Page 71 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

the “ruling ideas” version of Marx’s theory of ideology, but with the
extremely important qualification that such ideas are conceived not
simply as ruling, but as ruling effectively. Insofar as legitimate authority
does exist, it is uncontested. Moreover, there is for Weber no necessary
succession of different types of class rule, and hence of ruling ideas, as
there had been for Marx. In principle, at least, a legitimate authority
might last indefinitely.

Western Marxism
To proceed, finally, to Western Marxism proper, let us begin by noting
the quite remarkable extent to which culture itself has provided this
sub-variant of the Marxist tradition with its central preoccupation.
As Perry Anderson observes: “Western Marxism as a whole… came
to concentrate overwhelmingly on study of superstructures… It was
culture that held the central focus of its attention”. Western Marxism
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is an intellectual tradition the characteristic thematics of which have
been human agency, subjective consciousness, and hence also culture.
This is true of Georg Lukács (1885–1917), the Hungarian born but
German speaking and German educated philosopher; of his Franco-
Rumanian disciple, the sociologist of literature, Lucien Goldmann
(1913–70); and of Lukács’s heirs in the Budapest School, notably
Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér. It is true of each of the major members
and associates of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno (1903–69),
Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940),
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and, more recently, Jürgen Habermas.
It is true also of the French existential Marxist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–
80), and of the Italian revolutionary leader, Antonio Gramsci (1891–
1937). Even the structural Marxism of the French philosopher, Louis
Althusser (1918–90), and the school inspired by him, takes ideology
as its central focus, though without the connotations of agency or
consciousness elsewhere associated with it.
At its point of origin in the early 1920s, in the earlier work of
Lukács, in Karl Korsch (1886–1961), and in the young Gramsci, this
stress on agency and consciousness served so as to underwrite a leftist
rejection of the political fatalism implicit in Second International
economic determinism, in favour of the immediate possibilities of
revolution. As Gramsci observed of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917,

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