cited here,
http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper82h.html
followed up in a great book, "Dialectic of Defeat, "
Michael Pugliese
>..."This is his third volume on a set of closely related issues about how
to think about human nature and society. His previous book, Dialectic of
Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (Cambridge, 1981) has the same mixture
of indictment and Sisyphean 'spirit of rescue and retrieval' (p. ix). In it
he explored the replacement within Marxism of a revolutionary spirit with a
scientistic rhetoric. That book examined
a Marxist challenge to the consecration of Marxism by science. That Marxism is a science is regularly, almost obsessively, restated in orthodox texts. Here Marxism is infatuated with the bourgeois society it despises. If Marxists wanted to expropriate the expropriators, they also fell in love with their instruments: science and technology. In these pages the question is less science itself than its uncritical adoption. Marxists were convinced that they were the appointed and rightful heirs to the science of bourgeois society — a science that guaranteed success. The greatest insults in the standard Marxist dictionary were ''prescientific'', ''nonscientific'', "mystical", "utopian", and "romantic". Vulnerability to these charges intimidated the Marxist critics of science. The suppressed critiques took their revenge. Marxism succumbed to science; it shrivelled up into blueprints and state engineering. The most provocative interpretations of science migrated to those outside of the mainstream and to those outside of Marxism.
For the same reason, searching analyses of mass culture, leisure, and urban life found little nourishment in mainstream Marxism. Mesmerized by the glitter of science and progress, Marxists dreamed of new proletarian owners and revolutionary commissars but not a fundamental restructuring...
To challenge Marxism as science does not encourage the occult or mysterious. The single alternative of science or the irrational is posed by the inflexible scientific mind. Rather the challenge is directed against a repressive concept of science, perhaps more accurately dubbed "scientism'' (pp. 5-6).
In short, Dialectic of Defeat was a critique of Marxist objectivism. It is a scholarly work, in which Jacoby generously annotates his argument, inviting the reader to consider the evidence independently. His previous book was an attack on the history of soft options in psychotherapy and the psychoanalytic tradition, i.e., a critique of naively optimistic subjectivism and its effects on political hope. It was entitled Social Amnesia: a Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (Boston, Beacon, 1975; Brighton, Harvester, 1977). He has written reflectively on the book elsewhere (Free Associations, Pilot Issue 1984, pp. 12-18). It was in some ways opposed to the aim of Dialectic of Defeat: 'in a situation where the social noose is invisible and the gasps of the individual are recorded as cries of liberation, I recalled and defended an objective (or non-subjective) theory of subjectivity' (Dialectic, p. 9).