R.I.P. analytical Marxism.
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Jerry Cohen, RIP
The Canadian/British political philosopher, G.A. Cohen (1941-2009), probably best known as the author of the book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, died this morning, reportedly of a stroke.
http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/20...1941-2009.html
R.I.P. analytical Marxism.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
Thanks for that Jim; BTB's comments are particularly insensitive.
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By the way, Jim, I have a new e-mail address which I'll send you in the next few days. Busy moving my site right now, and have yet to set it up!
My other e-mail addresses still work, but I can no longer reply to anyone using them.
!
That's a real shame, I'm very sorry to hear that. As an individual he was a wonderful, kind and very funny man. This is a loss.
'Philosophy which begins with a thought without reality necesserily ends with a reality without thought.' - Feuerbach
::FOR THE POETRY OF REVOLUTION::
www.socialistworker.co.uk//www.isj.org.uk//www.newleftreview.org//http://leninology.blogspot.com
Sorry, Rosa, I didn't know you were so emotionally attached to analytical Marxism.
My only point was that Cohen, as far as I know, was the last surviving advocate of this variant.
As for the man himself, I didn't know him; I think that his Karl Marx's Theory of History is interesting in parts but he's far from my favourite academic Marxist, so his death has no emotional punch for me, I'm afraid.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
BTB:
I am emotionally attached to it slightly less than you are to mystical Hegelianism.
Whether or not you are right, and whether or not you have no emotional attachment to him, your comment about the death of a fellow Marxist was insensitive.
How was it insensitive Rosa? It was a very respectful comment that you appear to have misunderstood (probably because you can't grasp the dialectic nature of this situation)
RIP Mr Cohen
Formerly zenga zenga !
SG:
1) There's nothing 'dialectical' to grasp here, and there's nothing at all to grasp in 'dialectics' in general (unless you can show otherwise).
2) In a post about the death of a fellow Marxist, posting this is indeed insensitive:
Better to say nothing.
Had the death, say, of Tony Cliff been announced like this:
BTB would rightly have been incensed.
R.I.P Jerry you surely will be missed.
I don't think it would be out of place to begin discussing evaluations of Jerry Cohen's work. One person that I know who was a long time admirer of Cohen (and for many years considered himself to be an Analytic Marxist) wrote the following assessment:
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Unless I missed it the death the other day of Jerry Cohen attracted no comment on a list devoted to Marxist philosophy. I know that as first a founder of analytical Marxism, then as a refugee from Marxism to liberal egalitarianism, he was not favored among the participants here. But IMHO he was one of the most influential and important Marxist thinkers of the latter half of the 20th century, and his legacy requires comment.
Not much time here but I will note a few thoughts;
- In the context of a sharp decline in the quantity and quality of Marxist theory, Cohen and the AMs stood for the disconnection of theory from practice, the entrenchment of Marxism as another academic exercise. In some ways this was not their fault giving the collapse of Marxism as a movement and a force in the world.
- Cohen helped bring a level of rigor and precision in Marxist thinking that had been sorely lacking for a very long time. If it's complained that his work lacked popular accessibility, what are we to say about Adorno, a favorite here who gets wide discussion?
- Cohen's major work on Karl Marx's Theory Of History is very valuable, but went down the wrong track in reviving a stagist, mechanical, primacy of the productive forces 2d Internat'l conception of historical materialism. (Possibly due in part to his roots in the Canadian CP.)
True, Marx gave that view a lot of space, but Cohen almost totally neglected Marx's alternative class struggle view, which I think is more true and valuable and gets no less, arguably more, space. Brenner is far better on this (and no less rigorous).
- Cohen's turn to traditional style moral philosophy as important, first as a complement to his idea of historical materialism, then as a replacement for Marxism and materialist analysis, was a major retrogression. No doubt there is more ethics in Marx and Marxism than Marx cared to admit, but Marx pointed the way in integrating these into materialist analysis.
Cohen's own positive ethical views were, moreover, disappointingly primitive and underdeveloped. See his awful Egalitarianism book, but also earlier papers on exploitation and his paper critiquing value theory -- a real train wreck. And I don't accept value theory myself! I haven't carefully read the last book in Rawls.
Btw in that book Cohen lists as the big three books on political philosophy Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Hobbes' Leviathan, and Plato's Republic. Marx's Capital doesn't make his cut. Given Cohen's a priori turn to liberal morality, Marx might be happy to be left out.
- Cohen was nonetheless a major influence, one of the few really original thinkers in late 20th century Marxism, along with perhaps Althusser -- who, it might argued, paralleled him in a French sort of way. The people we tend to discuss, Marx, the Western Marxists, all had their roots and did much or all of their important work before 1950.
It says something about the state of Marxism that Cohen and Althusser are among the giants of postwar Marxism.
Thanks for that Jim. I agree with the above assessment of Cohen's KMTOR, and regret the fact that he drifted away from Marxism proper.
Short obit for Jerry Cohen here:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/farmelant080809.html
The only elements of analytical Marxism I am aware of is their rejection of the LTV in favor of methodological individualism - rational choice theory / game theory. In that sense, I don't think it was something progressive (not specifically abandoning the LTV, but substituting it with microeconomic methodology). That, and technological determinism, which I think is a distortion of Marx's theory of history.
Invariance, the only strength of Analytic Marxism was its turn to Analytic Philosophy (allied to the root and branch rejection of Hegel), and with that, modern logic. However, its practitioners were only half-hearted in this regard, and becasue of that, the 'movement' failed. Had they been more consistent, and had they pushed the programme through rigorously enough, they'd have abandoned the things you mention (methological individualism, technological determinism, and the rejection of the LTV).
In my own work, I am trying to rectify these fatal weaknesses.
[Of course, there was also an important political dimension to their failure, too.]
Excellent obit, Jim!
KMTOH was an important punctuation mark in my own intellectual development, nearly as significant as that which had been provided me by reading Marx, Wittgenstein and Frege.
Well, the death of people is (short of a few actual monsters like Himmler or Beria) seldom an occasion for commemoration. So, whomever Cohen was and whatever he did, the proper feelings of sadness and nostalgy, plus the normal solidarity towards those who face the "misterious and common destiny of all that is alive" apply.
Regarding "analytical Marxism", the best comment on it probably was styled by Daniel Bensaid:
Luís HenriqueOriginally Posted by Daniel Bensaid
Rosa, why do you think that Analytic Philosophy is incompatible with methodological individualism?
Luís Henrique
LH:
Because of the very strong holist tradition in Analytic Philosophy, based first of all in Frege's context principle, and in Wittgenstein's extension of this to discourse in general, emphasising that meaning and language (logic, the arts, science, etc., too) are not indivdualistic enterprises but social practices. In that case, 'rationality', for example, cannot be an individual skill, but is a feature of our social life. In that case, 'rational economic man/woman' is a by-product of a bourgeois view of the world, and not a reflection of genuine social relations.
I have to say that this is a minority view in analytic philosophy, but then analytic philosophers in general (led by Quine, and other American philosophers) have retreated from their earlier anti-metaphysical stance, and have adopted a more openly bourgeois/metaphysical view of the social and natural world.
Would you mind to explain what is Frege's context principle?
Interesting. Can you recommend me Wittgenstein's texts where he extends Frege's context principle to discourse in general?
I see. In what sence rationality is a feature of social life, as opposed to an individual skill? Because, evidently, individuals are able to behave in rational or irrational ways; what is being argued is that the judgement on whether such behaviour is rational or not is social rather than aprioristic, or that the behaviour of each individual, even if deemed "irrational" by others is in fact part of a greater, collective rationality?
Do Frege or Wittgenstein formulate this in these terms, or is this your, or yet another thinker's, conclusion on the base of Frege/Wittgenstein reasoning? Do Frege or Wittgenstein actually use such terminology?
Now, if I correctly interpret your paragraph, the myth of the "rational (maximising) individual" is the product of bourgeois social relations? Or is it not the product of any social relations at all? Does the adjective "genuine" here play an actual role in your construction? Is it meant to be opposed to "bourgeois"? And would "bourgeois" in this sence be interchangeable with "false" or "inauthentic"?
Even so, it is "a very strong" (holistic) "tradition", so you can possibly point us other authors who pertain to this (very strong, if I understand correctly) tradition? I find it curious that apparently none of the "Analytic Marxists" (all of whom, if I am correctly informed, capitulated to methodological individualism) belong to such tradition - did they write on this tradition, and why instead of taking advantage of it, they instead in fact retroceded to methodologic individualism?
That's interesting - to what would you attribute such turn? Does it have to do with the hegemony of methodological individualism in the Academy? Or could it be linked to some internal aspect of Analytic Philosophy?
(By the way, where do you situate such theories such as "rational choice" or "game theory" regarding methodological individualism? Is this approach inherent to them, or is it possible to rescue some of "game theory" insights within a different methodological frame?)
Luís Henrique
LH:
[This idea had already appeared in embryonic form in several medieval authors, in Leibniz and then in Kant (in the priority of the judgement) and Hegel, but in a confused, semi-psychologistic form. Oddly enough, it also appeared in Jeremy Bentham! But these theorists did not have a clear or consitent view of this idea, and many of their other theses were diametrically opposed to it.]
Frege was concerned to oppose the traditional view that words gained their meaning individually by acting as the names of ideas, concepts, things, objects, etc.
Based on Plato's idea that the smallest unit we can say anything is a sentence containing a noun and verb, he argued that it is only in the context of a sentence/proposition that a word has a meaning:
This was a direct challenge to atomistic theories of meaning that had dominated 'western' thought for 2400 years (despite the above qualifications).
What Frege is after is that the semantic role of a word (the syntactic role it plays in contribution to the sense of a proposition), whether it be an noun, verb, definite description, or whatever, is the key to our ability to use it and communicate.
Traditional theory had assimilated all words to names, or even proper names, and then the temptation to theorise that these were the names of objects, ideas or concepts (abstractions in the mind, etc.) became overwhelming. This sent philosophical psychology, metaphysics, logic and epistemology off on a 2000 year long wild goose chase.
Frege argued that if this were the case, then each person would have a different understanding of the words they used (since they were allegedly the names of ideas in the mind, etc. which no two people can share, or, rather to which no one else has access), and thus communication would fail.
Wittgenstein pushed this much further (it is central to his argument against the possibility of there being a private language, for example).
So, for Wittgenstein, names are only names because of the role they play in sentences and in our lives in general. They get their meaning from their syntactic role. Moreover not all words can be names, for if they were, sentences would be lists, and lists say nothing. For example:
London, Lenin, Amazon, Venus, Socialist Worker, Coronation Street, Tony Benn, Proxima Centauri.
This says nothing, and can only be made to say something if it is articulated with words that are not names.
This new logic has a profound influence on the way we interpret logic in general, science, mathematics, language, and practically everything else that traditional philosophers have studied -- and this constitutes the core of Wittgenstein's criticism of traditional philosophy, and mine, too. This is what makes it so revolutionary, since no one had pushed this as far as Wittgenstein did.
How this is so, I have worked out in great detail here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2003_01.htm
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2003_02.htm
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2012_01.htm
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page_13_03.htm
I'll respond to the other things you say tomorrow.
COMMUNISM !