Page 57 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

Chapter 3
MARXISM

Marxism as an intellectual tradition owes more to the work of a single
thinker, Karl Marx (1818–83), and more also to a mass political
movement, the international socialist movement, than does either
utilitarianism or culturalism. The socialist movement has its origins in
early 19th century Europe, in particular in England and France. It took
as its central project the abolition of capitalist private property, and its
supersession by some form or another of social ownership. Developing
alongside the infant labour movement, it gave voice to working-class
anger at the newly developing system of industrial capitalism.
Marx himself was neither English nor French nor working class,
but rather a German radical intellectual trained in Hegelian philosophy.
In Chapter 2 we were concerned mainly with the development of
British culturalism. But at this point we do need to remind ourselves
of the presence of a similarly culturalist tradition within German
thought. In Germany, however, culturalism led in significantly different
directions from those mapped out in Britain. In the work of the
philosopher G.W.F.Hegel (1770–1831), a powerful synthesis was
effected between culturalist romanticism and the rationalism of the
18th century French Enlightenment (which had derived its
individualism, in part, from British utilitarianism). For Hegel, an
appreciation of the cultural specificity of each age could be subsumed
within a wider understanding of historical development as possessing
an overall rationality and direction. As we have already had occasion
to remark, Hegelian philosophy exercised some real fascination for
Eliot. But in Germany itself, Hegel’s “historicism” opened up the
intellectual space from within which there emerged: much of the modern
discipline of history; Marx’s own Marxism, or “historical materialism”,
as he termed it; and finally, that set of responses to Marx, both positive
and negative, which provided the founding moment and much of the
continuing momentum behind German sociology.

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