working class civil society (wasRe: Class Ceiling--Ehrenreich)

Peter K. peterk at enteract.com
Sat Mar 25 09:28:13 PST 2000


Carrol:
>Others can carry on the argument about Ehrenreich. I'm not concerned
>right now. I say *moralizing* is wrong. It's false. It reflects a failure
>to understand the world correctly. All moralist judgments reduce to
>Platonism and Platonism reduces to religion.

page 226 of Terry Eagleton's _The Ideology of the Aesthetic_:

"Unlike Nietzche and Heidegger after him, Marx does not press through this aestheticization to human cognition itself. This is not some anaemic rationalism: the goal of human life, for Marx as for Aristotle, in not truth, but happiness or well-being. His work is an extensive enquiry into what material conditions would be necessary for this goal to be realized as a general human condition, and thus belongs to the discourse of classical morality. * Marx is a moralist in the most traditional sense of the term, which is to say that he is concerned with the political determinations of the good life. His morality thus stands opposed to the withered modern sense of the 'moral,' impoverished to interpersonal relations and 'spiritual values' alone, for which the Marxist term is 'moralism.'"

* See Denys Turner, _Marxism and Christianity_ (Oxford, 1983), Part 1.



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