Accessible introduction to key thinkers of Marxist theory and the debate on the nature of Marxist ethics.
Marxism and Ethics is a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the rich and complex history of Marxist ethical theory as it has evolved over the last century and a half. Paul Blackledge argues that Marx’s ethics of freedom underpin his revolutionary critique of capitalism. Marx’s conception of agency, he argues, is best understood through the lens of Hegel’s synthesis of Kantian and Aristotelian ethical concepts. Marx’s rejection of moralism is not, as suggested in crude materialist readings of his work, a dismissal of the free, purposive, subjective dimension of action. Freedom, for Marx, is both the essence and the goal of the socialist movement against alienation, and freedom’s concrete modern form is the movement for real democracy against the capitalist separation of economics and politics. At the same time, Marxism and Ethics is also a distinctive contribution to, and critique of, contemporary political philosophy, one that fashions a powerful synthesis of the strongest elements of the Marxist tradition. Drawing on Alasdair Mac Intyre’s early contributions to British New Left debates on socialist humanism, Blackledge develops an alternative ethical theory for the Marxist tradition, one that avoids the inadequacies of approaches framed by Kant on the one hand and utilitarianism on the other.
Tabla de materias
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Marxism’s Ethical Deficit
1. Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
2. Marx and the Moral Point of View
3. Ethics and Politics in Second and Third International Marxism
4. Western Marxism’s Tragic Vision: Socialist Ethics in a Non-Revolutionary Age
5. Alasdair Mac Intyre’s Contribution to an Ethical Marxism
Conclusion: From Ethics to Politics
References
Index
Sobre el autor
Paul Blackledge teaches at Shanxi University. He is the author of Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire, and Revolution, also published by SUNY Press; Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History; and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left.