> Perhaps sadly for me and my appreciation of Cohen, I found I couldn't get
> myself to plow through KMTH: AD because I'd read Derek Sayer's The Violence
> of Abstraction first.
That Sayer book and the earlier one are great and ought to be better known. In fact I ought to read it again because I'm hazy on it. The main thing I remember is his breaking down of the distinction between 'forces' and 'relations' of production. I have always been uncomfortable with the extent to which a few short passages in Marx were blown up to become this grand, highly abstract theory of history. Sayer must be one of the first to draw on Bhaskar and portray Marx as a critical realist, and that's becoming pretty big these days. I think it appeals to a lot of the same people who would once have been drawn to 'analytical Marxism', but it is much more supple and subtle.
I have never read Cohen's book all the way through but I really mean to soon. I recently got his 'If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?' which has autobiographical sections which are pretty interesting. He implies he wrote KMTH: AD almost to come to terms with and purge the theory he grew up with, and moved on, but of course it turned out to be his magnum opus and forever his best-known book. As Jim says in his obituary, he turned into a kind of moral and political philosopher after that.
It's funny, reading Poulantzas lately I've been struck by how similar that Althusserian stuff is to 'analytical Marxism' even though the latter kind of defined itself against the former. Both love building these elaborate systems of concepts. Althusser was, against all the caricatures we have of French theory, really scientistic, and presents his project as a 'no bullshit' Marxism in the same way the analyticals do, his bugbears being empiricism and historicism. His inspiration in the philosophy of science was Bachelard, who we Anglos know better through his influence on the entirely respectable Kuhn. Bachelard and Althusser himself were very important to Bhaskar, who put it all into the terms of analytical philosophy, and finally, now, this stuff makes a comeback in Anglo social science in a more pragmatic form.
Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com