Science, Science & Marxism, was Re: Marxism a

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Jan 5 21:15:09 PST 2002


Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> >Carrol writes:
> > >Several years ago there was an >interesting discussion on PEN-L >as to
> >what [clip]
>
> The German word is Wissenschaft, and it mean disciplined, systematic
> knowledge, thus, Hegel's Science of Logic (the Greater Logic). It didn't
> have the narrower sense that the word science does for us today, with the
> implication that it empirically guided quantitative research into natural or
> social phenomena. However, I think our present discusccoion is not into what
> Marx or Engels of more or less cultivated late 19th century Germans may or
> may not have meant, but whether there is any point now in saying that
> Marxian thinking is scientific in a sense that is meaningful to us today. At
> least that is what I was going on about.

That was I believe the original question. I guess I am suggesting that the original question was the wrong one. Both marxism _and_ science are (as I think the whole cluster of threads showed) contested categories, and the question of whether marxism is a science cannot be separated from the question of what constitutes a scientific discipline. And I think it is possible to argue that the current "narrower sense" of the word science is a barrier to both "scientific" (however defined) and marxist thought.

I'm not sure where I want to go from here, so I'll stop.

Carrol



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