Review: Materialism and the Dialectical Method by Maurice Cornforth

Where does one go to learn about Marxist philosophy and dialectical materialism? Cornforth provides one avenue in Materialism and the Dialectical Method. This work is written in an accessible style, with the ideas developed in an intuitive and clear manner in plain language and with helpful examples. Cornforth includes lengthy quotes by the most prominent names in Marxism (predominantly Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, but also Hegel, Marx, and Mao), giving the reader a sense of the intellectual tradition. The book covers the difference between idealism and materialism, contrasts dialectical versus metaphysical modes of thought, and introduces various principles of dialectics (contradiction, development, interpenetration, negation of the negation, etc). It’s a solid place to start, and I think it is a good option for a curious beginner.

That said, I found it not particularly useful as a more advanced reader, and here it stands in contrast with other works that I think also serve as good entry points to Marxist philosophy: Ludwig Fuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy by Engels, The Dialectical Biologist by Levins and Lewontin (for scientists, in particular), The Development of the Monist View of History by Plekhanov. These works present philosophical problems with more depth, and query philosophical failures in greater detail, rewarding the advanced or repeat reader. They also present the history of philosophy as a battle of ideas, showing dialectical materialism to be the winning philosophy. In the hands of these authors, philosophy feels very alive and yet incompletely solved; it is portrayed as a rich, developing field and invites the reader to join it. Cornforth’s book is undoubtedly written in more accessible language, but it is also more didactic; the party higher-ups have done the studying, and identified the solution, and it is up to the reader to learn the material so they can help change the world. A curious beginner up for a more challenging read may get more out of these other works.

Something I did find interesting about my read of this book was comparing its evolution between editions. The first edition (1953) lauds Lysenko as a shining example of dialectical materialism applied to the natural sciences. By the fourth edition (1968), Lysenko had become a cautionary tale of dogmatism. To a lesser extent, language around Stalin and the Soviet Union also shifted. Reading between the lines, Cornforth seems to hew close to his party’s line. This isn’t, on its face, objectionable, but I wish that his editorial notes had revealed more about his reflections on how he had made such an incorrect assessment (about Lysenko) to start, and how that shaped his thinking.

Cornforth’s introductory book is, at this point, over half a century old. Some of his examples would have been more topical than they are currently (e.g., nuclear bomb, the space race). There has also been considerable philosophical development since then: Marxism versus analytical philosophy, and Marxism versus post-modernism are pertinent debates absent from Cornforth’s book. Perhaps it is time for a new introductory book?

Review: A Social History of Analytic Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy traces the evolution of Analytic Philosophy from its early 20th century roots in Cambridge, Oxford, and the Vienna Circle, through its rise to hegemony in anglosphere academia in the second half of the 20th century, to its absorption of feminist and decolonial schools of thought in the 21st century. Schuringa challenges Analytic Philosophy’s self-mythologizing: the origin story that Analytic Philosophy sprung from Gottlob Frege’s natural language approach to logic was constructed by Michael Drummett in the 1970s. Schuringa also criticizes Analytic Philosophy for viewing itself to be largely synonymous with western philosophy, despite its disregard for Western philosophical developments after Kant. 

Schuringa attributes Analytic Philosophy’s present hegemony to its alignment with liberalism. Unlike Marxism and other critical theories, Analytic Philosophy largely escaped McCarthyism. Its Humean conception of the world as an unchanging collection of facts to be interpreted by the mind leads it to regard the world as unchangeable beyond the (liberal) status quo, even as it takes on questions of gender and race. Schuringa argues that this liberalism shapes not only analytic philosophy's content and conclusions but also its mode of philosophical inquiry:

The ideology of analytic philosophy is that of liberalism. Accordingly, participants in its discussions are conceived of as entering a liberal marketplace of ideas. Circulation on the market is the mechanism by which the best ideas win out. It is presupposed that each participant may enter the market as they see fit, and take full part in the process of exchange. Entry conditions are not considered – it is taken for granted that all are free, sovereign individuals. The maintenance of the fiction of equal entry, of course, just as in the case of the commercial marketplace, serves the interests of those who in fact exercise power.

The author identifies three tendencies in Analytic Philosophy which results in its stodgy resistance to change and its liquidation of other forms of philosophy:

1. Deference to science: analytic philosophers either attempted to turn philosophy into a science (empiricism, Bertrand Russell) or serve as science’s handmaiden (Vienna Circle), thereby limiting the scope of philosophy to only what science could not answer.
2. Retreat to common sense: taking on a “noble savage” view of the common man and never questioning how culture, religion and other such factors shape our expectations, philosophy became a series of thought experiments and appeals to intuition (“intuition pumping”).
3. Impulse to therapy: the skepticism arising from empiricism turned philosophy into an ailment that must be cured; what is needed is not a constructive philosophy but a critique of philosophy.

These intellectual developments are presented through the book's social history of the discipline. But the “society” of this social history is narrowly scoped: beyond university administration and academic publishing, there is relatively little discussion of Analytic Philosophy’s interaction with the general public. Other than Analytic Philosophy's relatively friendly encounters with McCarthyism, Schuringa discusses only effective altruism as a significant point of contact between Analytic Philosophy and the broader public. Proponents of this utilitarian strain of analytic ethics seek to maximize their own wealth so that they can devote it to charities that maximize quality-adjusted life years. I ran into many “effective altruists” during my time in the Bay Area, and concur with the author’s assessment of its philosophical poverty, although it seems fairly largely confined to elite tech circles. But several generations of students have now taken philosophy courses at universities dominated by Analytic Philosophy. What broader impacts has it had on society? Schuringa stops short of answering this question.

I found this book valuable for its coherent overview of the major figures and overall trajectory of Analytic Philosophy — things I had put together piecemeal while reading about other 20th century philosophical movements. However, I also recommend it with reservations: the author sees little of value in Analytic Philosophy, thus reassuring me of my own pre-conceived notions. Schuringa writes polemically; I agree with the author that western philosophy’s preoccupation with Analytic Philosophy has not met the needs of our times. Schuringa also writes dismissively; he credits a handful of thinkers for their rigor and originality (Wittgenstein in particular), but dismisses most for narrow-mindedness, sloppiness, and oblivious recourse to metaphysics. Why did so many thinkers pursue this dead-end approach to philosophy? Schuringa's answers of McCarthyism, tacit support of liberalism, and journal monopolies don't satisfy me as a full answer for its appeal. Rather than feeling challenged to integrate new material into my philosophical views, I found myself suspiciously wondering what was left out, or painted with too snide a brush. 

Review: Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo

Losurdo’s most important intervention in this work is to reframe the idea of Western Marxism as “a product of defeat” — to borrow a phrase from Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, to which Losurdo is directly responding. Writing in the 1970s, at the peak of the socialist national liberation movements, Anderson explains:

The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia, cause and consequence of its corruption inside Russia, is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period. Its major works were, without exception, produced in situations of political isolation and despair.

As Losurdo argues, this period was not a failure of the spread of socialist revolution, but a striking success. It was simply not recognized as such by Western Marxists due to their lack of appreciation of the demands of social construction (necessary for satisfaction of economic needs and evasion of neocolonialism) and their expectation that the state should “wither away” more rapidly (impossible when it is needed for construction of a new society). Having taken on idealistic and dogmatic characteristics, Western Marxism neglected the historical and geographical context of these early socialist revolutions.

The final section in the book presents Losurdo’s argument for how “Marxism in the West can be reborn” and is also valuable. Losurdo argues that Marx and Engels saw the path to communism as a long and gradual one. Interestingly, he also highlights that Marx anticipated that the bourgeois revolution would extend political rights more universally; history instead showed that these gains came through the pressures exerted by worker-led and anti-colonial revolutions. These revolutions faced conditions of economic underdevelopment and imperial pressure, and achieved neither universal political emancipation nor economic emancipation. Western Marxism criticized these nations for not quickly delivering on the promises of later stages of communism envisioned by Marx:

The concrete history of the new post-revolutionary society, which seeks to develop itself among the tentative contradictions, difficulties, and errors of every kind, is defined en bloc as a degeneration and betrayal of the real movement in the name of the remote and utopian futures, an attitude foreign to Marx and Engels and which deprives Marxism of any real emancipatory project.

To take such an attitude means arbitrarily amputating the plural temporalities that characterize the revolutionary project of Marx and Engels. It means a temporal amputation that is simultaneously spatial. It concentrates exclusively on the remote future, read in a utopian vein, and leads to the exclusion of the vast majority of the world and humanity that has begun to take the first steps toward modernity and has sometimes even stopped at its threshold. And so the essential condition for the rebirth of Marxism in the West is the transcendence of this temporal and spatial amputation of the revolutionary project it has carried out.

Western Marxism criticized without being part of “real struggles” — a practice Marx mocked. Its leading figures instead yearned for an immediate rupture with the state of things, while refusing “to take up the problems arising from taking power” (Part V, 5 — also an essential section). Losurdo’s ultimate conclusion is that “Overcoming doctrinaire attitudes, the willingness to measure oneself against one’s own time, and philosophizing rather than prophesying are the necessary preconditions for Marxism’s rebirth and development in the West.”

Published in Italian in 2017 and in English in 2024, this book is both the most recent of Losurdo’s works to be translated into English and one of his final works before his death in 2018 at the age of 76. Perhaps aware that he had not much life ahead of him, this book reads a little rushed, although I agree with his overall thesis, the need for this critique of Western Marxism and his prescription for a path forward. This hurriedness is unfortunate, because his argument has been rather summarily dismissed by Western Marxism.

A more unavoidable critique would have taken the form of an intellectual biography and critical balance sheet of Western Marxism, as Losurdo provides for Nietzsche in his paradigm-shifting Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel. Instead, Losurdo engages very briefly with each thinker — many of whom fit awkwardly into the Western Marxist canon, like Arendt. His critiques tend to follow the pattern of a quote by a Western Marxist praising Western Liberalism juxtaposed against the materialist, realist, ambitious and optimistic positions taken by revolutionary figures in the anti-colonial movement (Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, etc). Again, I don’t think Losurdo is wrong to criticize these writers for ignoring colonialism, but I find his attacks rather superficial and unsystematic, particularly compared to some of his other works. 

For new readers, I’d recommend instead Liberalism: A Counter-history or Democracy or Bonapartism? as entry points into his works. For those that want a more systematic presentation of Losurdo’s support for national liberation movements and defense of actually existing socialism, I would recommend Class Struggle instead — in particular, his insistence on technological progress and on the consideration of class struggle as the struggle for recognition are ideas touched on in this book but better developed in that work.

For readers familiar with his work, you might be surprised how little new you find in these pages. There are passages remixed from all three books recommended above, as well as from his 2004 essay on Arendt (“Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism”), his 1999 essay “Flight from History?”, and his book on Stalin. There’s nothing wrong with this — I, too, revisit ideas and examples over and over. But I think a remix should add up to more than the sum of its parts and your most vital blows must land on your targets.

Review: Lenin, A Study on the Unity of His Thought by György Lukács

This work is of interest for two reasons. The first is for providing a snapshot of how Lenin and the USSR were received by Marxists of other countries in the early 1920s. As Lukacs himself writes in his 1967 postscript, "As a document of how a not inconsiderable group of Marxists saw Lenin's personality and mission, his place in the course of world events, it is therefore certainly not without interest." The October Revolution changed the course of history, and it is interesting to see how socialists interpreted it at the time. 

The second is for the Postscript itself, which is a candid reflection of how the author viewed his influential work, the hits and misses. I find it valuable to see how admirable thinkers reflect on their work and mature over time.

As a work that outlined the unity of Lenin's thinking, I found it lacking. I would have liked to see more of an intellectual development traced out, and maybe a critical balance sheet tallied up, while this work represented more of a snapshot of his final positions, and was so laudatory that I had to roll my eyes a few times. Overall, the work seems more aimed at criticism of the failures of other parties to bring about a revolution, than of really presenting the unity of Lenin's thought. Lukacs targets the opportunists (and sometimes the revolutionary utopians) of the West, pointing to Lenin's "thinking through each question radically to its very end: in radically transforming his theoretical insight into practice." (Then again, it is often more meaningful to define something in opposition to something else, as opposed to as an abstract thing. This is probably even more true of Lenin, whose writing was particularly polemical against strains of thought he identified as incorrect.)

There were some concepts defined concisely and clearly (revisionism and labor aristocracy, for example). But these exist elsewhere too. Your time on this earth is scarce, and there are probably other books you would get more out of. Like Lenin himself, Lih's Lenin Rediscovered (for understanding Lenin as a theoretician and practitioner of Marxism contra opportunists and ultras), or Losurdo's Class Struggle (for a dialectical approach to the challenges of constructing socialism in an underdeveloped country).

Review: The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin

The Dialectical Biologist (1985) is a tour de force, compellingly arguing simultaneously for the need to overthrow the capitalist system as well as the need to overthrow dated scientific approaches. That book has rightly earned its place as one of the key texts on the relationship between science and Marxism. However, despite its name, biology plays more of a supporting role, with the collected essays centering on philosophy, society, and the history of biology. The examples of dialectics in nature are discussed at a high level, primarily drawing from evolutionary biology. The book, being a collection of articles and book chapters published elsewhere, lacks some cohesion, and the arguments repeat.

The Triple Helix (2002) addresses both these weaknesses. The book presents the dialectics of living things as a three stranded system: genes, organism, environment. The argument is well structured, examining first the gene-organism relationship, then the organism-environment relationship, then drawing all three together with a critique of reductionist approaches in science that try to view things in isolation. The work finally concludes with a section putting forward a positive plan for how biologists should conduct their research to avoid such pitfalls. After all, 

It is easy to be a critic. All one needs to do is to think very hard about any complex aspect of the world and it quickly becomes apparent why this or that approach to its study is defective in some way. It is rather more difficult to suggest how we can, in practice, do better.

Lewontin fills in these arguments with a variety of well-chosen examples (the 17 years between this work and the earlier effort were important ones for biology, and although already decades old, the discussion of molecular biology feels considerably more current). His narrative unfolds satisfyingly, flowing from one problem to the next, teaching the controversies and their resolutions. It is a wonderful work of science communication.

Despite the skilled writing on display here, I found it to be a less impactful read than his earlier book. Though the argument was delivered more sharply, the main ideas of The Triple Helix will be familiar to any reader of The Dialectical Biologist. Furthermore, while the author gestures towards the societal implications of the dialectical world view, the lines are never as explicitly drawn, and I missed some of the political fire of The Dialectical Biologist (a favourite example: “But whether the cause of tuberculosis is said to be a bacillus or the capitalist exploitation of workers, whether the death rate from cancer is best reduced by studying oncogenes or by seizing control of factories—these questions can be decided objectively only within the framework of certain sociopolitical assumptions”). 

I’d recommend The Triple Helix for any young scientist, or for any reader interested in the big ideas of biology. I’d recommend The Dialectical Biologist for scientists with an interest in political philosophy.

Review: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

How should you read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations? One option is to peer into it for hints of how it has shaped thinking in the 1900 years since its writing — this collection of disconnected aphorisms is one of the most famous texts of the Roman Empire. In this reading, you might reflect on the author’s views on cosmic order and nature and on the cyclical flow of time, and how philosophers as diverse as Isaac Newton and Friedrich Nietzsche might have approached his writing on these themes. Or perhaps you might do more of a feminist critique: how has Marcus Aurelius’s stoicism shaped what it means to be a man? To be unbothered by other people’s opinions of you, to prize rationality, to be principled and purposeful and not caught up in frivolities — these commandments continue to shape social expectations of masculinity. I like this reading, and if you’re interested in the development of human thought it’s a worthwhile reason to read this book.

Another reading would take Marcus Aurelius’s writing as normative life advice. This is a reading I don’t care for. Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy teeters on nihilistic individuality, and therefore reinforces the status quo: time is cyclic and your life is short so you shouldn’t strive to change society; forget about what other people think, follow your own nature. It is also only a partial picture of morality: he has relatively little to say about community, about our social obligation to each other, or about resolving conflicting perspectives (we could call these feminine virtues). That said, it is a philosophy more compassionate about accepting the shortcomings of others than some individualistic worldviews (“If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.” (Book X)). But to approach this work as a source of guidance is to invite cherry-picking of poignant quotes: it is not a systematic, rigorously developed worldview, but a scattering of sometimes contradictory thoughts.

A third reading — and this is where my mind kept going as I read the work — is to read it metatextually: why did Marcus Aurelius write these particular thoughts down? The work was never meant to be published: he wrote it for himself. What personal struggles was he grappling with as he penned these meditations? Death, surely, was one: he emphasizes over and over the fleetingness of life. Other anxieties appear to trouble him too; when he writes lines like

What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power. (Book III)

does he speak from a self-chastising position, as someone still trying to care less about what some other person is thinking of? Is he thinking of a particular example, but cloaking it as a general conclusion? (If so, Marcus, you would have loved the invention of the subtweet.)

I like this metatextual reading best for a few reasons. First, it explains his contradictory and repetitive writing: he is trying an idea on for size to see how it fits, or working through a difficult idea. While many of his aphorisms are expressed as confident exhortations, others are tentative explorations of a thought:

If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state. (Book IV)

I think we should read these statements — the confident and the tentative — as more in continuity than a superficial reading might suggest (“To read carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book.” (Book I)). These meditations are not battle-tested wisdoms the author hopes to disseminate broadly, but pep talks he gives to himself (“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil." (Book II)), or records of his deliberations for himself.

Second, this reading explains the incompleteness of the morality presented here. Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher-king, his views on man-as-citizen or man-as-shaper-of-society he would have debated extensively and applied as part of his imperial duties. The views scribbled here, just for him, naturally cover what remains: how to handle day-to-day emotional challenges in the right way.

Finally, there is a comfort in recognizing that even the literal Emperor of Rome struggled with navigating the complex waters of his internal life.
 

A few favourite lines not woven into the above:

• “We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive. For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker’s art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating. And again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit.” (Book III)
• “Men quarrel with that with which they are most constantly in communion.” (Book IV)
• “First, do nothing inconsiderately, nor without a purpose. Second, make thy acts refer to nothing else than to a social end.” (Book XII)
• “How close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of intelligence.” (Book XII)
• “If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state.” (Book IV)
• “By remembering, then, that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be content with everything that happens. And inasmuch as I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself, I shall do nothing unsocial, but I shall rather direct myself to the things which are of the same kind with myself, and I shall turn an my efforts to the common interest, and divert them from the contrary. Now, if these things are done so, life must flow on happily, just as thou mayest observe that the life of a citizen is happy, who continues a course of action which is advantageous to his fellow-citizens, and is content with whatever the state may assign to him.” (Book X)
• “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be. But thou art thinking only of seeds which are cast into the earth or into a womb: but this is a very vulgar notion.” (Book IV)

Review: Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec

The Canadian and American states were founded on centuries of genocide. Now what? This is the question Krawec explores in Becoming Kin. Reconciliation requires understanding the harm done and proactive righting of wrongs. Appropriately, this essay collection starts with telling the story of the wrongs of settler colonialism (Chapters 1-5). To do so, Krawec weaves together personal stories, linguistics, history and myth — Anishnaabe and Christian peoples both come to understand themselves and their values through their myths. With these stories imparted, Krawec shifts towards the future, towards becoming kin — a relationship that comes with reciprocal responsibilities to each other. She explores kinship with the land (Chapter 6), the interrelatedness of people (Chapter 7), and practical considerations for rebuilding kinship (Chapter 8).

Krawec’s essays come with homework: each finishes in an aambe, an Anishnaabe term meaning “let’s go!” These sections ask the reader to participate by learning about the treaties that govern the relationships with the Indigenous peoples they share a home with, observing the absence of Indigenous stories in the media they consume, or finding a way to insist on Indigenous representation in your community in whatever form that might be. As the book progresses, her homework problems increasingly involve community building and outreach. 

At the outset, Krawec insists the reader read her book with a friend. Learning and doing are best done in community: “Reading books in solitude may alter our individual relationship with the world around us. But like our histories, our lives do not unfold in isolation. We exist collectively: as neighbours and community groups, as workplaces and sports teams, as book groups and families.” It is from this community that your ability to change the world grows: “Organizing is a scary word. We hear it, and we think about large-scale events and mass mobilizations, but it begins with finding one person you can disrupt with.”

It is this emphasis on practical steps via community and education that makes this book special. Indigenous history is told more completely elsewhere (see, for example, works by Dunbar-Ortiz or Nick Estes). Indigenous philosophy is told more compellingly for a popular audience in Braiding Sweetgrass. Krawec’s writing meanders, and sometimes takes on a lecturing tone. Her perspective is more spiritual than what resonates with me. But her book, particularly Chapter 8, is forward-looking and community-oriented. It urges you to act and also makes you realize those first few steps aren’t so hard after all. That’s rarely found in a book.

Review: The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx

Marx’s model of political economy is better laid out in Capital and more briefly laid out in Wage Labour and Capital, but it’s fun to see it in draft and wielded like an axe against Proudhon. Even if you are looking for Marxist economics delivered as a killing blow, this book is tough for the uninitiated. Although Marx quotes Proudhon at length, the reader is presumed to be familiar with the overall shape of his argument. I read this work in parallel with Marx's Inferno, and was glad of the extra context Roberts gives regarding Proudhon’s positions (particularly Chapter 5, but also Chapters 2-3).

Perhaps one of the most important take-home messages is that we should uphold correct pro-capitalist economists (in this work, Ricardo and Smith) and not placate incorrect anti-capitalists (like Proudhon) despite the appearance of shared goals. The work is structured in two parts, which correspond somewhat to parts 1-3 and part 4 of Capital. I particularly enjoyed the second section, in which Marx targets Proudhon’s clumsy and idealistic attempt to apply Hegel’s dialectics. The other works by Marx that I’ve read did not discuss dialectics as a tool and it was fun seeing Marx describe historical materialism in these terms. Unlike Capital, this was not a transformative read, but did help me better understand the development of his thought. Marx’s writing in this work is often quite vivid and fun, and I imagine I’ll return to it again when I’m looking for a colourful quote.

Review: Ludwig Fuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy by Friedrich Engels

This is a breezy read that starts with Hegel’s philosophical context, and traces the development of philosophical thought through Fuerbach to Marx. It fits a similar niche as Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History (1895), except that Plekhanov starts earlier and ends later (from 18th century French materialists to Plekhanov’s contemporaries), and comes in at something like six times the length. Engels’s chapter on Hegel is an excellent overview, and although his chapter on Marx’s historical materialism doesn’t have too much that can’t be found elsewhere, is clear and elegant and to the point. It is perhaps noteworthy that Engels introduces the dialectics of nature before he shows how dialectics applies to history.

The middle chapters I found less useful. Unlike foes like Proudhon, I do not see clear modern-day versions of Fuerbach. Though I haven’t read him directly, Fuerbach seems to have less depth and rigor compared to Hegel. As a result, understanding the Hegel-Fuerbach-Marx pathway feels like it adds less to my toolkit compared to works that focus on a greater number of thinkers (e.g., Plekhanov, or Losurdo’s historical contextualization of Hegel).

The difference between materialism and idealism and the development of the dialectical method are so important for marxist philosophy. There’s a real need for a modern overview, something with the scope of Plekhanov, but perhaps with more of the conciseness of Engels and some of the practicality of Mao’s On Practice, that teaches the controversies and brings us up to the current era.

Review: Democracy or Bonapartism by Domenico Losurdo

This is an incredibly relevant work for understanding modern day democracy and its discontents. Losurdo traces history from the French Revolution through the 1992 US Presidential election to show the development of Bonapartism. We see how soft Bonapartism of the US and other countries of the West (versus the war Bonpartism of fascism) is remarkably stable, and yet fails to deliver on the emancipation and social welfare one might expect would come of universal suffrage.

Bonapartism is a political structure characterized by a powerful and charismatic executive, who legitimizes their power through the support of the masses, and who becomes the interpreter of the nation — that is, power is personalized. To pave over internal strife between economic classes within a nation, conflict is externalized, and the Bonapartist leader is imbued with a mandate to protect (and expand) the lofty ideals of the nation. Soft Bonapartism is able to shift from states of exception to states of normality, and part of its stability comes from its ability to change out heads of state when the current Bonapartist leader no longer can point to popular support. This is accomplished by having competitive elections between multiple factions of a single party.

Along with the increasing power of the Bonapartist leader comes a reduction of the power of political parties, if not through overt legal means, via the implementation of single-member districts over proportional representation. We also see increased monopoly over theoretical production, i.e., the consolidation of mass media under the control over a few billionaires. Though soft Bonapartism comes with universal suffrage (first for just white men, and now for nearly all adults), we also see a disemancipation in our ability to participate in political decision-making and debate.

Readers may be particularly curious about Losurdo’s assessment of the socialist states of the twentieth century. Losurdo argues that none of these leaders were Bonapartist figures (though Mao at one point came closest), in part due to the role political parties play in mediating power. Because political parties act as forums for political education and debate, they maintain the political engagement of the masses and act as insulation against the personalization of power.

Losurdo notes that we are currently in a wave of disemancipation, and that the end is not yet in sight. He has few answers for the steps going forward, although reading between the lines it seems like fighting for proportional representation and re-taking control over the means of information dissemination (education, news, etc) are likely bets. I’d recommend this book as a good introduction to Marxist critique of modern political structures, and as a first book by this author.

Review: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Philosophical beats repeat throughout history. Christian Thorne’s The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment traces anti-foundationalism from the Ancient Greeks through the modern era, and acts as a vaccine against such thought. Having read this work, I recognize it easily, and I can send out my metaphorical T cells to fight it.

J.S. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man plays a similar role against race science, tracing the bad philosophy and bad science to uphold the imperialist and racist status quo through a few hundred years. Indeed, his first edition (1981) anticipates the 1994 version of mismeasuring man, The Bell Curve. Gould highlights the factors that make this train of thought return to prominence: the need to justify cutbacks in social resources or explain increasing inequality by means of anything but social policy (“they deserve their fate, they’re just not smart enough to compete”). I think we will have many more years of such worsening social outcomes, so it’s a good vaccine to take.

Gould’s examination of some of the key figures and concepts of scientific racism (Broca, Goddard, Spearman's g, etc.) reveals a number of patterns. For example, data confirming a hypothesis is easily accepted and poorly scrutinized (Gould re-analyzes the raw data for several flawed but influential studies). In contrast, data showing the role of environment over genetics are tortured or waved away with absurd explanations like “intelligent Blacks move to where living conditions are better.” Politically or socially convenient findings are accepted and applied, despite pushback from contemporary critical scientists. Experimental protocols are poorly designed and often not followed.

Gould writes like a scientist (he was a professor at Harvard), for better or for worse. He is precise, cautious, meticulous, thorough. But he writes like a scientist with political convictions, who knows his work matters, who recognizes a personal stake in communicating the message. His presence throughout the book emphasizes this, such as his experience with a son with learning disabilities and how testing in education played a positive role in this case. Anticipating criticisms of bias, he cautions the reader not to conflate neutrality and objectivity: 

It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.

Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence—so that fair treatment of data and argument can be attained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one’s own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools. 

It’s a work that bridges science, philosophy, history and politics in a way I found very satisfying, and still very important to the questions of today.

Review: The Dialectical Biologist By Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin

Although it is possible to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in a field like biology without taking a single post-secondary philosophy course, I don’t think it should be. Through practice, biology can teach you how to think, but I don’t think it teaches you how to think about how you think. Philosophy helps you step outside your thought patterns and examine assumptions or limitations you didn’t realize you were making. 

The essays in this book take as their target scientists who are correct in applying their craft — at least by conventional standards of logic and statistics — but nonetheless draw incorrect conclusions. These vary from incorrect models of evolution (e.g., one-way adaptation of creatures to their environment instead of a dynamic relationship between creature and environment), to deductions of processes that fail to consider the contingency of an observed relationship, to the chauvinism of expecting a western model of science to be universally optimal.

This anthology is now several decades old and biology has necessarily abandoned some of its insistence on what the authors term Cartesian science — a reductionist approach that fails to account for mutual interdependence, interconnectivity, and change. My own PhD research examined some of this: how do certain relationships change while other environmental variables are also in flux? In trying to navigate such a problem, I found myself becoming more fluent in dialectical materialism, although I didn’t know the term for it. 

Although biology has progressed, Cartesian reductionism remains prevalent. I find myself butting up against it often when I try to communicate the work I do. The essays felt cathartic to read: here, too, were other scientists fighting the same fights I fight (particularly chapter 4).

Because this book is a collection of essays not intended to be read together, the essays sometimes repeat metaphors or examples or concepts. An abridged reading of my favourite chapters that retains the sweeping scope and remains feeling fresh and pertinent would be the Introduction, followed by chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13 and the Conclusion.

Review: Heidegger and the Ideology of War by Domenico Losurdo

When we say we are anti-fascist, it doesn’t mean we are only against the specific forms of fascism that developed in Italy and Germany in the mid-twentieth century, but that we are against all forms of fascism—an ideology of war and violence to benefit the community of the privileged off the subjugation and genocide of the out-groups. Fascism adapts to the specific conditions of a time, and it is happy to put on disguises to best appeal to the needs of a nation. That means we cannot be so reductive as to divide philosophers into camps of “Nazi” or “not Nazi” (or “fascist” or “not fascist”), but must understand and recognize those schools of thought that give birth to fascism, or otherwise nurture it and give it cover. 

To do so, we must correctly understand the political currents of these proto-fascist philosophies at the time they were written. Philosophy fails particularly spectacularly at this task with Heidegger, a philosopher still widely upheld and read today, as Losurdo lays out:

The debate regarding Heidegger and his relationship with Nazism is still unsettled, and it encompasses several unique aspects. Usually, the historian of philosophy tries to single out the interlocutors and the concrete targets of a certain position, and then tries to reconstruct the real historical framework, even for propositions that have the ambition of being valid sub specie acternitatis. He does this not for the sake of historicist reductionism; on the contrary, his starting point is the awareness that even the excess of one theory with respect to its time cannot be grasped and evaluated without a preliminary attempt at historical clarification. In the case of this debate, however, many interpreters of Heidegger seem dominated by the opposite preoccupation: that of relegating all of his texts, even those in which the political dimension is explicit and declared, to a rarefied, politically aseptic sphere. In this way Heidegger, who not only in his letters and occasional speeches, but also in his theoretical writings, tirelessly comments upon the events of his time, is subjected to a purifying process that is supposed to cleanse him of any worldly contamination.

Losurdo places Heidegger in his historical context again, connecting his philosophical work with his political commentary, and comparing him with both his colleagues that clearly denounced the Nazis (Jaspers, Adorno, Horkheimer, Husserl, etc) and those whose philosophy is much more broadly accepted as aligned with Nazi ideology than Heidegger’s (Schmitt, Spengler, Junger). Losurdo traces themes of community and belonging, historicity, epistemology, identity, modernity and war through the philosophical developments between the start of the war in 1914 through the end of the war in 1945.

One of the difficulties with understanding fascism is that within their political movements, at any given time and over the course of time, different strands of philosophies become expressed. For example, the Nazis upheld a bucolic ideal, but then facing the pressures of war, had to elevate mechanization and production, its antithesis. Heidegger’s relationship with fascism is sometimes excused by pointing to these different currents. His denunciation of the Nazis for giving into mechanization and modernity is hardly a damning blow against fascist ideology. It is not particularly exonerating to criticize certain Nazi ideologues for being too liberal: “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man) — have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’,” (1935) nor is his rejection of specifically biological racism much consolation given his strong antisemitism. His philosophy elevated the transformational aspects of war and volkische community throughout the war, and he shows little self-criticism for his relationship with the Nazi movement after the war.

Losurdo’s argument here hits similar beats as his masterpiece on Nietzsche, however where that work demolishes Nietzsche as a possible pillar from which to build progressive politics, this blow to Heidegger landed as less fatal. This might be partly due to the length; at only one fifth the page count, Losurdo doesn’t have the space to prevent a full intellectual development of Heidegger. Are there parts of Heidegger that can be salvaged, developed towards some other end? It seems unlikely, but Heideggerians might follow their lodestar in doing a poor job of self-critique.

Review: Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel by Domenico Losurdo

This is a 1000-page book about Nietzsche. This might seem like a lot of pages to read about one single philosopher (and it is a long book!), but it’s also an in-depth journey into late 19th-century philosophy, battles that shaped the ideology behind World War I and then later World War II as well as (from an opposite perspective) the 1917 October Revolution and then later the mid-20th century wave of national liberation movements. You come away from the book with not only a close familiarity with the evolution of Nietzsche’s thought over his ~20-year career, but also an understanding of origin myths and national identity, nihilism and the critique of religion, metacritique and an outsider’s critique of status quo ideology, judeophobia and antisemitism, eugenics and imperialism, masses and elites.

Losurdo argues that the consistent project in Nietzsche’s otherwise contradictory body of work is one of anti-communism and counter-revolution. Nietzsche held the creation of art and culture to be of the highest value, and something that could be achieved only by individuals afforded complete leisure and spared from mind-numbing toil. The maintenance of this class necessitated the enslavement of the rest of humanity, enforced by violence and eugenics and ideology. Socialism — in its declaration that all humans are equal — was a threat to this world order.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is repugnant, and Losurdo does not shy away from calling it so. But this book is not a 1000-page screed against a terrible philosopher. Throughout the book, it is clear how much Losurdo respects Nietzsche for his intellectual rigour and his ability to find new ways of interrogating the ideology of his world. The target of this tome is not so much Nietzsche but left Nietzscheans, or those who would wish to use him to socialist (or even liberal) ends. Losurdo renders this position ridiculous; he shreds attempts to interpret Nietzsche metaphorically or as a dreamy innocent distorted by a conniving sister. 

A common pattern in this book is to establish the contemporary discourse on a particular topic — education, the military, the poverty of the masses — and show Nietzsche’s continuities with conservative and liberal thinkers of his time, and then examine the ways Nietzsche was able to radicalize these critiques, to transcend the limitations of Christian or liberal thought, and recognize the full implications of their consistent application. I am left with more respect (as well as more repulsion) for him than I expected, and have a better sense for what it means to do “good philosophy”.

---

For a more detailed, academic review of the contents and approac, I like this one by Matt Sharpe.

Review: Not Enough by Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough identifies a very interesting phenomenon: that discourse around human rights kicked off only as the USSR disintegrated and neoliberalism kicked off. Such an interesting coincidence deserves an explanation.

Over the last few decades, human rights have fit quite comfortably within neoliberalism. But should they? Neoliberalism takes little issue with the first twenty-one articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): these have to do with political freedoms and property rights, and have close kin in the UDHR’s predecessors, the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789). 

The next seven articles are harder to square within neoliberalism since they demand, among other social and economic rights, the right to shelter and food, to education, and even to paid holidays. These were sharply censured by one of neoliberalism’s leading thinkers, Hayek:

The conception of a ‘universal right’ which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, ‘periodic holidays with pay’ shows the absurdity of the whole thing. (Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1979)

Moyn argues that human rights set merely a floor for basic needs, allowing limitless wealth accumulation for the few provided some allowances are made for bare subsistence living for the many. To address inequality — both between nations and within a nation — a new framework is needed. In this conception, indeed, human rights are exactly the fig leaf necessary for a return to the horrors of 19th century capitalism after the cannibalization of the welfare state. I agree with him that human rights organizations have largely prioritized political rights, and that the neoliberal era has made embarrassingly poor progress in the provision of shelter and food, education and paid holidays, globally. 

I am less convinced that it is so much an inherent failing of the tool of human rights than simply the doing of those wielding it. Article 27 demands “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Article 28 declares “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” Together, I think these rights demand that the technological progress of the Global North (high speed rail, internet, the most cutting edge cancer drugs, for example) be made available to all the people of the world regardless of their place of residence. The human rights movement under neoliberalism has not chosen to work towards these ends (and indeed this human right is also violated for many people residing in the wealthiest countries). 

Moyn argues throughout his book for the need of a distributive concept of equality versus ideals that aim only for a subsistence existence. However, he never dares to venture a positive vision of what that could look like — a privilege of the ivory tower, and not one a burgeoning state attempting to bring equality to its people can afford. Presumably, his conception of the rights due to all people would have to encompass a “share” of all wealth? It is interesting, therefore, that Article 27 (quote above) indeed provisions to all humans a share of science and technology. Simply declaring a right to a share evidently hasn’t been enough. So what sort of government permits that?

One of the neoliberal critiques of human rights is whether it is possible to satisfy them within a worldview founded on individual responsibility. Here’s Hayek again:

It is evident that all these ‘rights’ are based on the interpretation of society as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is employed. They could not be made universal within a system of rules of just conduct based on the conception of individual responsibility, and so require that the whole of society be converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word.

Moyn, likewise, is terrified of the “totalitarian” systems that chose an alternative to the welfare state in their efforts to eliminate inequality (i.e., socialism). It is not clear what system he calls for, nor how this system would avoid such “totalitarian” tendencies.

Moyn’s argument largely traces the intellectual history of the concepts of distributive equality versus subsistence allowances — particularly from an American perspective. He does not investigate the source of wealth inequality (although he nods briefly towards the devastation wrought by colonialism), nor does he ground his analysis in what sorts of interventions effectively reduced inequality (though there is a brief foray in how investment in education both satisfies a human right and reduces inequality). This is a blind spot: it is very difficult to tackle a problem without knowing what causes it and what has fixed it in the past. 

His treatment of intra-nation versus inter-nation inequality is simplistic. Political projects are largely judged by their intent to lift the very neediest in the globe out of poverty. In this way, the USSR’s accomplishments in dramatically raising literacy and life expectancy within its borders are dismissed because they aimed for “socialism in one country” (rather than addressing global inequality). (Nor is there curiosity regarding why the Soviets pivoted from their original goal of socialism across the world to just socialism in one country.) Similarly, heightened intra-nation inequality during the marketization of China is lambasted, although the wealth gap between China and the wealthier countries narrowed during this time for both its poorest and its better off citizens. Is it possible to reduce intra-nation inequality without, at least for some period, heightening inter-nation inequality? Because Moyn examines neither the source of inequality nor practical examples of addressing it (beyond the former colonial empires’ welfare states), he cannot answer this question.

Review: The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson

I kinda struggled with this book for the first couple chapters, but to be honest, that one is on me. I went in expecting something on the art of cruelty — should it ever be wielded, and if so, how? That is, I was expecting something along the lines of Yves Winter’s Macchiavelli and the Orders of Violence. In that text, Winter looks at the historical context in which Macchiavelli was writing, and from this perspective, proffers a model for how to understand violence (and cruelty, which he defines in Machiavelli's terms as lethal violence that upsets the social expectation of dignity and bodily integrity). Although the title is The Art of Cruelty, the subject matter is cruelty in art — something very different, and once I shifted my frame of reference, I felt better able to swim through Nelson’s waters.

In The Art of Cruelty, Nelson reflects on various meditations on cruelty in art and media (or reactions of people who accuse specific works of art of excess cruelty). She strolls through theatre (e.g., Antonin Artaud), visual arts (e.g., the other Francis Bacon), performance art (e.g., Yoko Ono), pop culture movies (e.g., Quentin Tarantino), poetry (e.g., Sylvia Plath) and mainstream news (e.g., Bill O’Reilly). Initially I found myself probing for why these examples of these genres were selected and not some others. Learning that Nelson taught an undergraduate seminar with the same title as this book made a lot of pieces fall into place: it should be approached as a tour through the hot topics of 2001-2011 (when this book was published and when she taught her seminars) and of academic discussions around contemporary art. This also explains why my expectations that Nelson would cast judgement on this or that object of art as “warranted” or “good” use of cruelty were constantly disappointed: Nelson presents many examples but seems very careful not to conclude too much about them.

“[The Neutral] allows for a practice of gentle aversion: the right to reject the offered choices, to demur, to turn away, to turn one’s attention to rarer and better things. Preserving the space for such responses has been one of this book’s primary aims. Of equal importance has been making a space for paying close attention, for recognizing and articulating ambivalence, uncertainty, repulsion and pleasure. I have intended no special claim for art of literature – that is, no grand theory of their value. But I have meant to express throughout a deep appreciation of them as my teachers.” 

I could see this approach working well in a context where the examples are encountered and debated collectively. But I wasn’t reading this book in a group or seminar, so I had to have a debate with myself. Perhaps in a university classroom, Nelson provides a little more guidance to structure the debate. I found very little structure present in this book, which is grouped mostly according to topic (theatre, pornography, beauty, etc). Without a better guide, I turned to the aforementioned Winter for help. His triadic model of violence, consisting of object, subject and audience, is helpful for examining cruelty in art. Who does the artist put in the role of object and subject, and do they include an audience within the frame, or is the audience only the viewer? Winter also discusses the political role that hate (collective, unites people in action) and fear (isolating, inhibits action) play — this too would be a useful lens: does a cruel work of art cause us to hate or fear something? 

I think if Nelson had used these frames for examining cruelty, the examples she picked would have been a little more varied, and the discussion a little more interesting. For example, she discusses at some length the reaction to the horrors committed by the US military in Abu Ghraib, made public in 2004, but highlights only American reactions. As she points out, this “model of shaming-us-into-action-by-unmasking-the-truth-of-our-actions cannot hold a candle to our capacity to assimilate horrific images, and to justify or shrug off horrific behaviour.” But in Abu Ghraib, the perpetrators of the cruelty are the Americans — the same group she presents as the audience. In the triad model (object, subject, audience), we are missing two parties: how did those in the territories invaded by the US react to these images? How did those in uninvolved countries react? Did it elicit fear? Or hatred? (Or, perhaps it registered as only one more action to add to the pile.) Either way, I think these parts of the triad would have been unlikely to shrug off or justify such horrific behaviour.

Despite its lack of theoretical framework and its US-centric focus, Nelson does pull together philosophical comments on cruelty from a variety of sources (Nietszche, Adorno, Plato, Derrida, etc) and it was fun to see these very different approaches collaged together. It was also an interesting time capsule: many issues it presents (for example, Stephen Colbert's "truthiness", and reality TV) were fiery topics of debate just as I was entering adulthood and I haven't really examined them since.

Review: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

There are no children in The Fountainhead, and this is because if this gap was visible all of Rand's argument comes tumbling down.

Rand's core argument is that man is naturally predisposed to selfishness, to wish only to fulfill his own wants, that any form of self-sacrifice or altruism is parasitic. Man's goal is to create skyscrapers and art.

I disagree, of course. Evolution found an optimum where our ability to think complexly came at the expensive of a very dependent childhood, and as a result humans evolved to be social creatures. Man is instead inherently predisposed to bond with others, to wish to see them to do well, to help them, to form loyalties and allegiances. We create skyscrapers and art not for the sake of these lifeless objects themselves, but because we want admiration, belonging, to communicate with others, to mark our place in the history of our people.

For this reason, I find Chernychevsky's take on rational egoism (the same philosophy Rand espouses) to be much more compelling. It feels good to help others, to accomplish something, to be admired, and so, selfishly, we act altruistically.

You see, my dear sir, O perspicacious reader, what schemers these noble people are, and how egoism plays in their souls? (...) They take their greatest satisfaction in having people whom they respect regard them as noble; to achieve this end, my dear sir, they work hard and devise all sorts of schemes no less diligently than you do in pursuit of your goals. Only your goals are different, and so the schemes you devise are not the same. You devise schemes that are worthless and harmful to others; they devise schemes that are honest and useful to others.

Rand's writing is tedious, the book is overly long, the rape is treated with startling dismissiveness, but I give her some credit for putting forth an argument rather than hiding her views in criticism of the status quo without putting forth a proposition for something she believes to be better.

Conspectus: Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns by Domenico Losurdo

Twentieth century history unfolded from battles in nineteenth century philosophy, which itself was a reaction to the French Revolution. One path of nineteenth century philosophy and twentieth century history objected to the French Revolution’s upsetting of the natural order of things (are all men really equal?). In this path, we find the liberals Burke and Toqueville, neoliberals like Hayek, and the philosophers of fascism. The other path developed a philosophical expression (and eventually, political implementation) of the values that sparked the French Revolution: all men are equal, and political rights are meaningless without economic rights. This path follows Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and from there continues to Marx and Engels, to Lenin and leaders of socialist movements world-wide. Given the crucial role Hegel played in this second path, it’s worth understanding his philosophy in some depth, and Losurdo’s book delivers beautifully.

Losurdo starts by asking, “is Hegel a liberal or a conservative?” (I suppose I am a little jealous that these are the arguments in which Losurdo feels he must intervene; the misunderstandings I see of Hegel revolve around a sort of “that guy loves kings…. and Spirit??”) The answer is that neither binary fits Hegel well, and in fact presupposes the rather peachy view of liberalism that liberalism views to be self-evident about itself. A better axis on which to situate Hegel would be “Patrician or plebeian?” On this axis, liberals and conservatives alike end up in the former camp, while Hegel is clearly situated in the latter (for all his approval of kings!). Hegel’s political positions are complex, and, Losurdo argues, must be understood in the context of the historical events and debates of the time. Losurdo leads us through these battlefields, examining Hegel’s perspectives on revolution, the sovereign, education and the rights of the child, and the role of the state in addressing poverty.

The one gap I felt was missing from this book was an examination of Hegel's racist statements about other civilizations. These statements also have roots in his philosophy (nothing in history is eternal, the actual is rational, and so why did Europeans become the dominant force in the 19th century?), and I think they could have fit within the argument of the book.

I feel so much more confident in the philosophical and historical issues of the nineteenth century having read this work. It's surprising (even disappointing?) how current discussions tread the same ground as discussions from two hundred years ago. Or perhaps it is instead Losurdo's skill at picking out the most relevant conflicts to our times, and presenting these clashes in ways that feel fresh but familiar. Regardless, it's a valuable book to read for understanding both the past and the present, and I strongly recommend it. However, it was a little dense, so as both a guide for myself and for other apprehensive would-be readers, I summarized the main arguments of each chapter. 

 Chapter I: A Liberal, Secret Hegel?

Review: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science by Helena Sheehan

It’s possible to study deeply in biology, to get a doctorate of philosophy in biology, without taking a single class in philosophy, let alone the philosophy of science. (The one philosophy class I took in my eleven years of post-secondary education, I took purely electively!) Concepts like evolution and genetics are (rightly) taught from a young age. Phenomena like the wave-particle duality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle you learn a little later. All these concepts are taught in a “and here’s what this means for biology/physics” sense, and not connected to a broader picture of how this impacted our understanding of knowledge and our relation to the world. For the most part, scientists approach their craft with an unexamined and eclectic form of positivism. It’s a worldview that doesn’t lend itself well to moving from genes to organisms to societies to history. Or, as Marx puts it:

The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality. (Capital, Vol 1)

Perhaps because of an awareness of these failings, many scientists shrug their shoulders and remain narrowly focused in their domain. We then continue to teach our craft as distinct threads of development. Sure, maybe advances in physics help advance our understanding, like using X-ray crystallography to deduce the structure of the basic macromolecules of life, but we don’t integrate these discoveries into a unified understanding. And so the next generation of unexamining eclectic positivists is born.

The stakes for failing to come up with a cohesive grand narrative of the world are high. We become materialists within the bounds of our own specialties, but stray into idealism, postmodernism, nihilism in our politics. Such a scientist might say “we tested fifty undergraduate students in a lab, and they all tried to maximize the amount of money they were rewarded in a game. From this, we can conclude that capitalism is the natural state of humanity, and any fight for a better system is futile.” A scientist with a unified theory of the world, one that recognizes we are shaped by our environments and that we shape our environments, and that the world is constantly changing, would conclude instead that this experiment demonstrates nothing more that in capitalism, our current economic mode, individuals are incentivized to maximize their capital.

Like fish might not remark on the water they swim through (I am not a fish psychologist), it’s difficult to step outside the philosophy you hold of the world (however eclectic it might be). One way to do so is to understand the history of philosophy of science, particularly the cataclysmic effect discoveries like evolution and quantum physics had on thinking in the nineteenth century. Rather than keeping these concepts in tidy separate boxes of thought labeled “biology” and “physics”, thinkers of the time reeled as they tried to fit these revelations of the earth as constantly changing and limited in its determinism with their prior conceptions of the world being composed of objects with unchanging essences requiring external impulses to bring them into movement.

To understand these debates, and the many philosophical pitfalls scientists and philosophers fell into (and continue to fall into!) when trying to deal with these contradictions, Helena Sheehan’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Science is a worthwhile read. She starts with how Marx and Engels translated Hegel’s dialectics into a unified understanding of the world, examining how dialectics describes not only history but also the natural sciences, as laid out in Engels' Dialectics of Nature. She traces the philosophy of science through the idealism versus materialism debates in the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as philosophers responded to the crises of science (Heisenberg uncertainty principle, relativity, evolution, sub-atomic particles), ending in the mid-twentieth century at the end of the Comintern and start of the Khrushchev era of the USSR. It's a sweeping survey of perhaps a hundred different thinkers, covering the origins, strengths and muddled parts of their theories. 

I saw my own experiences reflected in the biographies of scientists like Haldane and Bernal, who began studying Marxism as fully-trained, practicing scientists and found in dialectical materialism a better way of understanding their own field of expertise, as well as the world around them. 

On the other hand, I found the blind spots of Sheehan's narrative to be frustrating, to the point that I began to lose confidence in the areas she discussed in which I did not already feel reasonably well versed. The strength of her account was, I thought, the first three chapters, which focused on Marx, Engels, and the philosophy of science up until around 1917. Amply quoting her sources, she demonstrates the fool's errand of trying to "rescue" Marx from Engels or from Lenin. She also traces how philosophical differences (or ambiguity) towards science and materialism devolve to political differences (eg, Kautsky versus Lenin).

The fourth and fifth chapters, which made up well over half the book, were more flawed. The fourth chapter is a slow, 80-page build-up to how Lysenkoism took hold in the USSR in the late 1930s and 1940s. Sheehan approaches the political and geopolitical context of the 1920s-1940s USSR with surprisingly little historical context, positioning Stalin and Lysenko both as leaders who know how to dazzle people but are self-centered and power-hungry in any strategic thinking they manage to stumble into, rather than leaders dealing with high stakes decisions in low resource environments with fascists threatening to invade. Where her discussion of philosophical positions is generally very well-cited, historical occurrences are stated with few sources, complicating my efforts to learn more about the subjects at hand.

The fifth chapter, which surveyed the development of philosophical thought from 1920-1950ish, was disproportionate in both length (some 180 pages) and emphasis, which was overly focused on the works of British thinkers of the time (100+ pages, of which 40 pages were Christopher Caudwell alone). The works of French and German scholars was quickly summarized in a half dozen pages each, and a smattering of paragraphs were devoted to the US and Yugoslavia. There was a complete absence of discussion of thought in China, Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the global south. Every scientist was assessed according to their critique of Lysenkoism; those who wrote against him were correct and brave, while those who did not critique his ideas (Bernal) or who were open to some form of environmentally determined inheritance (Haldane) were naive or uninformed or, despite their perspicacity in other spheres of thinking, not able to "realize the gravity" of philosophical debates.

Despite these flaws, as a scientist, I found this to be a valuable read for better understanding Marxism, Philosophy, and Science. The footnotes often have fun anecdotes, and Sheehan's writing style is clear and often a little humorous.