Gone the Prodigal Son: Analyzing Marx through Plato, Augustine and Rousseau (1 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
Some families are united through history by their influences and distortions on one another, and some men are born bastards apart from the prestige of their progenitorial design. If Karl Marx is the youngest child in a family of philosophers, then he rebels against father Plato; finds solace in the comfort of mother St. Augustine; and maintains both deep rivalry and connection with brother Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One can find the building material of Marxism in the writings of each these great thinkers, either by virtue of agreement or his wholesale rejection of their judgments.
But the entire structure dooms itself to constant collapse—both in ideology and practice—because Marx chooses ambiguity for moments that demand detail, and torturous precision for those better left interpreted in their time. Raymond Aron writes, “The philosophy of Marx, precisely because of its intrinsic ambiguity, … has always lent itself to many interpretations, some of which are more convincing, … but all of which, strictly speaking, are tolerable.” (qtd. in Pontuso 73). More disastrous than anything is that Marx lays down the foundation for his vision on shaky settlement. At best, Marx’s bold obsession with materialism dooms his potential genius. At worst: the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.
Comments
Leave a Reply
