Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx [Paperback]

Tom Rockmore (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0631231900 | ISBN-13: 978-0631231905 | Publication Date: May 16, 2002 | Edition: 1

Marx After Marxism encourages readers to understand Karl Marx in new ways, unencumbered by political Marxist interpretations that have long dominated the discussions of both Marxists and non-Marxists. This volume gives a broad and accessible account of Marx's philosophy and emphasizes his relationship to Hegel.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"After a period of drought in serious Marx scholarship, the publication of Rockmore's book, at once so well informed and so informative in both philosophical and historical terms, is a marker event. It makes a strong and clear case, by means of a careful survey of Marx's own texts, for resituating him in the tradition of German idealism and separating him from the accrued excess baggage of later ‘Marxisms." William L. McBride, Purdue University <!--end-->

"The decline of communism has been accompanied by a decline in interest in Marx. Rockmore's Marx After Marxism is the beginning of a new assessment of Marx that will help reverse that trend. The book's overall stance concerns what Marx got out of Hegel at different times in his own development. Rockmore also gives a fine account of Marx's main work in political economy, especially the central ideas of Capital; this is where any Marx revival should focus in providing a critique of our own society." Robert Nola, University of Auckland

From the Back Cover

Marx After Marxism encourages readers to understand Karl Marx in new ways, unencumbered by political Marxist interpretations that have long dominated the discussions of both Marxists and non-Marxists. This volume gives a broad and accessible account of Marx's philosophy and emphasizes his relationship to Hegel.

Marxism has always claimed and still claims a privileged relation to Marx's theories. It typically presents a view of Marx that is widely accepted by Marxists, non-Marxists, and even anti-Marxists, unfortunately without careful scrutiny. This book argues that political Marxist influence obscures, transforms, distorts, and renders inaccessible Marx's basic philosophical insights. It concentrates on recovering Marx's philosophical ideas not in opposition to, but rather within, the larger Hegelian framework.

Now that we have seen the end of political Marxism's peak global influence, it is possible, for perhaps the first time, to depict Marx as a philosopher who began to think within, and remained within, the German philosophical tradition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (May 16, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631231900
• ISBN-13: 978-0631231905
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,140,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Entirely useless, August 24, 2006

By 

M. A. Krul (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (Paperback)

Rockmore's book on Marx appears to be very promising. On the back cover it states that Rockmore seeks to recover Marx' philosophical ideas and his relation to Hegel, and that he wants to do this free of "Marxism" (by which writers these days usually mean the official Leninist party line). So far, so good. But unfortunately, Rockmore fails to write even one page that is not either stating the obvious or clearly false.

Most of the book itself can be skipped entirely, since it consists of a recap of Hegel's philosophy of history and then an overview of the works of Marx. It's not clear why this was included in its entirety in Rockmore's work and it is certainly superfluous considering the very large amount of philosophical overviews of Marx' collected work in print today, but apparently it's quantity that counts here. Rockmore's analysis itself is not particularly bad, it must be granted, though nothing special either. Instead of reading these chapters, one might do better to read for example Allen Wood's book on Marx: that also gives an overview of Marx focusing on his philosophy, and is also written by a general opponent of Marx (though not an unsympathetic one, but Wood is a Kant specialist).

The first chapter and the final two are the extent of Rockmore's actual thesis. In this, he defends three points:
- Marx did not entirely abandon philosophy at any point in his career;
- Marx was a Hegelian;
- Marx was an idealist.
This of itself is already very odd, considering that the first is very well-known and not really disputed by anyone. Certainly writers such as Lukacs feel that Marx went beyond philosophy, but this means philosophy as mere abstract contemplation such as Kant or the scholastics, not philosophy as 'abstract thought of any kind'.

The second claim is muddled by Rockmore's tendency to go on the defensive where Hegel is involved, wanting to save him from his harshest critics who claim Hegel merely conceived of history in a theological manner. This may or may not be a correct criticism, but in any case it has little to do with Marx, who rejected Hegel for misunderstanding the nature of the relation between civil society, the economy and the state in history. At some points Rockmore does mention this, but in the last two chapters he suddenly beats a hasty retreat and simply states that anyone who reasons in a historicist manner can be considered "Hegelian", and that, therefore, Marx was a Hegelian. Why this is triumphantly presented as a discovery and why we should consider this a meaningful analysis in the first place is left to the reader.

The same approach also characterizes Rockmore's analysis in his third and most bizarre claim, the one where Marx appears as an idealist. He sets out by correctly stating that idealism can mean various things, and that the idealism of Berkeley and Plato is not the same as that of Kant or Hegel (though he overstates the difference). Then he quotes Marx as saying that the only way man can perceive the world is through his mind. Just like with the claim about the "Hegelianism" of Marx, this is suddenly adequate to call someone meaningfully an idealist, and voilà, Rockmore has established that Marx was really an idealist all the time! The whole issue of the analytical priority of mind or matter, or the question of theology vs economy, etc. are forgotten entirely.

It may sound hard to believe that this is really all there is to the book, especially considering the positive reviews of the other readers here on Amazon, but that can't be helped. I'm quite baffled as to why this was published. Any undergraduate student paper could do what Rockmore did, and smart students can do better.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ideology, theory, and the lefts, March 24, 2004

By 

John C. Landon "nemonemini" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (Paperback)

Even if you consider Marxism some phantom of evil it would be appropriate to get to the bottom of the theoretical problem case of its history and endgame. The reason is that the bits and pieces run through the blood stream of progressive groups attempting change as a series of half-understood fallacies which hamper correct thinking.
Rockmore's treatment of Marx here is therefore an interesting effort to return to the source and differentiate that from what came later.
That is useful up to a point, and it is true that Engels seems to be the source of a series of misunderstandings culminating in the doctrines of the Second Internationale. But it is not so easy to get Marx off the hook with Engels as the fall guy. The inuendo of smart Marx and dumb Engels gets a bit tiresome. All the problems with Marxism spring from errors in Marx's reasoning and the incoherent bits of Hegel. Figures of the Second Internationale have been dealt a bum rap in one way, since they were buried by Leninism. Who remembers that Plekhanov and Kautsky were appalled by Bolshevism or the several books of Kausky trying to expose Lenin. So, despite their confusions of theory, some figures in the Second Internationale were on the ball to some degree. We have been brainwashed to think Marxists were unable to critique their own ideology.
But the main focus of Rockmore's interesting text is on the complexities of Marx's development, seen as a philsopher in the vein of Hegel as much as an economist and historical materialist. The relationship to Hegel is a very elusive subject and it is here that the whole screwup begins. It never happens that anyone gets the 'dialectic' straight in its relationship to ideas of historical law or freedom and necessity. The whole mix is probably the number one best way to completely confuse disciples. Is it possible to ever get it straight, or at least free the left from the constant repetition of errors?
A very interesting study.

1.0 out of 5 stars Very poorly explained and poor writing style., October 19, 2011

By 

Dausubel - See all my reviews

This review is from: Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (Paperback)

I find it hard to judge Rockmore's thesis that Marx was really an 'Objective idealist' because Rockmore's writing is so poor and downright confusing.Although I have covered much of the material he is describing I still found myself constantly having to go over and over what he wrote due to his obtuse and eliptical phrasing and subsequent lack of clarity.Rockmore's review of Marx's work is more a series of descriptions of his work rather than explanations.But even here he doesn't describe the most central aspects of Marx's work i.e.in his description of the contents of Marx's 'Capital'he doesn't even mention the law of the falling rate of profit and the crisis of over production and under consumption (see Capital vol 3).If you already know Marx's work then the review is pointless and if you dont it's pretty much useless.
At the end of the review Rockmore looks at the relationship between Marx and Hegel.His argument seems to be that Marx didn't really understand Hegel and in fact his so called inversion of Hegel's dialectic wasn't really an inversion at all.This sounds absurd to me because if this was the case it would be more accurate to say that Hegel's objective idealism isn't really idealism but a materialistic dialectic,which if true means not only that Marx didn't understand Hegel but that Hegel didn't understand Hegel.In the end I was left with the impression that Rockmore had as poor an understanding of Hegel as he had of Marx.
I was initially attracted to the book because I believed there was a difference between Marx's understanding of Hegel's dialectic and Engel's understanding of it.Marx believing that Hegel gives the absolute logical priority to being (immanence) and Engels that Hegel gives the absolute tempral priority to being (Trancendence),I was curious about whether this had any bearing on the development of what came to be known as 'Marxism'.After reading this book I was no clearer on this issue than before.I found the book to be almost a complete waste of time.