Lawrence Krader (was thanx to me)

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Thu Feb 11 22:43:38 PST 1999



>In any case your recommendations are always interesting
>and your command of this kind of material evidently
>vast. -gn

It is Lawrence Krader's command of this kind of material that is evidently vast; my post was only a quote from him. I do not have the vast knowledge to evaluate his interpretations and arguments--that's why I take the time to post them in order to see if they elicit critical comments.

I wanted to call attention to his neglected Marxist work: *The Formation of the State*, *The Asiatic Mode of Production*, *The Dialectic of Civil Society* and *Treatise of Social Labor*. GA Cohen's analytical reconstruction of the Marxist theory of history is rather well known; Krader's anthro-philosophical development of Marx's and Korsch's theory of history unduly neglected, though understandably so due to the profound difficulties posed by Krader's prose style. From library and bookstore browsing, it seems to me that over the last three decades or so the two great efforts at philosophical anthropology, broadly conceived, are the works of Lawrence Krader and Ernest Gellner, a critic of Soviet anthropology among other things.

My hobby in marxology compels me to learn something of their efforts.

The perpetual grad student, Rakesh



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