movement looked back to a mythical age of good things, while the enlightenment looked forward to something similar.

In terms of the attitude to science and rationality, classical marxism is enlightenment in that it views conclusions reached by reason and research as more reliable than those reached by faith or authority. But it's also romantic in that it views technology as dehumanising, and science as 'dead, wooden, and bound to bourgeois ideology'.

Hegel had the same schizophrenic attitude, and tried to reconcile the two by incorporating the secular enlightenment into a christian romanticism. Just how much of Hegel wound up in Marx is still contentious.

Any talk of Marx 'moving beyond both' is trying to take Marx out of the limitations of his time, and give him a kind of transhistorical wisdom.

[o well this is ok I guess]

Wasn't the enlightenment on its last days by the time Kant gained popularity?

[o well this is ok I guess]

I think he's pretty firmly an Enlightenment thinker. I can't see why there'd be any question about that to be honest Cuz he's got very little in common with the figures associated with the Enlightenment

[Caj]

I wouldn't say he's either.


I tend to think of Marx as an excrement of the enlightenment.

Word choice? Lol

[Geiseric]

Enlightenment was pre-capitalism, and marx was a materialist. But he was about 200 years after that, and his entire work is debatably showing how obsolete Enlightenment ideas are in a modern society.

No way in hell he was a romantic, if anything he was a reaction against Utopianism which I could consider Romantic.

But Marxism is a whole new era in philosophy. I guess modernist/post modernist would be the way of describing him.

[Luís Henrique]

Any talk of Marx 'moving beyond both' is trying to take Marx out of the limitations of his time, and give him a kind of transhistorical wisdom.

So was Aristotle a Platonist or a sophist? And if we answer, "neither, he moved beyond both", are we taking him out of the limitation of his times, and attributing him a transhistorical wisdom?

In Marx's time Enlightenment was pretty over, and while Romanticism was pretty much "in", it was never unopposed. Eventually we moved out of it, too - and Marx's contributions are by no means a small part of such moving on.

Luís Henrique

[Kronsteen]

So was Aristotle a Platonist or a sophist? And if we answer, "neither, he moved beyond both", are we taking him out of the limitation of his times, and attributing him a transhistorical wisdom?

I didn't say everyone was entirely limited to the fashions of their own time. Aristotle's work grew out of Plato's work, and Marx grew out of Hegel, Ricardo etc. In both cases this involved continuing some lines, and dropping or turning against others.

I've sat through seminars which claimed Engels predicted chaos theory, and Hegel is 'proven' by quantum physics, so there's a great deal of bullshit around about supposed anachronistic insights of founding marxists.


In Marx's time Enlightenment was pretty over, and while Romanticism was pretty much "in", it was never unopposed. Eventually we moved out of it, too - and Marx's contributions are by no means a small part of such moving on.

I'm very dubious about historians bounding both movements to well-defined periods. Romantic and Enlightenment values are still very much with us, and still in tension.

In Marx, the notions of 'Primitive Communism' and the future higher communism are Romantic. The notions of 'Scientific Socialism', progress, and the unifying dialectic are pretty Enlightenment.

[Thirsty Crow]

Definitely Enlightenment
Marx has a teleological view of history as always progressing to better forms of social organization. There's also a focus on "science" and "materialism," which are Enlightenment
ideas.

That's not what constitutes teleology in thinking about history.
What we call teleology is the belief that the whole historical process is animated, directed by a single operational principle, such as the realization of reason or freedom. Obviously, there is nothing teleological in looking back and observing the development of the human productive forces - an empirical fact, which enable social transformation.



In Marx, the notions of 'Primitive Communism' and the future higher communism are Romantic.
How is the notion of communism (to leave aside the problem of tribal pre-agricultural societies as "primitive communism") a romantic one?

[Kronsteen]

What we call teleology is the belief that the whole historical process is animated, directed by a single operational principle

There are two connected notions of teleology, which tend to occur together.

One is that a process has a built-in goal, a target, a destiny, an endpoint. Whether it reaches this endpoint is another matter, and whether there's a foreordained timetable is different again.

The other is that a process has a built-in guidance system, and therefore implicitly a goal that it's being guided towards.

The idea that human society is 'intended' to reach socialism is obviously teleological in the first sense. There's no suggestion in Marx that it should get there by a certain date, though it's possible to read Marx as suggesting it get there by a certain route.

The section of the second edition of Capital where Marx quotes the reviewer talking about 'laws' of transition from economic stages, could be read as teleological in the second sense, though maybe Marx was just glossing over minor points of disagreement.


How is the notion of communism (to leave aside the problem of tribal pre-agricultural societies as "primitive communism") a romantic one?

The notion of a long lost classless society, to which we'll one day return but in a higher form? That's a return to Eden. Paradise Regained. The assertion that we're in mankind's pre-history, and it's only with the flowering of human potential post capitalism that true history begins.

How could it not be romantic, with a capital R and without?

[Thirsty Crow]

There are two connected notions of teleology, which tend to occur together.How exactly do they occur together since it seems, from a cursory examination, that one is in fact a simple moderation of the other?


One is that a process has a built-in goal, a target, a destiny, an endpoint. Whether it reaches this endpoint is another matter, and whether there's a foreordained timetable is different again.Maybe it would be more appropriate to talk about a predetermined endpoint rather than a "built-in goal" - from the standpoint of rhetorics (sorry if this seems like nitpicking, but this whole problem is a terminological minefield, and clarity is much needed).


The other is that a process has a built-in guidance system, and therefore implicitly a goal that it's being guided towards.As I've stated, this seems like a moderation of the former, and not something which could constitute a notion of teleology distinct from the former.
Or it could be that this doesn't at all represent a teleology since there is no need for an endpoint postulate - for instance, this could very well represent an "isolation" of some specific continuities in the historical process, for instance, the course of the development of the productive forces, and that means that any talk of a bult in guidance system doesn't represent a procedure of hoisting abstraction onto the course of history, but rather something very different - a reading out of the history of some long-term developments which can be shown as standing in relation to different kinds of social transformation.
Anyway, beyond this supposed teleology there is probably another option when thinking about history, and that would be contingency (in other words, giving up on thinking about it).


The idea that human society is 'intended' to reach socialism is obviously teleological in the first sense.
The fact that you placed the crucial word here in inverted commas speaks of the problem of style of writing, choice of words, and rhetorical strategies in deciding whether we're dealing ehre with teleology or not. Simply put, it's not so evident that we are.
But in general I agree, the notion that human history is predetermined (or in other words, that it is driven by the self-movement of an idea) and that a certain endpoint of its development is inevitable, does amount to a teleology.


There's no suggestion in Marx that it should get there by a certain date, though it's possible to read Marx as suggesting it get there by a certain route.
And I'd argue that this represents a misreading of Marx.
Anyway, it's possible, due to all sorts of reasons, to read Marx as suggesting all sorts of things. The point being the consistency of his entire work. Maybe he was inconsistent, and then the question arises of the relationship of Marx's work and Marxism(s). Does it matter if there is an inconsistency in Marx's work with regard to the problem of teleology when there should be a developed understanding of the fundamental problems of this view? I don't think it does.


The notion of a long lost classless society, to which we'll one day return but in a higher form? That's a return to Eden. Paradise Regained. The assertion that we're in mankind's pre-history, and it's only with the flowering of human potential post capitalism that true history begins.It seems as if you're suggesting that there is a distinctive strand of nostalgia for the mythical beginning running through his work, but I don't think this thesis can be supported by strict reference to the works themselves.
The problem here is that you're basically employing a conceptual framework foreign to that of the "object" you're examining (for instance, there's no doubt that in such modern myths the notion of a long lost Eden is determined by the lack of hard toil as a characteristic of that harmonious social state; but that can hardly ne attributed to Marx's views, I think). It's also suspect that the impoverished status of human powers and needs would fit well with the notion of a long lost Eden (and do recall that one way to conceptualize Marx's view on historical development is to emphasize the self-development of human powers).
That's not to mention the fact that there is a crucial distinction between the lack of surplus and a specific social organization of surplus production which accounts for the vast differences between these superficially similar social formations.


How could it not be romantic, with a capital R and without?
First of all, any such discussion should be clarified by a strict definition of what actually constitutes romanticism.
Secondly, as I've said, I think there are vast differences between the basically reactionary (in relation to emergent bourgeois society) myths and nostalgia for the golden age and the notion of communism as the result of class struggle (itself a product of capitalism as it produces not only commodities but also antagonism between social classes). Anyway, from what I assume to be romanticism, any such notion of mass struggle, the role of technology and productive powers, is incompatible with regressive fantasies of a historical return (which anyway are directed at the feudal nobility as its social basis) to a very different state of affairs.

[Kronsteen]

one is in fact a simple moderation of the other

It's the difference between an arrow being aimed then fired at a target, and the arrow being carried to the target and placed in the bullseye.

If you think the distiction is unimportant, fine.


Or it could be that this doesn't at all represent a teleology since there is no need for an endpoint postulate

As I said, there are two different notions of teleology. One defines a process by it's endpoint, set at the start of the journey by a presumably conscious and intentional force.

The other defines it by a similar force which acts on the process throughout it's journey, but doesn't require a predefined endpoint. God may just be taking us on a journey, without caring where it leads to.


any talk of a bult in guidance system doesn't represent a procedure of hoisting abstraction onto the course of history, but rather something very different - a reading out of the history of some long-term developments which can be shown as standing in relation to different kinds of social transformation.

Well, it's a very common error people make when they look back across a process. "This is where I've ended up, so this must have been where I was headed all along."


I agree, the notion that human history is predetermined (or in other words, that it is driven by the self-movement of an idea) and that a certain endpoint of its development is inevitable, does amount to a teleology.

Which raises two questions:

1) Is such a teleology part of marxism?
2) If it is, does marxism collapse without it.

I'd answer Yes, and No, respectively. Marx thought the fall of capitalism was inevitable, and that the next stage could only be communism. He was wrong, and it doesn't matter - capitalism still needs to be overcome, and communism still needs to be built.


there's no doubt that in such modern myths the notion of a long lost Eden is determined by the lack of hard toil as a characteristic of that harmonious social state;There's no notion that work was easier in primitive communism, or will be easier in communism, but there is the notion that it was and will be unalienated. The physical pain will still be there, but much of the mental pain will not.


but that can hardly ne attributed to Marx's views, I think.

I think his choice of the term 'primitive communism' does strongly suggest the 'return to eden' trope. It may be an attractive part of marxism, but I don't think it's an integral part of marxism.


First of all, any such discussion should be clarified by a strict definition of what actually constitutes romanticism. If I'd said that I'd get called an essentialist.

Romanticism is not a well-worked out doctrine, nor a single idea. But Here's some features:

* Nostalgia for a mythical past and hope for a return to it.
* Emphasis on subjectivity - emotion, spirituality, intuition. Phenomenology over positivism.
* Emphasis on intersubjectivity - defining a person by their relations to other people and to the world, as opposed to one who acts on the world or contemplates it.


Anyway, from what I assume to be romanticism, any such notion of mass struggle, the role of technology and productive powers, is incompatible with regressive fantasies of a historical return (which anyway are directed at the feudal nobility as its social basis) to a very different state of affairs.

Ah, but we're not talking about a reversion to childhood innocence. We're talking about a reclaiming of our birthright. It's not going back to being a child, it's regaining something that was lost as a child - something which we can now enjoy as an adult.

In fact, I think the attractive thing about returning to eden is that you can appreciate it properly because you temporarily lost it.

[A Marxist Historian]

The two are not mutually exclusive - Romanticism was a reaction against the enlightenment, but it was also informed by enlightenment values.

You could say the things Romanticism was romantic about were often the same things the enlightenment was enlightened about - individuality and responsibility, freedom and independent thought.

It's just that the romantic movement looked back to a mythical age of good things, while the enlightenment looked forward to something similar.

In terms of the attitude to science and rationality, classical marxism is enlightenment in that it views conclusions reached by reason and research as more reliable than those reached by faith or authority. But it's also romantic in that it views technology as dehumanising, and science as 'dead, wooden, and bound to bourgeois ideology'.

Hegel had the same schizophrenic attitude, and tried to reconcile the two by incorporating the secular enlightenment into a christian romanticism. Just how much of Hegel wound up in Marx is still contentious.

Any talk of Marx 'moving beyond both' is trying to take Marx out of the limitations of his time, and give him a kind of transhistorical wisdom.


Did Marx look back to a golden age in the past? Hell, no.

Did he look forward to a golden age in the future? Hell, yes! After the revolution.

So, though he was hardly an eighteenth century enlightenment guy looking for peaceful reform from above, he definitely would be much better categorized as "enlightenment" than "romantic."

Moreover, Marx did not see science as dead or wooden or bound to bourgeois ideology. Marxism is nothing if not scientific, anti-utopian socialism.

And he was very pro technology, did not see it as in any way dehumanising. He saw capitalism as dehumanising, but that is another matter altogether.

-M.H.-

[Luís Henrique]

I've sat through seminars which claimed Engels predicted chaos theory, and Hegel is 'proven' by quantum physics, so there's a great deal of bullshit around about supposed anachronistic insights of founding marxists.

Aside from Hegel having nothing to do with founding Marxism, yes, there is enough nonsence being thrown around such subjects. Including some people who seem to think that because electrons can be simultaneously at different places, their "souls" can do the same.

Has nothing to do with Enlightenment or Romanticism.


I'm very dubious about historians bounding both movements to well-defined periods. Romantic and Enlightenment values are still very much with us, and still in tension.

They are, but for a century and a half they have no more been the cutting edge of critical thought. Now Marx was certainly part of that cutting edge.


In Marx, the notions of 'Primitive Communism' and the future higher communism are Romantic. The notions of 'Scientific Socialism', progress, and the unifying dialectic are pretty Enlightenment.

No, I don't think so. There are similarities, of course, but Marx doesn't make a fetish of primitive societies, in the way some romantics (and a whole lot of Enlightenment people, for what is worth - the noble savage ideology is rooted in Enlightenment, not in Romanticism!) did. The notion of "progress" is quite different in Marx than in his predecessors; if anything, he is quite critical of the naïf idea of unqualified "progress". And the "unifying dialectics", whatever you mean by that, is at odds with the very reductionist mentality of Enlightenment science.

Luís Henrique