In a discussion of the Sophists, Hobbes, Popper, and Marx I made the mistake, in referring to the first chapter of a book I wrote on the subject (which was favourably reviewed by Alasdair MacIntyre), of giving an e-mail address instead of a webpage. The corrected reference is http://www.greenex.co.uk/philosophy/deals.html
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> From: <james.irldaly at ntlworld.com>
> Date: 2007/06/03 Sun AM 12:10:42 GMT
> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] A gem of a speech from Zoellick on socialists,
> anarchists, and anti-globo protesters
> >
> > Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote
>
> > Date: 2007/06/02 Sat PM 08:13:04 GMT
> > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> > Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] A gem of a speech from Zoellick on socialists,
> > anarchists, and anti-globo protesters
> >
> > james.irldaly at ntlworld.com wrote:
> > >
> > >> *****************
> > >
> > > So Karl Popper would say. But why was Plato's name put on Lenin's mausoleum? Marx did not belong to the sophistic tradition. The royalist Hobbes did. Sir Karl was a bourgeois wolf in proletarian sheep's clothing, crying crocodile tears over his prey (mixed metaphor intended -- it makes the image more Disneyesque).
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> > Well I can't answer re Lenin's tomb, but Marx was very protective of
> > Aristotle, Plato, & Ricardo: _he_ could criticize them but was apt to
> > snarl when others did. (Whitehead remarked, and I'm not sure Marx would
> > have vigorously disagreed, that the history of western philosophy was a
> > series of footnotes to plato.) As to Karl Popper -- no one can be wrong
> > about _everything_!
> >
> > Perhaps we have different perspectives on the Sophists: I certainly see
> > the _whole_ "democratic" (rule of the people) tradition as flowing back
> > to the Sophists, with their claim that Virtue could be taught: i.e.,
> > that excellence was socially/historically grounded, not an inherent
> > feature of select individuals. And one could argue that Hobbes's theory
> > (materialist) was more important than his mere opinions (royalist).
>
> > Carrol
> **************************
>
Plato's name is on Lenin's mausoleum as the Western origin of Communist thinking. Peasant revolts in the Middle Ages were stigmatised by the author of Piers Plowman as holding "Preach men of Plato, and prove it of Seneca, that all things ought to be in common". In other words they were guided by human aspiration (*ideals*), not envy, revenge or lumpen universal cynicism, the reduction of right to might: "The stronger rules". (This is the "old materialism", the source of *deals*, bourgeois competitive huckstering -- rejected in the first thesis on Feuerbach).
To me, one of the worst legacies of Engels is the statement in Ludwig Feuerbach (well after Marx's death) that there are transhistorically two great camps in philosophy, materialism and idealism. In fact, in the passage on materialism in The Holy Family Marx and Engels say that in Hobbes materialism became geometrical and inimical to man. (Hobbes's tyrannical royalism -- unwelcome to the communitarian King and bishops -- was the recognition of the frank brutality of his theory, and would have equally -- or better -- justified Cromwell).
Marx thoroughly rejected such empiricist and mechanistic possessive individualism, including the Benthamite utilitarianism which Marx excoriated, and which resurfaces in Popper's Cold War bourgeois piecemeal engineering. Hobbes reinvented the lumpen cynicism which the Sophists had already invented. Diogenes's idealistic, humanistic cynicism (which inspired his defiance of Alexander) was by contrast Socratic in origin, and contributed to (e.g. Senecan) stoicism.
Even Engels said that the German working-class had become the inheritors of German classical philosophy -- which was the inheritor of Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism, which blend with Feuerbachian humanism (the famili-ar I-thou relationship between human beings, beginning with production) in the pure lyricism of the early writings. (Ted Winslow has often shared their truth and beauty with the list).
I have elaborated this position, which I think is true to Marx, in *Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment*, the first chapter of which can be read online at ....................
> James Daly
>
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