Nostalgic Marxism
Some socially useful thinkers—for example, Cornel West, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton—still speak of themselves, for what seem to me purely sentimental reasons, as ‘Marxists.’ Such sentimentality appalls Poles and Hungarians who never want to hear Marx’s name again. I suspect it would baffle the Chinese disidents starving in the laogai. Nevertheless, there is little harm in such nostalgic piety. For in the mouths of these people the word ‘Marxism’ signals hardly more than an awareness that the right are still ripping off the poor, bribing the politicians, and having almost everything their own way. —Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 46.
The way I continually laugh out loud while reading Rorty makes me suspect I’m not taking him seriously enough. It’s this kind of polemic that I find amusing most of the time, and often because there’s quite a bit of truth to it—but, I admit, I also find myself laughing when Rorty is at his most philosophical, proclaiming the uselessness of Truth and the eschatological triumph of progress based on whatever contingencies. Still, I find his political vision oddly compelling, despite our enormous ground-level differences. Perhaps I’m just thankful for a leftist political philosophy that doesn’t begin with Marx or assume the immediate necessity of revolution, and moreover one that makes rooms for the messy sort of political cooperation that really constitutes all political history (as he himself argues).
13 November 2006 |
tags: Philosophy, Politics
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I hear you. I have much the same feeling. Except for his views on war, I find the same kind of political kinship with Michael Walzer. See especially his Spheres of Justice, his Thick and Thin, On Toleration, and his book on the political implications of Exodus. Walzer is a Jewish political philosopher influenced by Marx, but far more by “heterodox Marxists” like Gramsci.