Southern Political Science Association

Marx's Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx's Theory of Social Reality. by Carol C. Gould Review by: A. Belden Fields The Journal of Politics, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Aug., 1979), pp. 975-976 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2129835 . Accessed: 17/03/2014 21:36
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BOOK REVIEWS

975

Marx's Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx's Theory of Social Reality. By CAROL C. GOULD. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1978. Pp. xxvi, 208. $15.00.) Carol Gould's major purpose in writing this book is to establish the point that while Marx did not dwell on a description of what the final stage of communism would look like structurally and while he did not directly and explicitly address himself to a definition of freedom and justice, he did indeed possess conceptions of human freedom and human justice. In order to reconstruct and make explicit the concepts of freedom and justice in Marx, Gould turns to Marx's Grundrisse. The Grundrisse does not speak for itself on these concepts. It needs to be interpreted. Gould employs what she calls the "dialectical method of critical reconstruction" to clarify Marx's philosophically implicit conceptions of freedom and justice. Her major adversary is the deterministic interpretation of Marx which sees causation rooted in "objective" historical laws over which human individuals have no control and thus no real freedom. Gould argues that while such might be a satisfactory interpretation of Hegel, it is not of Marx. She sees Marx as being much more Aristotelian in distinguishing between various levels and kinds of causation and in seeing human beings as self-realizing beings. Gould argues that while for Marx history sets the context for human choice and action, history is itself "the product of the choices and actions of agents and the course of its development is therefore possibilistic and contingent on these choices and actions." (28). According to Gould, Marx traces all causal efficacy ultimately back to purposive human activity. And, unlike both Aristotle and Kant, in whose theories self-realization remains abstract and the actualization of a prefixed conception of potentiality, she sees Marx as leaving open the possibility for virtually unlimited choice in the domain of self-actualization. In this sense, although Gould herself does not make this comparison, Marx is more like Sartre, who sees individuals creating their own potentialities in the very process of realizing them. For Marx, then, freedom is the activity of individuals who are realizing themselves. Freedom presupposes the overcoming of natural and social necessity or domination. But it is a process or an activity engaged in by individuals. It is not a structural arrange-

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meant or an abstraction outside of that concrete activity. Justice, the second sought after conception, involves reciprocity and mutuality. It is the link between self-actualizing individuals, the characteristic of a true community. That is to say, in a just society individuals do not merely leave each other alone to realize themselves in some sort of privatistic, isolated manner. There would be no community in that case. Rather, in a just society people give concrete recognition to their understanding of human equality by actively enhancing each other in the use of freedom to develop themselves as non-instrumental beings with particular needs and particular purposes. Thus Gould establishes that Marx did indeed have a normative ontology. Her book is a very interesting refutation of those who portray Marx as an historical relativist who could not even criticize capitalism from a moral point of view because he had no historically transcendent conception of justice while capitalism had an historical function. Gould argues that while freedom and justice could only be manifest under communism for Marx, they were still universalistic conceptions which could serve as evaluative criteria for any system at any point in time. In the introduction, Gould claims that her "dialectical method of critical reconstruction" can also serve as a guide to practice. This she does not attempt to demonstrate in the body of the text. She also claims that her method is freer from the constraints of the interpreted text than is the hermeneutic school of interpretation. It might be that she is a little too free, particularly when she argues, "for Marx circumstances or the objective world have no causal efficacy." (83) While it would have been nice to see a demonstration of the utility of her interpretative method for practice and while the interpretation itself might play a little too freely with Marx's own thinking, on the whole Carol Gould has made a serious and an interesting contribution to the literature that tries to understand Marx philosophically.
A. BELDEN FIELDS,

University of Illinois, Urbana

Women Under Communism. By BARBARA WOLFE JANCAR. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Pp. x, 291. $16.00.)

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