Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism: for “Stanley Aronowitz and the Labors of Theory”

Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism.**
B.Ricardo Brown, PhD
Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies
Pratt Institute

Prepared for

“Stanley Aronowitz and the Labors of Theory”

April 13 and 14, 2017
Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work
Department of Sociology

The Graduate Center, City University of New York

There are many approaches to Aronowitz’s critique of Marx and Marxism.  I want to highlight how the critique of Marxism runs alongside Aronowitz’s critiques of science in general, and more specifically, of the aspirations of both Sociology and Marxism to become the sciences of life. 

Of course, from the start the relationship between sociology and Marxism has been hostile.  Marx wrote that “as a party man I have a thoroughly hostile attitude towards Comte’s philosophy, while as a scientific man I have a very poor opinion of it” (London June 12, 1871).  Engels wrote to none other than Ferdinand Tonnies regarding the new science of sociology:

In this system there are three characteristic elements: 1) a series of brilliant thoughts, which however are nearly always spoiled to some extent because they are incompetently set forth likewise; 2) a narrow, philistine way of thinking sharply contrasting with that brilliant mind; 3) a hierarchically organised religious constitution... but divested of all mysticism and turned into something extremely sober... [a] Catholicism without Christianity  (Engels to Tonnies January 24, 1895).

And Karl Korsch, whom Aronowitz praised for having recognized that Marx’s contribution “consisted in his discovery that nothing in society was immutable” 
Even Korsch, who argued for Marxism as “the science of socialism”, even he was careful to distinguish sociology from Marxism:

What is the relationship between Marxism and modern sociological teaching? ….we shall not find any affinity or link between it and Marxism. Marx and Engels, with all their keen desire to extend and enhance the knowledge of society, paid no attention to either the name or contents of that ostensibly new approach to the social studies.…

The science of socialism as formulated by Marx, owed nothing to this “sociology” of the 19th and 20th centuries.... bourgeois social thought has been a reaction against the theory and thus also against the practice of modern socialism. Up to the present day “sociologists” have endeavoured to submit another way of answering the embarrassing questions first raised by the rising proletarian movement. [This is] the essential unity of the manifold theoretical and practical tendencies which during the last hundred years have found their expression under the common denomination of Sociology. 
Karl Korsch. Karl Marx. (1938) https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1938/karl-marx/ch01.htm

Neither sociology nor Marxism successfully became the sciences of society that they worked to become.  Even at their most positivist extremes, they remain at the level of scientific ideologies.

These failures to secure a science of social life expose the problems that scientific ideologies pose to our understanding of science and truth, and therefore in Aronowitz handling demands the critique of Marxism itself. 

These are not abstract problems, because Aronowitz is after all a materialist.  It is a concern that runs through Aronowitz’s work:  the problem of continuity and discontinuity, for isn’t science – even scientific Marxism – shaped by its histories of error;  and doesn’t truth – even the truth of revolutionary transformation – always appear as continuous through the past, present, and future? 

It is here that Aronowitz’s somewhat overlooked engagement with Michel Foucault’s work provides an avenue for us to discuss matters of continuity and discontinuity in the histories of the Marxist movements/parties and the genealogies of Marxist theory.  In fact, Aronowitz’s encounter with Foucault has profound ramifications for our understanding of these histories and genealogies in relation to any critical theory derived from Marx. 

Moreover, in Aronowitz’s work, the problem of continuity and discontinuity sheds light on how to approach the deeply related yet often opposing formations of sociology and marxism as sciences of life. 

We can find this concern with continuity and discontinuity when we look again at works such as the Crisis in Historical Materialism, Science as Power, and Dead Artist/Live Theories.

I’ll begin with

1] The Crisis in Historical Materialism

In the chapter “History and Disruption” Aronowitz asks the question: “Can we speak of a unitary science or is the object of our knowledge constituted by structures/discourses that are fundamentally discontinuous? (301)”

For the most part I will leave aside Aronowitz’s discussion of the conjunctures of Benjamin and Foucault,  In this early encounter with Foucault on the question of the science and Marxism, Aronowitz makes two points that are particularly relevant to our discussion today: 

First, Aronowitz notes that Foucault pays close attention to that which is excluded, marginalized, and displaced by the relations of power/knowledge.  It is in this attention to exclusion that Foucault’s work seems to “parallel Thomas Kuhn’s notion that normal science excluded counter-paradigms until forced to account for them” (317).  And by “Normal science” here Aronowitz means the discipline or theoretical consensus that “excludes all possible sciences [so as to] make itself a monopoly of power and knowledge” (317). 

[Just as an aside:  One might play a little game when reading Aronowitz of substituting “marxism” or “the Parties” for Science (or vis-a-versa) and it becomes clear that what holds for one often holds for the other. Indeed one can not deny that the marxist parties sought to exclude other possible knowledges or to at the very least subsume them to the revolutionary sciences.  Moreover, Aronowitz has always maintained that the specific knowledges of certain classes are also excluded, marginalized, and displaced.] 

A second important point that Aronowitz makes regarding Foucault’s work is that Foucault consistently lays bare the ideological assumptions lurking within concepts such as continuity, coherence progress, and revolution. 
Aronowitz emphasizes that this notion of discontinuity moves us to something more than just the criticism of an author:  “here we are not just talking about Foucault.  We are talking about the enunciation of a principle” that should guide the practical activity of Critical Theory.

In other words, Marxist theory must be seen as Critical Theory and cultural critique, rather than as a science of social life.
Aronowitz writes that:

“It is a question of the status of literature, law, and science.  [Foucault and Benjamin insist that we see] culture as a material practice rather than as [a mere] representation of underlying social forces” (319)

or to put it another way, we should understand scientific ideologies through their modes of deploying continuity, discontinuity, power, and class.  At the same time, we must always remain skeptical of the utopianism that stands behind the desire for a science of social life.

As he writes in Science as Power: “The desire to transform politics and economics into sciences, rather than keep them as arts, is nearly universal” (300).

And if we turn to
2]  Science as Power

We find recognizable continuities within Aronowitz’s critique of Marxism, particularly in the chapter “The Science of Sociology and the Sociology of Science” which begins by deploying Foucault’s “concept of episteme as a way of seeing that is specific to a historical period, but that is, at the same time, discontinuous in time and space.... [The place of science in the social formation] is constantly renegotiated with the other power centers, and degree of its 'freedom’ is always understood in context. Marxism does not flourish (or wane) in some mythic pristine form.  Marxism adapts itself to other paradigms and adopts them as a condition of its own legitimacy within the academy.  Far from constituting an alternative to 'bourgeois’ theory, in the context of the academy, Marxism easily adapts” to being “a variety of [naive scientism]” (300).

Here, the views of Aronowitz and Henri Lefebrve converge in asserting the utter failure of both Marxism and Sociology to achieve the status of sciences.  They are “scientific ideologies” because, while they enjoy a certain appearance of – and will to be  – sciences (192), they can never achieve the same status and refinement that sciences such as physics enjoy.  To quote Lefebvre:

Towards the end of the 19th century, scientific knowledge began to address the city. Urban sociology, understood as a scientific discipline, was inaugurated in Germany by, among others, Max Weber. But this science of the city has not kept its promises. It brought forth what we today term ‘urbanism’ (l’urbanisme), which amounts to extremely rigid guidelines for architectural design and extremely vague information for the authorities and bureaucrats. Despite a few meritorious efforts, urbanism has not attained the status of a theory (pensée) of the city. What is worse, it has gradually shrunk to become a kind of gospel for technocrats.
How and why have so many investigations and evaluations failed to produce a living and livable City? It is easy to blame capitalism and the pursuit of profitability and social control. [But] This response seems all the more inadequate since the socialist world has encountered the same difficulties and the same failures in that domain. 
Henri Lefebrve. 1989/2014.  “Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 203–205.  Originally published as: “Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire”, in Le Monde diplomatique May 1989; republished in Manière de voir 114, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2010/January 2011, pages 20–23.

Although Sociology failed to become a science of society, it does continue to serve valuable functions within the apparatus of power.  And so it’s place amongst the other legitimate scientific ideologies is fairly secure.

On the other hand, Marxism of course does not enjoy such a secure position either inside or outside of academia.

In fact, the very notion of Marxism as a positive science of society, which is where sociology and marxism have often intersected to create that monstrosity known as “Marxist Sociology” languishes withing the confines of the discipline.  And who really ever speaks any more of a “science of Marxism” or “Marxist science”?

So the critique of science that we find in Aronowitz’s work is always bond up with his critiques of sociology and Marxism.  They fold into each other.  And these critiques are again taken up in his essays in Dead Artists/Live Theories,  where Marx’s work is presented as inviting a manner of cultural critique that can not be fully closed off by the structures of power and knowledge.

3]  Dead Artist/Live Theories

Now the essay “Tensions of Critical Theory” begins with an attempt to recover Foucault from his many fans:

“Foucault’s work has been shamelessly appropriated by his universalizing disciples who, nudged by academic environments, are prone to overtheorization.... It was, after all, in consideration of the dangers entailed by such a use of science that schools of social inquiry, including Marxism as well as positivist social science, bid us [to] return to the concrete” (130).   

Dispensing with this academic appropriation of Foucault, Aronowitz returns again with certain modifications, elaborations, and most of all, critically, to Foucault’s notion of the episteme, which Aronowitz takes to mean

“A way of seeing reality that not only forms a specific perception of the social world as well as ordinary objects, but also becomes a way of activity and inscribes itself in institutions such as law and education”

This

“notion of episteme requires not only an examination of ideological stances, it demands an attempt to recover and name [the activities that] resist representation in terms of ideological or scientific [systems of classification].”

Once again, that which is excluded, marginalized, and displaced by scientific ideologies also mark the space of resistance to the conventions of science.  To locate these sites of resistance requires an interrogation of “practical activity” (p.68) and for Aronowitz, history becomes an “interrogation that refuses to privilege political and economic events or perceptions over expressive forms” (68)

So we find that “practical activity” and the “expressive forms” of everyday life mark the limits of the sciences of life even as it is dominated by them.

“Practical activity... leaves a trace that is discontinuous with... scientific [classifications]”, ideological formations, and systems of knowledge. 
 
And “practical activity” and its expressive forms are located of that singular object of study that both Marxism and sociology have tried to reduce or fix as an object of scientific knowledge: class.

Now this is where Aronowitz supplies something more than a modified definition Foucault’s episteme, he alerts us to class as a fundamental silence in Foucault’s work, whereas for Aronowitz class supplies the foundation for any notion of history and continuity.  It  is not that Foucault is alone in his silence.  And Marx himself, we remember, had his own difficulties with the concept of class, as the final section of Capital III demonstrates when it famously breaks off just as we are finally about to be given the definition of class.

What continuity that concretely exists is supplied by class, culture, everyday life and its repetitions.  This point returns us to Marx by highlighting the discontinuities so as to open up Marxist theory to critique.  The history of Marxism itself becomes nothing less than “a theory of discontinuity as well as continuity” of science (68). 

In How Class Works, Aronowitz elaborates on this in the section titled “The Ideology of Endings” where he rejects the notion that “class and class struggle are relics of a bygone era” (210).

“History is made when – through self-constitution – the subordinate classes succeed in changing the mode of life in significant ways.  That these changes rarely involve transformations in the ownership of productive property does not disqualify them from being historic.  Moreover, rulers make history when they are able to abrogate previous gains made by insurgent social formations and return to some previous time.  In this sense Nietzsche’s comment that nothing disappears but, instead, returns to bite us is entirely vindicated by current events.  The form of the return is never identical to its previous incarnation, but it is recognizable as the past.... For the making of history is a creative act, but one constrained in part by conditions already in existence.  Because change is self-generated by social formations, it is always different in many respects, always new” (211).

Marxism thus becomes not an abstract science of abstracted life, as Aronowitz  notes regarding the vitalism behind Althuseer’s separation of science and ideology.  Instead Aronowitz offers a critique of life alienated from living: i. e., a materialist critique of everyday life that is not chained to a dogmatic moralism, or to the orthodoxy of past or future parties and political formations. 
There is no epistemological break in Aronowitz’s work.  Where we find discontinuities, they serve to mark the continuities of culture, the struggles of classes, and the domination of nature. 

Critique is never closed off.  This provides the continuity in Aronowitz’s contributions to Cultural Studies, labor, class, sociology and the other sciences of life, but especially to Marxism and Critical Theory.  The continuity that flows through them is less historical than it is cultural, that is, the continuity that allows us to trace these histories/genealogies is –  at its core –  the “practical activity” of social classes. The notion of historical continuity always appears in Aronowitz’s works as the concrete social relations of class formation. 

So how should we understand the relationship over time of science to Marxism, or rather, the various sciences to the various Marxisms?

This is the Unanswered Question of Marxist Theory.  Just as Charles Ives put the question of continuity and discontinuity to music, Aronowitz puts the question to Marxism and to the sciences of life and society.  And just as with Ives, the question is never answered, though the responses grow louder and more chaotic as they become more insistent.

As he states at the conclusion of “Tensions of Critical Theory”:
“I am persuaded that these debates [on the place of science and the relationship of Marxism to the sciences] will not end; a final solution will not be found.
And it should not be, for the very reason that the [social function of the various scientific and/or sociological Marxisms ] as with science in general, “is constantly renegotiated with the other power centers, and degree of its 'freedom’ is always understood in context” (300).

[**]  Before beginning this talk I added a few remarks about how I came to be a student of Stanley’s at the Grad Center. This is a slightly edited and expanded version:

In some respects I encountered Stanley long before I read or knew him.  As a undergraduate at Simon’s Rock, my sociology professor was Jim Monsonis.  Jim was in the SDS with Stanley.  Jim had in fact once been the national treasurer for the SDS.  My freshman year he gave the Intro. Sociology class Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capitalism for its first reading.  When I first heard Stanley speak at the American Sociological Association, he was speaking in part about the lessons to be drawn from Braverman....

At that time, I was more interested in being an Ecologist than in being a Sociologist.  By those twists of fate I got a fellowship to study Geography at Syracuse University.  While I was there I undertook a study involving Emerson’s philosophy of Nature and specifically how to observe nature, the social and natural transformations of the 18th and 19th century New England landscape, and the luminist-style paintings of that landscape.  My adviser, the one “Marxist” in the department, objected to my MA thesis on the grounds that no where had I denounced Emerson for being a bourgeois philosopher.  I said that that was both the most obvious and the least interesting thing about Emerson.  Upon that, he told me that I was “an armchair Marxist” (which was, if you can believe it, a pretty big insult back in the day) and I replied that he was a “Stalinist” and soon after moved to New York City to work as a legal reference librarian, giving little thought to ever going back to grad school.

But while I was at Syracuse I picked up a copy of the Crisis in Historical Materialism and was immediately taken with its mix of Critical Theory and what would later be known as Cultural Studies that came together to form a critique of Marxism itself.  Nancy was encouraging me to consider returning to grad school for Sociology and I realized that Stanley was only a few blocks away at the Graduate Center.  I sat in on a couple of classes and then dove back in.  With Patricia Clough coming to the Grad Center soon after, it was obviously the right decision.

Now, a couple of years after I started at the Grad Center I was talking to Jim Monsonis and only then learned that he and Stanley knew each other.  But there is something more that is directly relevant to my talk today.  When I was a senior at Simon’s Rock, I took the Social Science seminar with Jim.  The final essay question (15-20 pages!) was on the question “Is Marxism a science, a branch or the social sciences, or not a science at all?”

After thinking about it for a long time,I told Jim that I had no way to answer the question, as all of them could be either true or false depending on how one understood science.  Jim gave me a grade even though I never finished the paper... and I have always told him that I still owe him an answer.  And now, it is with these remarks on Stanley’s work that I, in fact, return to the question that Jim posed and whose answer, as you will see, Stanley leaves open.... unanswerable.... at least within the social relations of capital.....

Originally titled: A Foucauldian with a sense of class?  Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism.

Lathe Biosas. Epicurus

20 Works on Marx and Marxism

 

The twenty works which most influence my reading of Marx and Marxism.

I.  Rosa Luxemburg.  The Accumulation of Capital. [and The Anti-Critique].

II.  Rosa Luxemburg. The Junius Pamphlet.

III.  Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.  The Dialectic of Enlightenment.

IV.  Max Horkheimer.  Critical Theory.

V.  Theodor Adorno.  Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life.

VI.  Theodor Adorno.  Negative Dialectics.

VII.  Herbert Marcuse.  One-Dimensional Man.

VIII.  Isaak Illich Rubin.  Essays on Marx's Theory of Value.

IX.  Karl Polanyi.  The Great Transformation.

X.  Alfred Schmidt.  The Concept of Nature in Marx.

XI.  William Leiss.  The Domination of Nature.

XII.  Antonio Negri.  Marx Beyond Marx:  Lessons from the Grundrisse.

XIII.  Louis Althusser. For Marx. 

XIV.  Michel Foucault.  The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.

XV.  E. P. Thompson.  The Poverty of Theory.

XVI.  Henri Lefebvre.  Everyday Life in the Modern World. 

XVII.  Angela Davis.  Women, Race, and Class.

XVIII.  Stanley Aronowitz.  The Crisis in Historical Materialism. 

XIX.  Stanley Aronowitz.  Science as Power.

XX.  Terrell Carver.  The Postmodern Marx.

Herbert Marcuse on The Frankfurt School (video): An Interview with Brian Macgee.

Herbert Marcuse on The Frankfurt School, parts I-V.
Bryan Macgee talks with Herbert Marcuse about his work, his relation to the student movements, and the legacy of the Frankfurt School.

Part I
http://youtu.be/2pzfy2izu44


Part II
 http://youtu.be/AO65LwhnMNI


Part III
http://youtu.be/REP7HLI4Rpk

Part IV
http://youtu.be/-mtaUXdL-jg

http://youtu.be/Mn0PW-CVmxk Part V

READING MARX: Selected Sources on Materialism

READING MARX
Selected Sources on Materialism for Genealogical Studies in the Writings of Karl Marx

"Once into his library, however, and having fixed his one eyeglass in the corner of his eye, in order to take your intellectual breadth and depth, so to speak, he loses that self-restraint, and unfolds to you a knowledge of men and things throughout the world apt to interest one. And his conversation does not run in one groove, but is as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves. A man can generally be judged by the books he reads, and you can form your own conclusions when I tell you a casual glance revealed Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Moliere, Racine, Montaigne, Bacon, Goethe, Voltaire, Paine; English, American, French blue books; works political and philosophical in Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, etc., etc." --- Chicago Tribune reporter's comments on interviewing Marx, January 5, 1879.

Karl Marx

"Karl Marx went to the University of Berlin with a happy heart engaged to the beautiful Jenny von Westphalen. He was matriculated at Berlin on October 22 1836 being then 18 years and 5 months old. The University of Berlin was at that time still enjoying some of the splendid glory of the great name of Hegel who had died five years before. During the time that great metaphysician held the chair of Theology there Berlin University was the Mecca of German students. They came from all parts of Germany often at great sacrifice to enjoy the priceless advantage of sitting at Hegel's feet. Among those who studied there was Ludwig Feuerbach the philosopher of humanitarian religion whose Wesen des Christenthums profoundly influenced the mental development of Marx as may be seen from his and Engels Die Heilige Familie. David Strauss author of the Life of Jesus was another. But while the University of Berlin was still enjoying some of the splendour of Hegel's fame it was already declining. It had begun to lose some of the great prestige it had enjoyed during the time Hegel was in active service there. Marx entered the university when it was undergoing a transition. Less on account of the passing of Hegel than because of changing economic conditions theology and speculative philosophy in general occupied a secondary place in the life and thought of the nation practical subjects such as jurisprudence now held the place of honor. A new school of Naturalist philosophers had arisen under the leadership of the brilliant Alexander von Humboldt.

Philosophy and history were the two subjects of study which most appealed to Marx but he studied jurisprudence to please his father as a necessary evil he said. It was his good fortune to have begun his studies in jurisprudence under those eminent jurists Frederich Karl von Savigny and Eduard Gans the former of whom was lecturing at the university upon Roman Law, the latter upon Criminal Law and Prussian Property Rights. Others who were lecturing and teaching at the University of Berlin at the time were Rudolff Erbrecht upon Theology, Philosophy and Philology, Bruno Bauer upon Theology, Karl Ritter upon Geography, and J. P. Gabler upon Logic. Of these Bruno Bauer and Rudolff Erbrecht were Marx's personal friends. Of all the others Eduard Gans seems to have exercised the greatest influence upon him, special mention being made in the report he received upon leaving of his attention to the lectures of his friend Bauer and those of Gans. As a matter of fact he studied only a little more successfully at Berlin than he had previously done at Bonn. He worked very hard it is true often endangering his health by the intensity of his studies but it was mainly independent personal work outside of the university altogether. During the term he attended very few lectures indeed and though he successfully graduated in 1841 at Jena with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy he cannot be said to have had a very distinguished university career" -- John Spargo. 1910. Karl Marx: His Life and Work. B. W. Huebsch, 35-36.

Marx's Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy (1839).
On the Difference between the Democritean & Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Doctoral Thesis (1841).
Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts (1844).
The Holy Family, Or the Critique of Critical Criticism. Marx & Engels (1845).
Theses On Feuerbach (1845).
The German Ideology Marx & Engels (1845).
The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon (1847).
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (1857-61).
Marx's Ethnographical Notebooks
Marx's Notebooks on the History of Technology

"… I have re-read my notebooks (extracts) on technology, and am attending a practical (only experimental) course for workers on the same by Professor Willis (in Jermyn Street, the Institute for Geology, where Huxley also gave his lectures)… While re-reading the technological-historical excerpts, I came to the conclusion that, apart from the invention of gun-powder, the compass and printing - these necessary pre-requisites for bourgeois development - from the 16th to the mid-18th centuries, i.e. the period of the development of manufacture from craftsmanship until really large-scale industry, the two material foundations on which were based the preparations for mechanised industry within manufacturing were the clock and the mill.…" Marx, letter to Engels of January 28, 1863. Marx & Engels, Letters on Capital, 82-84.

Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Biographical Notes on Marx’s Literary Interests.

And so many and many a year later Marx told stories to his children. To my sisters — I was then too small — he told tales as they went for walks, and these tales were measured by miles not chapters. “Tell us another mile,” was the cry of the two girls. For my own part, of the many wonderful tales Mohr told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was “Hans Röckle.” It went on for months and months; it was a whole series of stories. The pity no one was there to write down these tales so full of poetry, of wit, of humour! Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffmann-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always “hard up.” His shop was full of the most wonderful things — of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds as numerous as Noah got into the Arc, tables and chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a magician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher, and was therefore — much against the grain — constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonderful adventures — always ending in a return to Hans Röckle’s shop. Some of these adventures were as grim, as terrible, as any of Hoffmann’s; some were comic; all were told with inexhaustible verve, wit and humour.

And Mohr would also read to his children. Thus to me, as to my sisters before me, he read the whole of Homer, the whole Nibelungen Lied, Gudrun, Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, etc. As to Shakespeare he was the Bible of our house, seldom out of our hands or mouths. By the time I was six I knew scene upon scene of Shakespeare by heart.

On my sixth birthday Mohr presented me with my first novel — the immortal Peter Simple [adventure novel by the English writer Frederick Marryat]. This was followed by a whole course of Marryat and Cooper. And my father actually read every one of the tales as I read them, and gravely discussed them with his little girl. And when that little girl, fired by Marryat’s tales of the sea, declared she would become a “Post-Captain” (whatever that may be) and consulted her father as to whether it would not be possible for her “to dress up as a boy” and “run away to join a man-of-war,” he assured her he thought it might very well be done, only they must say nothing about it to anyone until all plans were well matured. Before these plans could be matured, however, the Scott mania had set in, and the little girl heard to her horror that she herself partly belonged to the detested clan of Campbell. Then came plots for rousing the Highlands, and for reviving “the forty-five.” [refering to Walter Scott’s novel Waverley which described an uprising against the British rule in Scotland in 1745] I should add that Scott was an author to whom Marx again and again returned, whom he admired and knew as well as he did Balzac and Fielding. And while he talked about these and many other books he would, all unconscious though she was of it, show his little girl where to look for all that was finest and best in the works, teach her — though she never thought she was being taught, to that she would have objected — to try and think, to try and understand for herself.
Biographical Notes on Marx’s Literary Interests by Eleanor Marx-Aveling
Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976. Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Marx: Interviews and the Observations of a Spy:
New York World, July 18, 1871.
New York World, October 15, 1871.
Chicago Tribune, January 5, 1879.
 New York Sun, September 6, 1880.
Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff: 
      A letter to Princess Victoria concerning Dr. Marx, February 1, 1879.

"Altogether my impression of Marx, allowing for his being at the opposite pole of opinion from oneself, was not at all unfavourable and I would gladly meet him again. It will not be he who whether he wishes it or not will turn the world upside down."

Frederick Engels
Dialectics of Nature (1873-1886).
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886).

Marx as the "Literary Prometheus" after the censoring of his newspaper.

Aeschylus
The opening quotation of Marx's Dissertation is from Prometheus Bound:

"Be sure of this, that I would not change my evil fortune to be the faithful boy to father Zeus"

These are the only surviving texts of the c.70 plays by Aeschylus.

The Orestia Trilogy
Agamemnon
The Suppliants
Eumenides
Other Plays
Prometheus Bound
The Seven Against Thebes
The Persians
The Choephori



Anaxagoras
"Anaxagoras himself, who first gave a physical explanation of heaven and in this way brought it down to earth in a sense different from that of Socrates, answered, when asked for what purpose he was born: 'For the observation of the sun, the moon, and the heaven' " (Marx. Dissertation, 66).
"The Eleatics, as the first discoverers of the ideal forms of substance, who themselves still apprehended the inwardness of substance in a purely internal and abstract, intensive manner, are the passionately enthusiastic prophetic heralds of the breaking dawn. Bathed in simple light, they turn away indignantly from the people and from the gods of antiquity. But in the case of Anaxagoras the people themselves turned away indignantly from the wise man and declared him to be such, expelling him from their midst. In modern times Anaxagoras has been accursed of dualism. Aristotle says in the first book of the Metaphysics that he uses the nous like a machine and only resorts to it when he runs out of natural explanations. But this apparent dualism is on the one hand that very same dualistic element which split the heart of the state in the time of Anaxagoras, and on the other hand it must be understood more profoundly. The nous is active and is resorted to where there is no natural determination. It is itself the non ens [not-being] of the natural, the ideality. And then the activity of this ideality intervenes only when physical sight fails the philosopher, that is, the nous is the philosopher's own nous, and is resorted to when he is no longer able to objectify his activity. Thus the subjective nous appeared as the essence of the wandering scholar, and in it power as ideality of real determination, it appears on the one hand in the Sophists and on the other in Socrates" (Marx. Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, 436).
According to Diogeneres Laertius "Among the early philosophers....[Epicurus'] favorite was Anaxagoras, although he occasionally disagreed with him..."

Aristotle
Categories
History of Animals
Metaphysics
Nicomachean Ethics
On Generation and Corruption
On the Parts of Animals
Politics (Translated by Benjamin Jowett)
The Athenian Constitution
On Longevity and Shortness of Life
 

Pierre Bayle

"The man who deprived seventeenth-century metaphysics and metaphysics in general of all credit in the domain of theory was Pierre Bayle. His weapon was skepticism, which he forged out of metaphysics' own magic formulas. He himself proceeded from Cartesian metaphysics. Just as Feuerbach by combating speculative theology was driven further to combat speculative philosophy, precisely because he recognized in speculation the last prop of theology, because he had to force theology to retreat from pseudo science to crude, repulsive faith, so Bayle too was driven by religious doubt to doubt about the metaphysics which was the prop of the faith. He therefore critically investigated metaphysics in its entire historical development. he became its historian in order to write the history of its death. He refuted chiefly Spinoza and Leibniz.

Pierre Bayle not only prepared the reception of materialism and of the philosophy of common sense in France by shattering metaphysics with his skepticism. He heralded the atheistic society which was soon to come in to existence by proving that a society consisting only of atheists is possible, that an atheist can be a man worthy of respect, and that it is not by atheism but by superstition and idolatry that man debases himself. To quote a French writer, Pierre Bayle was 'the last metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth century and the first philosopher of the eighteenth century'" (Marx. Holy Family, 157-158).

Historical and critical dictionary: selections (1826)
An Historical and Critical Dictionary, Volumes 1-4.
Oeuvres diverses de M. Pierre Bayle.
Nouvelles de la republique des lettres.
Leibniz's Exchange of Views with Pierre Bayle.
Works by or about Pierre Bayle.

J. E. Cairnes
Follower of John Stuart Mill. Cairnes' The Slave Power: its character, career, and probable designs, being an attempt to explain the real issues involved in the American contest (1862) was a defense of the North in the American Civil War, made a great impression in England. Interested in noncompeting groups in the labor market and known for his distrust of mathematical economics. Works include: The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (1857), and Some Leading Principles of Political Economy Newly Expounded (1874).

See also Adelaide Weinberg. 1970. John Elliot Cairnes and the American Civil War.

"The slave-owner buys his labourer as he buys his horse. If he loses his slave, he loses capital that can only be restored by new outlay in the slave-mart." -- Marx citing Cairnes' Slave Power.

Henry Charles Carey
U.S. economist, advocate of protective tariffs.
The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: why it exists & how it may be extinguished

"In all countries of the world man has become free as land has acquired value, and as its owners have been enriched ; and in all man has become enslaved as land has lost its value, and its owners have been impoverished.... Freedom grows with growing wealth, not grow- ing poverty. To increase the cost of raising slaves, and thus to increase the value of man at home, produces exactly the effect anticipated from the other course of operation, because the value of the land and its produce grows more rapidly than the value of that portion of the negro's powers that can be obtained from him aa a slave — that is, without the payment of wages." (p.395-396)

Democritus
DÊMOCRITUS OF ABDÊRA from Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, by Kathleen Freeman. 1948.

"Dêmocritus of Abdêra was in his prime about 420 B.C.
A large body of written work was produced at Abdera, during and after Democritus’ time. Thrasyllus, Roman scholar of the first century A.D., using the work of Alexandrian scholars, arranged these works in tetralogies, according to their subject-matter. Ethics (Tetralogies I and II); Natural Science (III to VI); Mathematics (VII to IX); Music (X and XI); and Technical Works (XII and XIII). There were also a group of treatises under the title Causes; a group of monographs on various subjects, the genuineness of which is suspect; a large number of Maxims; and a group of forged writings on magic."

Duns Scotus

"Already the British schoolman Duns Scotus, asked, "whether it was impossible for matter to think?" (Holy Family, 158)

A Treatise on God as First Principle

"Help me then, O Lord, as I investigate how much our natural reason can learn about that true being which you are if we begin with the being which you have predicated of yourself."

Epicurus

Introduction to The Epicurus Reader
An introduction of Epicureanism by D.S. Hutchinson
Introduction to Lucretius
An introduction to Lucretius in four parts by M.F. Smith
I. Lucretius
II. On the Nature of Things
III. Epicurus and Epicureanism
IV. The Structure of Lucretius’ Poem

Collections of Epicurean Sayings:
The Principal Doctrines

The Vatican Sayings

“Fragments”
     A short anthology of fragments compiled by Cyril Bailey

Epicurea Enumerated fragments from Hermann Usener’s 1887 compilation
Testimonials
Fragments from known works (U1 - U218)
Fragments from uncertain sources (U219 - U607)

Lucretius
De Rerum Natura

Diogenes of Oinoanda
The Epicurean Inscription (Abridged)
by Diogenes of Oinoanda (c. 200 CE) Translation by Martin Ferguson Smith

A Gigantic Jigsaw Puzzle: The Epicurean Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda via Youtube with Martin Ferguson Smith

Philodemus
The Rhetorica
Philodemus Project

Diogenes Laertius
The biography of Epicurus from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
containing:
Epicurus’ will
Epicurus’ letter to Herodotus - A Summary of Physical Nature
Epicurus’ letter to Pythocles - A Summary of Phenomena of the Sky
Epicurus’ letter to Menoeceus - How to Live a Happy Life

Seneca
Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Moral Epistles. Translated by Richard M. Gummere. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1917-25. 3 vols.: Volume I.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Moral Epistles. Translated by Richard M. Gummere. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1917-25. 3 vols.: Volume II.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Moral Epistles. Translated by Richard M. Gummere. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1917-25. 3 vols.: Volume III.

Cicero
De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum
De Natura Deorum

Cornelius Nepos
"Atticus" a biography of Roman Epicurean Titus Pomponius Atticus

Lucian
Alexander the Oracle-Monger
Zeus Rants


Ludwig von Feuerbach

"In these circumstances, a short, coherent account of our relation to the Hegelian philosophy, of how we proceeded, as well as of how we separated, from it, appeared to me to be required more and more. Equally, a full acknowledgement of the influence which Feuerbach, more than any other post-Hegelian philosopher, had upon us during our period of storm and stress, appeared to me to be an undischarged debt of honor." -- Engels, Ludwig von Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

The Essence Of Christianity In Relation To The Ego and Its Own
Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

"Things in thought should not be different from what they are in reality. What is separate in reality should not be identical in thought. To exclude thinking or ideas – the intellectual world of the neo-Platonists – from the laws of reality is the privilege of theological capriciousness. The laws of reality are also the laws of thought."

Pierre Bayle: Nach seinen für die Geschichte der Philosophie und Menschheit
Ludwig Feuerbach Archive
 
Gassendi
Epicurus, By Peter Gassendi, Translated by Thomas Stanley


Hegel
Hegel by Hypertext Home Page (features many complete texts)
Jean Hyppolite. Logic & Existence (1952). State University of New York Press, 1997. Final Chapter before Conclusion reproduced here: "The Organisation of the Logic: Being, Essence, Concept"
 

Luesippus
(fl. about 450-370 BC), Greek philosopher, probably born in Abdera. Virtually nothing is known of his life and none of his writings survive. He is, however, credited with founding the atomic theory of matter, later developed by his pupil, Democritus. According to this theory, all matter is constituted of identical indivisible particles called atoms. We have but one fragment, which Wheelwright translates (though Kirk and Raven dispute its authorship) as:
"Nothing happens at random; whatever comes about is by rational necessity"


Proudhon
Proudhon Archive
Proudhon letter to Marx, Lyon, 17 May 1846.


Shakespeare
Complete Works.
Timon of Athens (Marx's favorite and often quoted play)
All's Well That Ends Well
Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
Florizel and Perdita (adaptation of Winter's Tale)
Hamlet
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, Part 1
Henry VI, Part 2
Henry VI, Part 3
Henry VIII
Julius Caesar
King John
King Lear
Love's Labour's Lost
Macbeth
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello
Pericles
Richard II
Richard III
Richard III (18th century adaptation)
Romeo and Juliet
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
Twelfth Night
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter's Tale


Spinoza
The chief works of Benedict de Spinoza, vol. I.
The chief works of Benedict de Spinoza, vol. II.
 

Repost from Until Darwin blog: The Life Sciences, the Origins of Race,and the History of Sociology

[It is both fun and a curse to look back to graduate school when a project was in its early stages and see all the things one would change.  And so, an early presentation of what would later become the manuscript for Until Darwin.]

The Life Sciences, the Origins of Race,and the History of Sociology

B. Ricardo Brown

Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies 

Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies Pratt Institute 

Brooklyn, New York 

Prepared for the Section on Marxist Sociology Roundtables, 

Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington D.C.

August 2000

****

DRAFT

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The relationship between sociology and Social Darwinism is often assumed but it is not very well understood. Many simply passed it off as a forgotten dead end. It was Parsons who said that “no one reads Spencer anymore”. And it is Parsons who explains this forgetting of Spencer as an evolutionary triumph of sociology.  Sociology did not emerge from Social Darwinism. Sociology and Social Darwinism share common origins in Spencer, political economy, discourses on government, and scientific disputes,especially the species question and the question that consumed American biology in the 19thcentury: monogenesis versus polygenesis.Given this range of origins, I was lead to question the notion of social Darwinism as it relates to Darwin’s intervention into the monogenesis/polygenesis debate. This debate is essential to understanding the scientific ideology of race.  Race was the central problem in the American approach to the species question.

The species question

Slavery was a driving force behind the debate between the mongenists and the polygenists, but the debate over the origins of humans and the classification of their diversity had been well underway in its modern form since the 18th century (which owed earlier descriptions and representations of the Plinian Races). It was not the Civil War that ended the monogenesis/polygenesis debate (as Stanton says in his The Leopard’s Spots, which remains one of the best works on the subject), but Darwin. Only the species question was to later reemerge from its repression with the work of Lombroso and Weissmann.  It is often stated that Darwin broke with Lamarck and Natural History, but the origin of species----modification by descent vs. creation vs. successive creation----was the question of Darwin’s time, and Lamarckism was not the subject of polemics from the pro-evolution side. (Darwin to some degree followed Lamarck, most notably in Darwin’s theory of pangenesis.)

You might in fact read Darwin’s Origins as an anti-slavery argument. He was opposed to slavery.(Admiral Fitzroy, an originator of modern meteorological instruments and Captain of the Beagle was a vocal proponent of slavery and the superiority of the European. Darwin, who was hired on not as the official naturalist, but rather the dinner and social companion of the Captain, noted in letter to his sister how unbearable it was to be endure these social gatherings with the Captain.  Natural and sexual selection as described in the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man destroyed the polygenic theory. At the same it demolished and replaced religious basis of monogenesis. The central enlightened argument for the abolition of slavery now had a scientific basis in the origin of the human species itself. Darwin is often characterized as apolitical, but politics has no limit in theory. He says in the
Descent of Man

...we may conclude that when the principle of evolution is generally accepted, as it surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death (Descent of Man, 541)The biology appropriated by sociology was not Darwinism, although it shares certain terminology and concerns.

The discursive formation of sociology and biology was concerned with continuity: progress and degeneration. Darwinism, on the other hand, is concerned with discontinuity: species, extinction,isolation, and selection.  This makes me look at sociology in a new way. Instead of seeing the period before the crisis in Western Sociology as having been one where bad sociology appropriated bad science, I began to see it as a bio-social discourse more or less autonomous from the discourse of Darwinism. This lead me to return to the history of sociology and of race from a different perspective.  Darwin’s was an anti-slavery argument that destroyed the scientific and religious discourses on race. But the history of race appears in the context of a general assumption of bio-social progress and degeneration. It is degeneracy and not natural selection that supported Eugenics, and the linkage between the two sciences of society are profound. In particular, I want to focus on degeneration as it appears in sociology because it has not yet had a thorough treatment .  To understand the relationship of sociology, the life sciences and race in America, you have to trace through the formation and transformations of a scientific ideology that unites;

1) Discourses on nature and life (biology, medicine, Natural History, and ecology)

2) Discourses on the forces of social life, both the rational forces (those which are allied Enlightenment with the universals of Enlightenment Reason, History, Consciousness, and Reason) as well as the irrational forces (e.g., the instincts, the id [e.g., A. Wiessmann as opposed to Freud’s concept,] the mob, the mass) and also rationalized irrationality (e.g., the market and the social anarchy of capitalist production, psychological therapy)

3) Discourses on the stability of society, or inertia (e.g., Parsonian sociology, or more generally,bourgeois morality, the morality of community described by Nietzsche in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals and by Marx in The Holy Family, the rhetorics of stability, progress, and degeneration).  If you understand how these work, then you can begin to understand the relation between the scientific discourses on race, the sociological ones (sociology in the broadest sense, as the definition of sociology narrows over time in proportion to the need to clean up its pantheon of fallen gods like Sumner, Spencer, Comte, Giddings, Cooley, Sorokin, Lombroso, etc. Feagin in his Presidential Address last night did exactly this, but of course it was only for the best of reasons, as his goal was to remember forgotten sociologists of the left) and together with the media’s re-presentation, we can discern more clearly how the history of this social relation weighs like a nightmare on the mind of the living today.

Before you can discuss race, you must first discuss science, for race does not precede science,rather, science first establishes race --- at least race as we understand it today. We must ask “What is the bio-social discourse on race and what is the origin of its authority?”rather than “What is race?” By implication, this raises all sorts of questions for Marxist theory that claims science as its authority. Perhaps this is why the race question (and the woman question too) were deferred for so long by the Parties. It is not that addressing them would have distracted us from our critique of a more fundamental problems, as was so often claimed, but because addressing them would have called into question the scientific authority on which orthodox marxism rested.