Words at the Grave
/On Marx: Revolutionary and Utopian
By Alan RyanOxford University Press, 2014Are there any two people who completely agree about Karl Marx? It seems unlikely. To some, he remains the fountainhead of the 20th century’s worst dictatorships. To others, his thought offers a fruitful means of dissecting social dynamics and identity in the contemporary world. The trouble with attempting to come to grips with the work and legacy of this extraordinary thinker is that neither of these opinions, nor many of those in between them, can be excluded or dismissed.The latest statement on Marx’s legacy intended for a popular audience is On Marx, an extract from Alan Ryan’s mammoth On Politics, which traces Western political thought from Herodotus to the present. It is one of several volumes taken from the longer work, others including On Aristotle and On Machiavelli. The slim volume is composed of a new introduction, a chapter from On Politics and several selections from Marx’s expansive oeuvre, and from the very opening of the introduction, Ryan’s puzzling little book reads not so much as a new contribution to an ongoing conversation as a restatement of conventional objections to a thinker who continues to pose a radical challenge to modern liberal democracy.This is not altogether surprising. Ryan’s long, respectable career at Oxford and Princeton has been spent largely in the study of John Stuart Mill, the man most closely associated with utilitarianism (although it was with Jeremy Bentham that the theory began) and who is a key figure in liberal political thought, having a strong pull over later thinkers as well-regarded as Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, and in an oblique way, John Rawls. These later giants are united in their prolificacy, striking powers of persuasion and undeniable influence, but also by a rather uncritical acceptance of the main tenets of modern liberalism. A worldview that consists of a defense of the individual against the state, reverence for the “hard sciences” and a general support of egalitarianism is not so much a foregone conclusion as the unassailable presupposition in the works of these men. Naturally, it is difficult to assimilate opposition from such a vantage point, and so the critiques of other thinkers tend to be rather ideological as opposed to philosophical, or, at their worst, even thoughtful. Ryan’s take on Marx is not quite so bad as all that, but this tradition is undeniably present, and the resulting thought suffers accordingly.Of course, there are benefits to having unwavering beliefs, one of which is a steady foundation from which to do what is usually dull work. In this case, the usual biographical detail or the backbreaking minutiae of argument between 19th century socialists (how many organized workers could dance on the head of a pin?), are pulled off here with style and charm. Under his evident disdain for Marx, Ryan able to strip away Marx’s imposing personal reputation one might hear about from millions of followers gazing at stately, bearded portraits and replace it with a chronically broke, almost recklessly irresponsible academic-type with a predilection for power.Commentators smile at the thought of Marx the Victorian paterfamilias, reading through the Times to see how his investments were doing.Engels, by contrast, ceases to be the uninteresting lackey and emerges as more the stabilizing rock for Marx’s more fanciful ambitions—in all, someone who is not without his own attractive qualities.
Engels was a physically energetic man who fought with considerable courage in the 1848 revolution in Saxony and relieved the tedium of managing his family’s thread mills by riding to hounds. Although he was prosperous and Marx was invariably hard up, Engels was less attached to bourgeois respectability than Marx. It is characteristic of Engels that he wrote in Eleanor Marx’s autograph book that his vision of happiness was Chateau Margaux and that his motto was “take it aisy.”
The brief exposition of the two men’s relationship is fascinating, but always there is the slight tone of derision, sometimes bordering on contempt, that these two misfits, or rather this misfit and
When Marx died in 1883, it would have been a rash observer who predicted that the “specter of revolution” he and Engels conjured up in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 would become one of the main driving forces of world history in the twentieth century.
Prejudices aside, Ryan’s style can be confusing to the point of distraction. He comes down hard on delicate conceptual material, such as the relations between the dialectics of Socrates, Hegel, and Marx, referring to them all basically with one fell swoop, and tiptoes lightly around what would appear to be easily-assimilated statements. “Marx, too,” he writes, “was in his own way an end-of-history theorist.” It is hard to imagine a way in which Marx is not an end-of-history theorist.. Ryan’s caveat, that “Marx also suggested that ‘real human history’ would begin after the revolution,” does little to complicate the matter, since it is obvious that there is a change in the definition of history between the two statements. The tacit, and sometimes explicit, qualification in all of Marx’s comments on history is to refer to it as “hitherto,” which is to say, “as we know it.” In the same passage of the introduction that includes this discussion, Ryan seems alive to this qualification, and yet he ignores it in his conclusions.History as we know it, which is to say the overall flow of events that takes place without our consciously bringing it about, would come to an end; humanity would no longer be playthings of forces that it had brought into existence but did not know how to control.To say that “real human history” begins after history is the same as saying that after death we go to another world. But who would infer from that claim that the afterlife and the world in which we live are the same thing?There are other, smaller but equally strange moments of an apparent lapse in self-editing that pepper Ryan’s writing. In the midst of a three-page discussion of Marx’s understanding of religion, Ryan writes: “Marx was not interested in religion; his friend Engels was.” He then almost immediately continues to give evidence of Marx’s concern for the political element of religious practice:
Marx regarded religion as obviously false, and peoples’ attachment to religion as symptomatic of their miserable earthly conditions. After the revolution ushered in socialism and a decent society, religious consolation would wither away. Engels contemplated the possibility that an atheistic religion of humanity would succeed Christianity, but Marx seems to have thought that no replacement would be needed.
Given Marx’s preoccupation with peoples’ “miserable earthly conditions,” this would indicate a sincere interest in religion, even if his direct pronouncements on the subject are infrequent. Indeed, one of Marx’s most famous (if misapplied) quotations comes from his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and is concerned with religion as “the opiate of the people.” What is more, our own recent “New Atheist” movement has shown that one needn’t be a defender of religion to be deeply interested in it.
