From Heidegger to Pomos

[James Farmelant]

There is a certain irony concerning Richard Rorty's ignorance
of Marxism given his family background.  Richard's father
James Rorty was a journalist who was a close associate
of Sidney Hook and he followed Hook in moving from the
independent Marxism of the American Workers Party to
later adopting Hook's anti-communism.  As it happens
Rorty became interested in philosophy under Hook's influence.
Yet whereas, Hook during his leftist phase wrote two important
books on Marxism,  _Towards the Understanding of Karl
Marx_  and  _From Hegel to Marx_ ,  it is apparent that
failed to absorb the latter's interest in Marxism.  Richard
Rorty certainly shares the kind of Cold War liberalism
for which the older Hook was noted for but not the interest
or knowledge that Hook had in Marxism (which remained
with him even after turning anti-communist).

		Jim Farmelant

On Tue, 22 Dec 1998 20:30:25 -0600 "Daniel F. Vukovich"
<vukovich at students.uiuc.edu> writes:
>Greetings all,
>
>Ive just signed on to this list, and so just catching the Rorty 
>thread.
>There was a review essay in the London Review by Jonathan Ree, on 
>Rorty's
>ignorance of marxism.  The link is here, if youre interested:
>
>http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20n20/ree2020.htm
>
>While I think Ree still cedes too much ground to Rorty, it is still a 
>fine
>critique.  Rorty finds marxism just too damn grand-theoretical and
>rationalist, whereas what we really need is non-theory like (his)
>pragmatism, an emphasis on telling "sad and sentimental stories that 
>help
>us care about other people," and something like a collective, 
>political
>will to welfare-statism.  Ree's retort is that, if anything, classical
>marxism (lenin, mao, etc) was all too close to this prioritizing of
>politics (or political will), at the expense of theory.  Here is Ree 
>on
>this:   
> 
>                 If there is a moral to the story of 20th-century 
>Communism it
>                 is not that social movements ought to rely more on
>sentimental
>                 hope and less on rational knowledge, but that sheer 
>political
>                 willpower can lead to results at odds with its aims: 
>after
>all no
>                 one could suppose that drab poverty, nervous 
>suspicion and
>                 mass murder were quite what the Bolsheviks originally 
>had in
>                 mind. They would have done well to acquire a better
>                 theoretical understanding of their situation rather 
>than
>trusting
>                 that sheer militant optimism would be enough to see 
>them
>                 through. They should have thought rather more deeply 
>about
>                 the ideas of democracy, planning and state power, not
>                 bothered about them less. They listened to too many 
>edifying
>                 stories, not too few. 
>
>                 Marx had a much better [idea] when he suggested that 
>money
>-                                   especially self-creating money, or
>capital - corresponds to God, with                                   
>Adam
>Smith as patriarch and classical political economy as the Bible.
>                       Rather like Rorty, he had a zeal for saving his
>fellow leftists from                                   absolutist
>delusions: that is why he exhorted them to treat the
>                           mystery of capital rather as atheists treat 
>the
>mystery of God, and
>          warned them not to be taken in by political economy when it
>                                             sanctifies capitalist 
>social
>relations and treats them as 'fixed by                  natural laws 
>and
>unchangeable'. Marx sounds to me like the first and
>                 perhaps most consistent leftist ironist.
>
> Best,
>
>Daniel
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-------------
>Daniel Vukovich
>English; Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
>University of Illinois
>Urbana, IL 61801
>
>"Riding roughshod everywhere, U.S. imperialism has made itself the 
>enemy of
>the people of the world and has increasingly isolated itself.  Those 
>who
>refuse to be enslaved will never be cowed by the bombs in the hands of 
>the
>imperialists.  People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. 
>aggressors
>and all their running dogs!" 
> ---- Mao Tse-Tongue, 1964
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-------------
>

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