Geras - Marx and human nature - refutation of a legend

This short essay attempts to dispose once and for all of a rather obstinate old legend about the thought of Karl Marx. So far at least as these things do depend upon the marshalling of sound evidence and argument, that aim is not excessively ambitious. For the legend is certainly false. I hope to have provided here both evidence and argument enough to demonstrate its falsehood. In any case, it is the hope of a conclusive refutation that accounts for features of the essay of which it would be as well to inform the reader in advance. Some brief remarks on how it was originally conceived will serve this purpose.

You will not go very far in discussion either within or about Marxism before encountering the view that one of the things bequeathed to this intellectual tradition by its founder was a denial of the idea of a universal human nature. That view, which had already had a good life when Althussers theoretical anti-humanism imparted to it a new confidence and vigour, has long struck me as being pretty remarkable, and it was my attendance at a certain seminar one evening in early 1979 that led me to want to confront it. The seminar, in fact, was not about Marx or about Marxism. It was on the subject of human needs. I no longer recall the details of the discussion, only that the theoretical and practical viability of a concept of common human needs was received with general scepticism, and this was sustained in part - or so it appeared to me - by impulses of a relativist and idealist kind. Since much of both philosophy and social science is thick with relativist and idealist themes, there is perhaps no great cause for puzzlement here. Nevertheless, the occasion did crystallize in my mind the thought of how surprising it was that Marxists also, would-be materialists amongst them, should often sponsor more or less similar themes in support of a similar scepticism; how very extraordinary indeed, in view of what I had read in Marx, in view equally of some obvious facts about the world, that the claim that he rejected the idea of human nature should be so widely made and believed.

I decided to look and see just what from Marxs work is generally given as confirmation of the claim. The answer is: not very much - actually only a single passage that can be said to amount to anything, though Marx himself did not think fit to publish the text containing it; and, apart from that, a few other odds and ends which, considered for the role of evidence in this matter, amount to nothing at all. The one item of any plausibility is some lines from the Theses on Feuerbach and it is with a close and extended analysis of those lines that I have chosen therefore to begin the present study. Some may perhaps find this analysis rather too extended and wonder why, when so much in Marxs writings can be brought against the claim in question, I was not content simply to appeal to that and to see off the passage from the Theses with more dispatch. I would ask only that they postpone judgment of the opening analysis until they have digested what follows it. I hope the sequel will persuade them of its point.

Here it will suffice to say this much. There are already plenty of commentaries on Marx which draw attention to this contrary evidence. Nothing was to be gained by just repeating them. However, by focusing initially on the best of the textual support for the disputed claim, we first square up to the latter on its own chosen terrain, so to speak, meet it at what may be supposed to be its strong point. From doing this, as it happens, there is something to be gained. It may be a few lines only that become thereby an object of detailed attention, but they have been made to bear a heavy weight in the exegesis of Marx. Relying on their support, the legend that he dispensed with the concept of an intrinsic human nature manages to survive in the face of textual evidence that he did not: either this is simply ignored or else, if its existence is conceded, it is treated as the basis merely of one reading of Marx to which however another, alternative reading can be opposed, or else it is said not to represent the real, or the most profound, tendency of his mature thought; and so on. Yet, examination of the relevant lines from the Theses on Feuerbach reveals that their sense is not, in fact, transparent. They can be understood in a number of ways. And when the various possible meanings of this passage are placed within the only possible context for its proper assessment, the interpretation of Marx that has been so reliant on it is shown not to be a viable one at all. It is left without even the slenderest title to philological respectability.

A second feature of my approach here of which notice should be given is that I take this interpretation at its word. The argument that Marx rejected all concepts of a universal human nature is construed in its literal sense. For, its advocates do themselves emphasize that what he opposed was not just this or that view about human nature but the very idea of one, and it is only this emphasis, moreover, that justifies presentation of the argument as though it were a theoretically bold and momentous one and told us something distinctive about him. Such it would scarcely either be or do if the proposition was merely that Marx dismissed some conceptions of human nature. Of whom is that not true? I am aware, all the same, that construing this particular argument in a straightforward way lends an air of strangeness, a certain unreality, to parts of the discussion, and this might prompt the suggestion that it would be intellectually more charitable therefore, and the claim more credible, if one took a narrower view than I do here of what counts as a concept of human nature. Now, of course, should we choose to include under this heading just those conceptions of an enduring and common human make-up with which Marx did in fact disagree, but not any that he, for his part, entertained, then the claim will appear very credible indeed. However, I can think of no genuinely compelling reason for doing this. Intellectually charitable it certainly is, but it gives us a definition that is eccentric and, worse, tendentious: selected with the claim in mind; purposely designed for the rescue of a bad, albeit widely used, argument. The view taken in this essay of what is to count as a concept of human nature is, on the contrary, a quite standard one. It is one that is found, as we shall see, in Marxs own usage. Most importantly, it is the one embodied in what the claims advocates actually say, for all that this renders their claim unreasonable. It is better to be true to what they say than to be charitable to it. And it is more than time. This is a case like that of