Considerations on Western Marxism by Perry Anderson

Considerations on Western Marxism by Perry Anderson

Author:Perry Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2016-02-07T16:00:00+00:00


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1 Lukács in Budapest; Korsch in New York; Marcuse in Brandeis and La Jolla; Lefebvre, Goldman and Althusser in Paris; Adorno in Frankfurt; Della Volpe in Messina; Colletti in Rome. Gramsci and Benjamin alone – the two victims of fascism – remained outside any university.

2 See the interview, ‘Lukács on His Life and Work’, New Left Review, No. 68, July-August 1971, pp. 56–7; and the 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness London 1971, p. XXXVI.

3 See Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy, London NLB 1972, pp. 3–4, whose first essay is a translation of this key text, ‘The Foundations of Historical Materialism’.

4 Le Matérialisme Dialectique, first published in Paris 1939; English translation as Dialectical Materialism, London 1968, pp. 61–167 passim.

5 See La Teoria Marxista dell’Emancipazione Umana (1945) and La Libertà Communista (1946), which focus mainly on the Paris Manuscripts, and Per La Teoria d’un Umanesimo Positivo (1947), which is centred on the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Della Volpe’s translations of both texts of Marx appeared in 1950.

6 See Literary and Philosophical Essays, London 1955.

7 In particular, ‘Feuerbach’s “Philosophical Manifestoes”’, ‘On the Young Marx’, and ‘The 1844 Manuscripts of Karl Marx’, in For Marx, London 1969.

8 History and Class Consciousness, p. I.

9 The literary difficulty of these authors was to be frequently criticized in their own time. Gramsci’s editing of Ordine Nuovo was attacked for its ‘difficulty’ by the French socialist newspaper L’Humanité in 1920, a charge which Gramsci replied to with a lengthy justification of his prose in Ordine Nuovo, 10 January 1920. Lukács was denounced for ‘artistocratism of style’ by Revai in 1949: see Josef Revai, Lukács and Socialist Realism, London 1950, pp. 18–19. Sartre’s terminology was assailed with particular vigour by Lucien Sève, in ‘Jean-Paul Sartre et la Dialectique’, La Nouvelle Critique, No. 123, February 1961, pp. 79–82.

10 Prison conditions do not, however, account for all the difficulties of Gramsci’s notebooks. His language, as we have seen, had been criticized for undue complexity even in Turin; moreover, at least some of the riddles of the Notebooks are to be attributed to his own intellectual contradictions and uncertainties, in dealing with problems to which he never found an unequivocal or satisfactory answer.

11 These influences are amply demonstrated in Gareth Stedman Jones’s essay, ‘The Marxism of the Early Lukács’, New Left Review, No. 70, November–December 1971. Weber was a personal friend and colleague of Lukács before the First World War.

12 For the complexity of Gramsci’s attitude towards Croce, and his qualified admiration for the latter’s category of ‘ethico-political history’, which he believed should be taken as an ‘empirical canon’ for historical research, see Il Materialismo Storico, Turin 1966, pp. 201–2, where Gramsci even compares Croce to Lenin, as two theorists of hegemony, who both in their own way rejected economism.

13 For a full account of the conceptual continuities between Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, see the admirable discussion in Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form, Princeton 1971, pp. 230–74 – much the best critical analysis of the subject.



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