Dick Howard - The Marxian legacy : the search for the new left

This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise, but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection as well as informed praxis.

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As a new era of populism dawns, there is a kind of nostalgia that sets in when thinking about how the New Left of the late 1960s and 1970s unfolded. It is all too easy to forget the seriousness of the ways that this generation was rethinking society, culture, politics, the family, and the self. It is all too easy for its intellectual and political impulses to be obscured by the way it has been framed in popular memory and consciousness mediated by the conservative 1980s: as a movement bloated by hyper-idealism, reckless social criticism , evincing what Samuel Huntington referred to in the 1970s as an excess of democracy . What all of this hides from view, however, is the ways that many of this generationboth in the West and the Soviet Eastwere rethinking democracy and, more centrally, the ideas of Marx. In this sense, Dick Howards seminal book, The Marxian Legacy , is at once both a document of that periods attempt to rethink and recreate Marxian critique and a document marking a crucial evolutionary stage in Marxian theory itself.

I first encountered the first edition of this book in the 1990s when, as a graduate student , I was engaged in my own project of reconstructing the shattered pieces of Western Marxism into a more coherent, critical form of theory. Amid the debris left in the wake of postmodern political theory and philosophy , it was a tonicfor it framed Marxism as a reservoir of ideas and principles that could help shape a new critical consciousness . Howards exploration of the ideas of Ernst Bloch , Rosa Luxemburg , Max Horkheimer, and Jean-Paul Sartre , among others, retains its ability to reward those who see the need for a form of critique that can retain both its power to give insight into the realist-materialist structures of power and the humanistic-democratic ideas that must serve to displace and transform them. For this reason, Howard sees Marxs ideas as currently in evolution and development by successive generations of radical thinkers. Just as the writings of the Young Marx were once used to critique the orthodox scientism of rigid orthodoxy, so today can we see in the Marxian legacy a capacity of a renewal of more robust democratic and humanist principles that underwrite the Marxian project of critique.

Such a project is in need now just as urgently as in the past. New forms of authoritarianism are gaining legitimacy, populism has taken a decidedly right-wing turn, democratic movements and associations have withered. We are in the midst also of a long counter-revolution against the cultural and institutional progress made during the middle of the twentieth century. A more rapacious form of capitalism has been untethered from social-democratic institutional constraints, the legitimacy of the business community and its culture of consumption and entrepreneurship has colonized the culture, oligarchic inequality reigns supreme, and the degradation of society and the natural environment both threaten to undermine society. The early decades of this century have therefore shown that Marxs relevance persists even as a new generation now seems less aware of the deeper political and philosophical debates that formed the ideas of earlier radical thinkers. As populist ressentiment has increased and democratic aspirations and values have ebbed, Howards book can help us focus once again on the kind of political ideas we must keep in view. To imagine a more compelling form of democracy , to elicit a radical imagination for troubled times, we can indeed look to Howards important study of the Marxian legacy to plumb the depths of a new political sensibility.