Death Penalty: Report From Canada

Sam Pawlett epawlett at uniserve.com
Mon Mar 8 12:03:42 PST 1999



>
>
> After saying all this, I should emphasize that I full agree with what
> Carrol calls his political argument against capital punishment. However,
> in my judgement he attempts to draw an artificial barrier between
> philosophical and political arguments that would have been strange
> to both Marx and Lenin (who after all wrote a famous polemic against
> Ernst Mach's philosophy as part of a political struggle within the
> Bolshevik faction).

The Marx article on capital punishment was great. I sensed a lot Engels in it. I read somewhere, I think in Ch1 of Michael Perelman's book on Crisis Theory, that a lot of the Tribune articles were authored or at least co-authored by Engels. I don't think Engels gets the credit he deserves. Haldane and Hilary Putnam both called him "the most learned man of the 19th century".

The determinism argument is not new. I was thinking of Arthur Koestler and Clarence Darrow who both used it to argue against capital puishment. Darrow used it to argue against all forms of punishment.

Sam Pawlett



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list