Rawls Killed Marx

 [[{“value”:”I found this Joseph Heath post very informative. In essence, Marx was about exploitation but when no theory of exploitation without gaping holes could be developed, the analytical Marxists shifted to egalitarianism ala Rawls. Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going
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I found this Joseph Heath post very informative. In essence, Marx was about exploitation but when no theory of exploitation without gaping holes could be developed, the analytical Marxists shifted to egalitarianism ala Rawls.

Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Most of this work was being done under the banner of “analytical Marxism” (aka “no-bullshit Marxism”), following the publication of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (and his subsequent elevation to the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Philosophy at Oxford). Meanwhile in Germany, Jürgen Habermas’s incredibly compact Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus promised to reinvigorate Marx’s analysis of capitalist crises in the language of contemporary systems theory. It was an exciting time to be a young radical. One could say, without exaggeration, that many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description.

So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.

If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.

That’s the opening. Read the whole thing.

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