It looks like an important book. The article on religion Justin referred to is highly illuminating. It tends to quash both the arguments Chuck G made on this list and my reply to him.
Carrol --------
Which argument? The one where I claimed Falwell is homophobic because his dick is too short? Or your claim Falwell was a fundamentalist because he was homophobic?
I missed the article you're referring to. Going through last week's archives Justin wrote you:
``.. Btw there is an unusually intersting article on Martx & Engels on religion in the current issue of Science & Society...''
Well, post it or some of it and let's argue...or agree.
I see no reason why class bound and theoretically Marxist styled arguments necessarily supersede various individual psychologically based arguments. Each has their own uses and illuminate different domains.
I agree in the gross sense, an individual's general world view including its likely ideological outlook and morals are very probably a product of various socio-economic forces, including the class within which the person was raised and may still reside. But this observation does not have the weight of determinacy.
To maintain that only large social, economic and cultural parameters fully determine an individual psyche is far too crude a level of analysis to illuminate very much about the activities and motivations of any particular person.
On the other hand, that doesn't preclude the real possibility that a particular individual's actions and motivations can be seen to faithfully represent their class ideological outlook.
This is a somewhat subtle distinction. In the first case we are trying to explain a particular individual's activities in terms of their class origins. In the other, we are choosing particular activities and motivations and claim these represent a class interest. These two are slightly different points of view.
I want to bring Strauss into this as an example. According to all the economic class, ethnic, social, educational, and political experiences---reflecting the large scale forces of his place and time, Strauss should have maintained an ideological outlook similar to his liberal, left, and progressive cohorts: Fromm, Arendt, Horkhiemer, Marcuse, Adorno, et al. He didn't. Why? At the very least he should have been a liberal humanist. He wasn't. He practiced his life much as they did, as an academic, living a middle class life in the US and so forth. Yet he was very much a representative not of his class interest, but that of the ruling elite. So when I examine his writing and analyze his ideological make up, I see only the interest of an elite served, and no where are my interests served either as a disaffected intellectual or as a working class mechanic.
Oddly, I think I understand Strauss more through a psychological lens, through his struggle to identify himself as a Jew. His political and ideological outlook are more determined by that struggle than by the externals of class or discrimination or even the potential of extermination per se. So what appears to serve a ruling elite in the larger political sense, is transformed within the psychological sphere as a reaction to a loss of identity, alienation, and disillusionment. Only in this limited and internal sense can Strauss be seen to represent a psychological aspect indicative of a particular class, time and place.
Marx, `On the Jewish Question' writes:
``The most stubborn form of opposition between Jew and Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. And how is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian come to see in their respective religions nothing more than stages in the development of the human mind---snake skins which have been cast off by history, and man as the snake who clothed himself in them---they well no longer find themselves in religious opposition, but in a purely critical, scientific and human relationship. Science will then constitute their unity. But scientific oppositions are resolved by science itself.''
(Marx is referring to state religion and proposes a separation between the church and state, and then finally the socio-political separation or emancipation from the state...)
All well and good. But the problem is we have whole swaths of our society who en masse have decided to crawl back into their old skins and live there. This retreat is their idea of a solution to their own internal crisis of identity.
It has turned out that Marx's dream of emancipation has at its apogee a century later resulted in a massive retreat.
``Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.'' (near the end of the essay)
But the practical species-being of our age has simply turned out to be the same old collection of snakes skins. It is as if the egotistic man (Marx's term) of our age faced with its individual or ego dissolution into social power, something greater than itself, did not see the fraternity of species-being, but rather saw the abyss.
I think this is what happened to Strauss, and why he reacted as he did, and why his political thought, transformed into the US conservative spectrum, has found such great appeal in our time.
CG