Marxist Social Thought, History of
See also: Development: Socioeconomic Aspects;
Human–Environment Relationships; Marxian Eco-
nomic Thought; Marxism in Contemporary Socio-
logy; Marxist Social Thought, History of; Resource
Geography
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Castells M 1977 The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach
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R. Peet
Marxist Social Thought, History of
1. Critique of Political Economy
In the twentieth century Marxist social thought has
taken many different and opposing forms: revisionist,
revolutionary, structural, critical, humanist, New Left,
social relations, rational choice, etc. Their common
denominator is that they appeal to Marx as their
original source.
Marx himself began with a critique of modern
natural law theory; that is, the way of thinking which
dominated the Western tradition of political and
economic thought. Modern natural law theory took
two main forms, empirical natural law which prevailed
within political economy and idealist natural law
which prevailed in political philosophy. Marx argued
that modern natural law theory made vast strides in
advancing social thought and in identifying the do-
main of the social. However, he thought that the
discursive framework within which classical political
economy and philosophy moved failed to distinguish
adequately between what is social and what is natural,
or more precisely failed to distinguish the place of the
social in nature as a whole (Fine 1984).
Marx saw classical political economy as having
made great advances in understanding the social
character and historical origins of the economic forms
of the modern age—value, exchange value, price,
money, capital, interest, rent, profit, etc. It recognized
that human labor is the ground of value and that the
economic system as a whole only reached fruition in
the modern age—at the end of history rather than at
its beginning. Marx argued, however, that classical
political economy naturalized labor as the source of
value and never questioned in what kind of social
organization or under what social circumstances labor
would take the form of value. The way Marx put this
is that in analytical terms political economy was
strong: it perceived that the magnitude of value was
determined by the average amount of labor time that
goes into the production of a commodity. But dialec-
tically political economy was weak: it treated the fact
that things take the form of commodities and are
bearers of value as a natural fact of life rather than as
the product of determinate social relations, and it
treated the historical emergence of the modern com-
mercial, commodity-producing economy as the tri-
umph of reason over the manifold forces which
constrained its fruition in the past (see Political
Economy, History of ).
Vis-a' -vis empirical natural law theory, Marx saw
himself as the first to comprehend adequately the
social character of the value form and to release it
from the naturalistic framework in which it had been
captured by natural law. The claim to be the first was
true, although he did not recognize that Hegel’s
critique of natural law pre-empted and prefigured his
own—a fact which has only recently been recognized
by Marx–Hegel scholars (Rose 1981). Marx wrote
Capital as a critique of political economy: not as an
economics text but as a study of a society dominated
by the dull compulsion of economic forces; not as an
economic determinism but as an analysis of a society
in which the economic is determinant. The subject
matter of Capital concerned the inhuman, alienated,
9311
Marxist Social Thought, History of
and exploitative social relations that lie hidden behind
the fetishized forms of modern economic rationality.
To read Marx as an economic determinist as many
of his followers have done, or to accuse him of
economism as many of his critics have done, is to miss
the mark in as much as Capital was a critique of a
social world in which:
(a) The exchange of things is a primary condition of
intersubjectivity.
(b) Things appear as bearers of exchange value or
prices.
(c) Access to things is primarily mediated by the
ability to purchase them.
(d) Human activity is subordinated to the movement
of things and the fluctuations of the market (for the
more traditional reading of Marx’s economics, see
Dobb 1946, Meek 1973, Sweezy 1969, Mandel 1978).
Capital was a critique of a society which actualizes
economism. It treated the very idea of ‘the economic’
as a product of definite social relations of production
and conceived a truly human, social world in terms of
the overcoming of ‘the economic’ as such. Capital was
an attempt to understand a social world in which
everything has its price, even the capacities of our
body and soul, and humanity is a slave to the products
of its own labor (for this social reading of Marx’s
economics, see Sayer 1979, Clarke 1982).
The key proposition in Marx’s ‘economic’ writings
was that economic forms and categories are the visible
expression of determinate social relations of pro-
duction. It is misleading, therefore, to say that Marx
called the economy the base on which legal, political,
and ideological superstructures rest (Williams 1983).
Marx was not consistent in his use of terminology but
if we can still speak of a ‘base,’ it is constituted by
social relations and not by their economic forms. The
imagery that informs Capital is not that of base and
superstructure but of form and content—economic
form and social content. The approach that Marx
adopted was to start by analyzing the forms themselves
(commodity, value, use value, price, money, capital,
interest, profit, etc.), then uncover the alienated social
relations concealed behind these forms, and finally
explain why these social relations manifest themselves
in the form of material relations between things (Rubin
1972). Marx called this post-enlightenment form of
superstition and domination the ‘fetishism of the
commodity.’
2. Critique of Political Philosophy
One potential weakness of this social approach to
Marx’s ‘economic’ writings is that it might give the
impression that the economic forms of capitalist social
relations are its only forms, or at least that they are its
essential forms. Other noneconomic forms of modern
social life—moral, legal, political, cultural, etc.—
might thus be perceived as being in some sense
9312
epiphenomenal or inessential. Even when it was
recognized that Marx offered a social critique of
political economy rather than an economics, there still
remained something rather arbitrary in the way in
which he treated the economic as a privileged sphere of
social life. Within traditional Marxism this led to a
number of possible solutions. At one pole, that of
revisionist Marxism, legal, political, and cultural
forms usually appeared to be entirely dissociated from
and independent of capitalist social relations (as in
Eduard Bernstein’s E
olutionary Socialism). At the
other pole, that of revolutionary Marxism, they
usually appeared to be entirely determined by capi-
talist social relations (as in Lenin’s State and Re
-
olution). In the middle they have often appeared in the
manner of structuralist Marxism to be ‘determined in
the last instance’ by economic forces or to be ‘relatively
autonomous’ and have their own efficacy (Althusser
1965, Poulantzas 1980). Within most forms of con-
temporary Marxism, it still seems that there are
immediate internal connections between capitalist
social relations and economic forms that are not
shared between capitalist social relations and the
moral, legal, political, and cultural forms of the
modern age.
For some Marxists, particularly those confronted
by the rise of fascism in the 1930s, there was a need to
rescue Marxism from the grip of economists and
revive it as a theory of the whole social totality. The
key to achieving this was to reconsider the relations
between Marx and the tradition of German idealism
out of which he emerged, and in particular the relation
between Marx and Hegel. This was characteristic of
those Hegelian Marxists who belonged to or were
influenced by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
They argued that, if economic determinism is one
aspect of our social world (the aspect which Marx
analyzed in detail), the other is that which Hegel called
the ‘right of subjective freedom’ which he analyzed in
its various legal, moral, political, and aesthetic dimen-
sions (e.g., Hegel, Philosophy of Right). The basic
insight of Hegelian Marxism in all its forms was that
there is more to capitalism than the circuits of capital:
there is Kant as well as Bentham, political philosophy
as well as political economy, the fetish of the subject as
well as the fetish of the commodity, free will, morality,
and personification as well as determination, instru-
mental rationality, and reification (Luka! cs 1971,
Luka! cs 1975, Marcuse 1989, Adorno 1973). However,
the most characteristic gesture of critical theory was to
treat the forms of right, law, and morality either in
terms of the logic of illusion (the illusions of liberal
individualism) or a logic of anachronism (treating
aspects of bourgeois society in the period of its
ascendancy as if they were still operative in its period
of decline; see Critical Theory: Frankfurt School ).
The one-sided, economic view of capitalist social
relations has also been unconvincing to non-Marxists
who have recognized that the modern age conveys

ideas of personality, free will, moral agency, individual
rights, legal equality, collective self-regulation, etc. as
well as material relations between things (Kolakowski
1978, Lichtheim 1964). In response, Marxists of
various stripes have wanted Marxism to acknowledge
that the individual is a juridical, moral, political, and
cultural subject as well as a ‘bearer’ of economic forces
and that bourgeois society produces ‘high’ moral,
political, and cultural values as well as the bare cash
nexus. If it is inadequate to say that the language of
individual right and moral agency is merely an illusion,
or that it is an anachronism inappropriate to our own
age, then the difficulty is how to understand the place
of this language within the totality of social life and
how to move, as it were, from the circuits of capital to
capitalism as a whole.
3. Humanist Marxism and Stalinism
In the latter half of the 1950s, a new wind was
beginning to blow. In the East it was marked by
mounting dissidence partly in reaction to the reve-
lations made at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU,
the 1956 Hungarian uprising and its suppression by
Soviet troops. In the West it was marked by the birth
of the New Left and of the new social movements
(antiwar, antinuclear, shop stewards, etc.), which
fought against the moral myopia characteristic of the
Cold War and for a perspective capable of looking
beyond existing social forms and comprehending new
social forces. In the Colonies it was marked by anti-
colonial and anti-imperialist revolts whose main aim
was national self-determination (Fanon 1965). Within
all of these movements there were residues, often
strong, of a more traditional Marxism. However there
was also growing evidence of a Marxism which put
human needs before dogma, and social relations
before institutional arrangements, which recognized
that choices can and must be made along the way to
socialism and that conscious human agency plays a
part in the making of history. It was a Marxism which
rejected the coupling of socialism and barbarism that
was the mark of Stalinist rule and which sought to
reconnect Marxism to the idea of humanity (see
Totalitarianism).
As an alternative to the deformed socialism of the
post-Stalinist states, there was posited a humanist
Marxism which reaffirmed faith in the revolutionary
potential not of the human race or of the dictatorship
of the proletariat, but of real men and women. Such
dissidents were denounced by the official communist
press, and sometimes by the more orthodox Trotskyist
opposition, for the sins of idealism, subjectivism,
romanticism, clericalism, and humanism. But they
represented the rediscovery of the ‘social’ in socialism
that had been squeezed out of existence once the
latter was turned into a ruling abstraction (see
Dunayavskeya 1964, Draper 1977, James 1992).
Marxist Social Thought, History of
Marxist humanism emphasized Marx’s own aware-
ness of the limitations of a critique in which ‘the
connection of political economy with the state, law,
morality, civil life, etc. is only dealt with insofar as
political economy itself professes to deal with these
subjects,’ as well as his ambitious life-project: to
‘present one after another a critique of law, of
morality, politics, etc. … and then finally … to show
the connection of the whole.’ However, as the Marxist
historian Edward Thompson put it, there was also a
growing sense that Marx himself was ‘trapped within
the circuits of capital’ and ‘only partly sprung that trap
in Capital’ (Thompson 1978). It seemed that Marx was
increasingly sucked into the theoretical whirlpool of
political economy whose categories were interrogated
and re-interrogated but whose main premise, the
possibility of isolating the economic from other fields
of social study, was left intact. The structure of Capital
appeared to be dominated by the categories of its
antagonist, namely the economic sphere itself, and to
remain fixed within this order of things.
It was widely argued that, although Marx could not
be blamed for the deformations of traditional Marx-
ism, neither could he be simply exonerated. There was
no ‘virgin untouchable purity of original Marxism to
which Stalinism owes no kinship’ (Thompson 1978). If
Marx’s one-sidedness appeared, like Antigone’s com-
mitment to family love, wrong only because it was
one-sided and to be valid within its own terrain, the
ideology of Stalinism was seen to justify the exercise of
totalitarian terror against both its ‘own’ people and
subject nations, and to conceal the social relations
(within the workplace, within the party, within the
trade unions, within everyday life) which lie beneath
absurdly idealized conceptions of state property and
workers government.
Affirming the unity of human experience, humanist
Marxism treated Marx’s failure to explore other
subjects systematically as symptomatic of a certain
imprisonment within the very economic categories
whose social content he dedicated himself to under-
standing. It argued that law, morality, culture, etc.
belonged to a different logic from that of capital and
that the influence of the latter should be conceived as
one of corruption rather than constitution. This
attitude might be exemplified in Thompson’s assertion
at the end of his study of class law in eighteenth-
century England that the rule of law itself is an
‘unqualified human good’ (Thompson 1977). Most
important, Marxist humanism maintained that the
philistine character of official Communist ideology lay
in its denial of the creative agency of people. When
people are considered merely as units in a chain of
determined circumstances, what disappears is the fact
that we are moral and intellectual beings capable of
making our own history, confronting adversity, and
surmounting the limitations imposed by circum-
stances. It was this denial of human agency that
Thompson called a ‘heresy against man’ and which
9313
Marxist Social Thought, History of
destroyed from within the social dimension of Marx-
ism. In the Communist world this heresy against
people took the shape of a pseudo-Marxist ideology
which served only to buttress the ruling bureaucracy.
4. New Left Marxism
The rise of nontraditional forms of Marxism—critical
theory in the 1930s, humanist Marxism in the 1950s,
and then New Left Marxism in the 1960s—was
accompanied by the discovery, translation, and dis-
semination of the young Marx’s early writings. These
included his analysis of alienated labor as the key to
understanding private property (in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts), his attack on the latent
authoritarianism of the modern state that he (wrongly)
attributed to Hegel’s philosophy of right (Critique of
Hegel’s doctrine of the state), and his revolt against the
anti-Semitism he detected within some sections of the
German socialist movement (On The Jewish Question).
The recovery of Marx’s analysis of the modern social
division between the self-interested atomism of civil
society and the abstract community of the political
state—and its manifestation as a split within every
individual between the bourgeois and citoyen—helped
rescue the social character of Marx’s critique from
both the stagnant depths of economic determinism
and the giddy heights of political philosophy. In
practice this meant the renewal of the critique of the
cultural, legal, and political forms of modern society.
This included state property as well as private prop-
erty, collectivity as well as individual personality,
bureaucracy and the Party as well as representative
government, and the endeavor to overcome the bour-
geois and socialist mystifications which surrounded
these forms of cultural, legal, and political life (Colletti
1974, McLelland 1969).
The exposure of Marx’s early writings to public
discussion was accompanied by the publication (in
German in 1953 and translated into English in 1973),
of Marx’s rough draft of Capital, known as the
Grundrisse and written in a rush of revolutionary
expectation in 1857–8 (Nicolaus 1973, Rosdolsky
1977). This made Marx’s debt to Hegel in his later
‘scientific’ writings far clearer than it had been. There
was interplay between the revelation of previously
unknown, untranslated, or obscure writings by Marx
and what contemporary Marxists themselves wanted
to find in Marx’s work. It brought to the fore a
thematic present on the margins of Capital but more
evident in the Grundrisse, namely Marx’s critique of
the alienated social forms of modern ‘subjectivity’: the
forms taken not by the products of human labor but
by the producers themselves, the subjects of human
labor who produce goods, bring their commodities to
the market, interact with one another, express their
creativity and take their leisure.
9314
New Left Marxism, with its very strong spirit of
rebellion, discovered an implicit hypothesis in Marx’s
work: that the fetishism of the commodity (the product
of human labor) is accompanied by the fetishism of the
subject (the producer or laborer) as the split halves of
an original unity. Now everything was conceived as a
‘social relation’—money, capital, the law, the state,
abstract right, etc.—and the times looked promising
for Marxist social thought. There was a revival or
resurgence of Marxist writings on the critique of law
(Pashukanis 1983, Fine 1984), the critique of the
capitalist and socialist state (Holloway and Picciotto
1978, Clarke 1991), the critique of bourgeois culture
(Jameson 2000), the critique of alienation (Meszaros
1970, Ollman 1973), the conditions of radical democ-
racy (Miliband 1988, Habermas 1974), etc.
In post-1968 politics, Marx’s early writings were
often cited in order to dismiss the whole complex,
differentiated edifice of bourgeois authority and demo-
cracy as a sham and to put in its place an alternative
conception of ‘true democracy.’ New Left Marxism
distinguished between two traditions: that of formal
democracy aligned to representation, and that of true
democracy aligned to an anti-representational tra-
dition of natural law indebted to Rousseau. The idea
was taken from the young Marx, that the so-
called democratic state allows the people to appear
only as ‘fantasy, illusion, representation,’ that it offers
no more than a ‘ceremony’ or ‘spice’ of popular
existence, that it expresses ‘the lie that the state is in the
interest of the people,’ and that the existing world has
to be ‘turned on its head’ if the people are to enter the
political stage as they should, in person rather than
through representation, in flesh and blood rather than
in name alone, in actuality rather than in mere form.
This was the thread that Lucio Colletti picked up in
his introduction to the Penguin edition of Marx’s
Early Writings (1974). He argued that the revolution-
ary tradition From Rousseau to Lenin (1972) had as its
center the critical analysis of parliamentarism and of
the modern representative principle itself, and the
conviction that sovereignty must no longer be trans-
ferred to government by the people but be retained by
the people themselves. The idea of revolution was
represented not as a transfer of power from one class
to another but a transition from one form of power to
another—from the alien form of the political state in
which the people are only ideally present, to a power
that is ‘directly into the hands of the people.’
This spirit of radicalism was caught, for example, in
Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1977). He
directed the critique of representation east and west: at
a Leninism where the representation of the working
class radically opposes itself to the working class, and
at a parliamentarism where the people in miniature
opposes itself to the people themselves. He depicted
the representative principle as ‘the quintessence of
modern domination … the concrete inversion of life
… the heart of the unrealism of the real society.’ The

Commune\Council, by contrast, was shown as the
form in which all prior divisions between rulers and
ruled are finally overcome and where specialization,
hierarchy, and separation end. Debord construed the
latter as an institution that is fundamentally anti-
institutional, a form of representation which only
actuates the generalization of communication, a form
of organization which recognizes its own dissolution
as a separate organization, a power which can no
longer combat alienation with alienated forms.
This vision of the Commune\Council was vulner-
able to the criticism that it was as abstract as the power
against which it protested. It encountered the realist
criticism that, viewed as an institutional system and
bared of its revolutionary mystique, the Commune\
Council manifests its own tendency toward hierarchy
and alienation. The rationalist criticism argued that,
judged in terms of its capacity for rational decision-
making, the face-to-face structures of the Commune\
Council fall victim to the vagaries of public opinion or
the contingencies of the loudest voice. The modernist
criticism argued that the idea of a true democracy
echoed an old European tradition of natural law
theory, eventually going back to Aristotle, which
conceived the political state and civil society as an
undifferentiated unity.
5. Contemporary Marxism
Marx often defined himself through his opposition to
Hegel. He praised Hegel for having discovered the
‘correct laws of the dialectic’ but indicted him for
mystifying the dialectic. He argued that in Hegel the
dialectic was ‘standing on its head’ because it trans-
formed the process of thinking into an independent
subject; while he, Marx, recognized that ‘the ideal is
nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of
man and translated into forms of thought’ (Postface to
Capital 1). He argued that Hegel’s mystical dialectic
served as a philosophy of the state to ‘glorify what
exists,’ while his own dialectic was by contrast ‘a
scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie’
because it ‘included in its positive understanding of
what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation,
its inevitable destruction.’ Hegel was Marx’s Doppel-
ganger: the ghostly double that allowed Marx to be
Marx. By making Hegel logical and conceptual, Marx
constructed himself as historical and material.
This account was deceptive both in respect of Hegel
and Marx himself. In fact, Marx’s analysis of the
value-form was no less logical and no more historical
than Hegel’s analysis of the form of abstract right.
Their respective methodologies were almost identical
(Fine 2001). Within contemporary Marxism the
relation between Marx and Hegel continued to con-
found scholars who echoed Marx’s own conviction
that Hegel got everything upside down and that Marx
was the one who put the world and Hegel back on their
Marxist Social Thought, History of
feet. There was a tendency within Marxism to treat
what Marx said about Hegel as the truth of Hegel
without any independent judgement, and to fixate on
the logic of inversion which overshadowed Marx’s
own writings. One result of this was an increasing
stress on the historical specificity not only of the
objects of Marx’s analysis (such as the economic forms
of value, money, capital, etc.) but also of the critical
consciousness that attempts to grasp them.
For example, in his critique of traditional Marxism
and revival of critical theory, Moshe Postone (1996)
radicalizes Marx by pushing the idea of historical
specificity to its limit. He argues that not only are the
economic categories of Marx’s theory historically
specific but also the categories Marx employs to
analyze these economic forms, especially that of labor.
Postone’s charge against traditional Marxism is that it
does not historicise enough, that it treats certain aspect
of Marx’s theory, say the mode of production in
contrast to the mode of distribution, as transhistorical.
Postone pushes to the fore the historical specificity not
only of the commodity form, but also of industrial
production, the working class, the category of labor as
a tool of analysis, and even the epistemological
opposition between subject and object. He looks to the
transformation, abolition, supersession, destruction
and\or transcendence not only of the historically
specific forms of social life characteristic of our age,
but also of the historically specific critical conscious-
ness whose aim is to abolish both these forms.
This type of Marxism takes to the limit Marx’s
critique of bourgeois ideology: that is, the tendency to
universalize the particular and to eternize what are in
fact historically specific values, including those of
science and critique themselves. Its conception of
history has in turn opened up new areas of debate. The
idea that a relation is historically specific, however,
tells us little about the nature of the relation itself or
about whether it ought to be abolished. It reflects
rather the culture of a historically self-conscious age
that declares that both knowledge and reality are
transitory and surpassable and that what seems
unquestionably true to one age differs from what
seems unquestionably true to another. It is a culture
that discloses a variety of conflicting historical ‘truths’
with no transhistorical criteria for judging between
them. It opens the door to a variety of ‘post-Marxist’
outcomes: a skeptical paralysis which abandons all
faith in knowledge and enlightenment; a pragmatic
make-believe which hopes that a pretended faith might
do the work of an actual faith; a new faith in
democracy and democratization which offers a singu-
lar political solution to all the alienated forms of
social life; or even a new kind of ideological fanaticism
which seeks to achieve certainty only by making itself
true (see Ideology, Sociology of ).
Marx argued in The Communist Manifesto that the
fleeting transitoriness of all values, relations, forms,
and types of knowledge was an expression of a
9315
Marxist Social Thought, History of
practical nihilism inherent in bourgeois society: ‘All
fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient
and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept
away, all new formed ones become antiquated before
they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.’
Bourgeois society, Marx wrote, drowns religious
fervor, chivalrous enthusiasm, and philistine senti-
mentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation; it
resolves personal worth into exchange value; it strips
of its halo every occupation hitherto honored; it
reduces the family to a mere money relation; it
profanes all that is holy; it substitutes expansion,
convulsion, uncertainty, motion, smoke for everything
that was permanent, fixed and certain. The bourgeois
in this account sees only the transitoriness of things in
a world where nothing lasts, nothing has value. Marx
emphasized the revolutionary character of the modern
bourgeoisie in confronting traditional philosophy and
in devaluing all eternal values and timeless ideas. Yet
to the extent that Marxism turns the idea of historical
specificity into a doctrine of movement, transitoriness,
and surpassability, rather than into an investigation of
the burden of history bearing down on the present, it
begins to mimic the destructive aspect of bourgeois
consciousness. It sees the historicity of things only in
the sense that every existing social form is equally
deprived of value.
In the face of these difficulties within contemporary
critical theory, Ju$ rgen Habermas (1996) and the New
German School of Critical Theory have reaffirmed the
rational aspect of Marxism by appealing to the
rational structures of an ideal speech situation. Haber-
mas launched a major critique of the attachment of
Marxist social thought to what he reads as the nihilistic
ways of thinking characteristic of postmodernism and
has endeavored to reconnect Marxism with a repub-
lican tradition as indebted to Kant as to Rousseau. In
pursuit of a postmetaphysical theory of right, he draws
heavily on Kant’s Metaphysics of Justice in re-
conceptualizing radical democracy as a differentiated,
complex, lawful, and representative system of right,
buttressed by an active civil society and open public
sphere. Habermas achieves this re-appropriation of
Kant by proceduralizing natural right and by thus
overcoming what he sees as Hegel’s emphatic stat-
isation of right and Marx’s equally emphatic soci-
alization of right. Hegel and Marx’s radical critiques
of natural right theory are both viewed with sus-
picion.
6. Conclusion
The problem of what Marxist social thought is, is not
resolved. One wing of contemporary Marxism, some-
times called the Social Relations School, has perhaps
protested too much that x and y and z are ‘social
relations’ and has thereby lost sight of the natural
9316
world of things and people, use values, and human
beings, which inhabit these social relations. Social
relations are turned into a subject in their own right
and everything else appears by comparison inessential
and derivative. The reification of ‘the social’ as the
foundation of all cultural, political, and economic
forms has in turn sparked either antifoundationalist
critiques of Marxism or attempts to reconstruct
Marxism as a form of antifoundationalism (Nancy
1991, Derrida 1994). The other wing of contemporary
Marxism is known as analytic or rational choice
Marxism. It has been characterized not only by its
respect for traditional canons of argumentation to
which it subjects Marxist propositions, but also by a
methodological and normative individualism which
seeks to reinstate the individual in Marxist thought,
both in terms of historical explanation of existing
society and the formulation of a just society. Rational
choice Marxism may be seen as reflecting the rational-
ization and individualization of contemporary West-
ern society. However, the proposition that it is possible
to analyze social life as if its basic units were rational
individuals is a statement of social ontology which
takes the perceived weakening of social bonds within
the modern age as its starting point (Cohen 1978,
Elster 1985).
Marxist social thought is now considered ‘dead’ by
many commentators. This perception is due partly to
external reasons, such as the decline and fall of official
Communism, but also to internal deficiencies within
contemporary Marxism itself. Thus the sociology of
Erving Goffman and the discourse theory of Michel
Foucault seem to have more to say about power
relations in the prison, asylum, factory, family, army,
school, police, everyday life, etc. than Marxist state-
theorists. Yet Marxism remains a crucial resource if
the drive to dissociate power from social life or to
subordinate social life to the unidimension of power is
not to be entrenched.
Marxist social theory is an international phenom-
enon with strong roots in the West, the East and the
Colonies. It has now entered into a new era. It has lost
the state support it received from the Soviet Union and
its satellites. It has lost the ideological closure with
which it was once associated. Its attachment to social
movements has also declined. It is now part of a post-
Communist age and has to respond to new problems
of globalization. In this transition, the history of
Marxist social thought is itself being reviewed. Marx’s
relation both to the natural law tradition and to the
other nineteenth century rebels against the tradition,
from Hegel to Nietzsche, has been revisited in more
open and critical ways. The distinction between
Marxism and other forms of twentieth century social
thought has been made less sharp and severe. What
comes to mind is the thought that Marxist social
thought does not have its own history and that what
we call its history is a manifold of stories each
construing itself as the narrative heir to Marx’s

writings. The potentiality this opens up is of a new
wave of social thought which will draw inspiration
from Marx’s writings without all the old demarcations
and dependencies.
See also: Aristotelian Social Thought; Communism;
Critical Theory: Frankfurt School; Existential Social
Theory; Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937); Marx, Karl
(1818–89); Marxian Economic Thought; Marxism in
Contemporary Sociology; Marxism\Leninism; Mar-
xist Archaeology; Marxist Geography; Nostalgic
Social Thought; Pragmatist Social Thought, History
of; Socialism; Utilitarian Social Thought, History of;
Weberian Social Thought, History Of
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