PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by: [Ramon, Pedro]On: 17 April 2009Access details: Sample Issue Voucher: CritiqueAccess Details: [subscription number 910528817]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

CritiquePublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t741801732

Book ReviewSavas Matsas

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2008

To cite this Article Matsas, Savas(2008)'Book Review',Critique,36:3,487 490To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03017600802434466URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017600802434466

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Book Review

Norman Levine: Divergent Paths*Hegel in Marxism and EngelsismVolume 1: The Hegelian Foundations of Marxs Method

Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2006

ISBN 0-7391-1304-6 (paperback)

The Hegel/Marx relation has continued to stir controversy for more than a hundred

years, from Bernstein to Stalin and from the Frankfurt School to Louis Althusser, and

closer to our days, with the analytical Marxists and, on the other side, the

proponents of systematic dialectics like Chris Arthur and Tony Smith.

Most of the time, debates on the Hegel/Marx connection are intertwined, both by

defenders of that connection and by rejectionists, with attempts to disconnect the

Marx/Engels relation. Apparently, the second violin, as Engels very modestly

described himself, with all the simplifications linked to his work as publicist and

propagandist of the young workers communist movement, looks like a much easier

target for criticism than the Renaissance man who wrote Das Kapital.

Norman Levine represents one of the most extreme cases of anti-Engels

rejectionism. For more than three decades now, he has painstakingly tried to draw

the divergent paths that were followed by Marx and Engels, and he has claimed to

have separated Marxism and Engelsism from the beginning.

The present book is the first volume in a project, bluntly and repeatedly defined by

Levine himself as an act of surgery*more precisely, a double act of surgery.First, Levine tries to separate [surgically] Marx from Engels starting from their

different, if not opposed way of appropriation of Hegel. The author distinguishes

two periods for each, a rather arbitrary periodization mainly performed on a bio-

bibliographical base: a first period of appropriation of Hegel by Marx, and by Engels

from 1837 to 1850, and a second period from 1850 to their respective deaths. Volume

1 of Divergent Paths is limited to a focus on what Levine calls the first segment of the

first period, which goes from 1837 to 1841 for Marx, and from 1837 to 1842, the year

of his departure to Manchester, England, for Engels.

Levine never denies, as others do, the importance and persistence of Hegels

influence on Marx, particularly on method. But this historiographically correct

assessment has to be followed by an epistemological correction. As he explains, his

operation involves two steps: first, to locate the Hegelian elements in Marx, and then,

ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2008 CritiqueDOI: 10.1080/03017600802434466

Critique

Vol. 36, No. 3, December 2008, pp. 487490

Downlo

aded

By:

[Ra

mon,

Ped

ro]

At:

10:3

6 17

Apr

il 2

009

to perform a second act of surgery extirpating all Hegelian tumors from Marx and

Marxism, purging them from a source of permanent serious epistemological errors.

After such multiple surgical operations, one should ask himself what comes out

alive from the Marxian corpus after surgery . . . .There is a lot that has to be questioned in this procedure. In this review, we will

limit our criticisms to a few crucial points.

Let us return first to the surgical separation of Engels from Marx. The main

argument by Levine is that their paths were diverging from the beginning, because of

their divergent appropriation of Hegel. One of the main reasons for this, according

to Levine, is that Marx was a real scholar, an academic who had completed his PhD

successfully, while Engels never graduated from the gymnasium, never went to

university, and did not acquire a doctorate (p. 146). What an amazing argument! It

ignores the polyglot Engels well-documented extensive culture in many fields (he

spoke 22 languages), and it dismisses him, with contempt, because this leading figure

of the international workers movement did not comply with the petty prejudices of

the most narrow-minded academic milieu!

The bifurcation of Marxs and Engelss divergent paths, as it was said, is situated by

Levine already in the first segment of the first period of appropriation of Hegel by

them. Engels had an objectivist reading of Hegel, giving priority to the objective

impersonal forces of history as the inexorable progress of the concept of freedom,

while Marx had called for the transposition of the objective system into individual

subjectivity (p. 200).

The first evidence for Engelss objectivism is found by Levine in his letter to

Friedrich Graeber on December 9, 1839February 5, 1840, where modern pantheism,history as the progress of the concept of freedom, and the priority of totality over the

individual are mentioned. So from that moment Engelsism is founded. The original

sin of 1839 establishes dialectical materialism, including its monstrous Stalinist form

of Diamat.

But Levine, anxious to ground his artificial image of Engels, misreads, as,

unfortunately he does throughout his book, distorting or taking out of context the

actual texts. Engels does say in his letter that he made his own Hegels idea of God

and thus he was joining the ranks of modern pantheists [Engels quotation marks]

as Leo and Hengstenberg say, knowing well that even the word pantheism arouses

such colossal revulsion on the part of pastors who dont think.1 The 20-year-old

Engels, formed in a long pietist tradition, clashed violently with the official

representatives of that tradition and with the Evangelical Church, joining the left

Young Hegelians. He counter-posed the rational Cyclopean building of Hegels

philosophy to the obscurantist irrationalism of these pastors, adding ironically the

statement that disturbed Levine: If, for example, the thought that world history is the

development of the concept of freedom were to fall with all its weight on the neck of a

1 F. Engels, Letters of the Young Engels 18381845 (London: Lawrence & Wishhart, 1976), p. 129.

488 Book Review

Downlo

aded

By:

[Ra

mon,

Ped

ro]

At:

10:3

6 17

Apr

il 2

009

Bremen pastor*what sort of sigh would be give?2 In the same letter to Graeber,Engels takes notice of the degeneration of the right-wing Hegelians after the death of

the Master, criticising them and their descent to individualism by stressing that

Hegel distinguished the totality very sharply from the incomplete individual.3 Is that

not so? Levine finds it to be a rejection of the role of the individual, an original sin

making Engels automatically the forerunner of Vishinsky and Zhdanov.

On the other side, counter-posed to an objectivist Engels, Marx is transformed

into a subjectivist. Agency or causality for Marx was located in the individual or in

human activity organized as a group, Levine writes. During the years 18391841,while he was under the influence of Bauer, Marx transferred subjectivity to the

individual. In 1846, in The German Ideology, after his break with Bauer, Marx situated

the center of subjectivity in the social forces of production (p. 208).

Marx never identified subjectivity with the individual. And he never situated the

center of subjectivity in the social forces of production; Stalin did that, giving a

distorted, technological determinist interpretation to productive forces, raising their

priority into the status of a mythic Subject of history. Apparently, Levine is

completely confused on the basic principles of the materialist conception of history,

omitting always the existence and role of the social productive relations. Social

productive forces and productive relations belong to the sphere of objective social

being; otherwise there is no priority of social being over social (and individual)

consciousness, and no materialist basis for a Marxist conception of history. Levine

ignores the dialectic of productive forces and productive relations and he speaks

about a conflict between means and mode of production (p. 225), using terms

(strangely enough for Levine, who abhors and wrongly identifies Bolshevism and

Stalinism), similar to those of Stalinist Istmat.

The relation of freedom and world history was central not solely for Engels but for

Marx as well, during their formative years, in the transition from Hegel to historical

materialist dialectics. No supersession of Hegelian speculative philosophy and

dialectics is possible without dealing properly with the question of rational freedom,

raised under the impact of the French Revolution to become the axis of German

speculative idealism in its entirety, from Kant to Hegel. Reason and Freedom, Hegel

wrote to Schelling in 1795, remain our password.

For the young Marx, the question of freedom in history is central both in his

doctoral dissertation on The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean

Philosophy of Nature, and his preparatory Notebooks on the Epicurean Philosophy.

Levine fails to grasp this, despite his extensive commentary on Marxs dissertation.

He presents the young Marx of 18401841, still entangled in Hegelian speculativephilosophy, as an accomplished materialist by automatic reflection of his actual

object of study; because Democritus and Epicurus represent ancient materialism.

Furthermore, he identifies Marxs position with that of Epicurus: In order to affirm

2 Ibid., p. 132.3 Ibid., p. 131.

Book Review 489

Downlo

aded

By:

[Ra

mon,

Ped

ro]

At:

10:3

6 17

Apr

il 2

009

human freedom, Levine writes, Epicurus denied both positivism and natural

determinism. On these issues, as well, Marx remained an Epicurean throughout his

entire life (p. 213).

Leaving aside the issue of the use of the modern term of positivism for currents in

ancient philosophy, Marx never rejected natural determinism throughout his entire

life; he grasped causality, objective natural-historical law, determinism in a dialectical

not in a mechanical sense. In his dissertation, he compared and counter-posed

Democritean blind necessity (which goes hand in hand with blind chance) to the

Epicurean concept of declinatio rectae lineae, the deviation of the falling atoms from

the straight line, opening, in this way, the possibility for freedom from blind

necessity. But for Marx, this possibility revealed by Epicurus was still an abstract

possibility, which would inescapably degenerate into fantasy if it was not grounded in

being. Marx criticized Epicurus and his attempt to avoid the contradictions and reach

ataraxy (non-disturbance) of consciousness: Abstract individuality is freedom from

being, not freedom in being. It cannot shine in the light of being.4 Marx contra

Epicurus seeks freedom in being, in a new world emerging after the end of a total

world philosophy like that of Hegel. Levine contra Marx says exactly the opposite:

that Marx was seeking the Epicurean kind of self-consciousness, an ataraxy that

escapes contradiction and strife. (p. 215).

Norman Levines book reflects the enormous difficulties for the reception of

Marxian dialectics in an Anglo-American intellectual milieu dominated by the dead

weight of the empiricist-pragmatist tradition; a tradition that always tries to escape

contradiction and strife but now it finds it impossible as all the contradictions of

declining capitalism come powerfully forward.

SAVAS MATSAS

4 See Karl Marxs Doctoral Dissertation, in Karl MarxFrederick Engels Collected Works: Volume 1 Marx:18351843 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 62.

490 Book Review

Downlo

aded

By:

[Ra

mon,

Ped

ro]

At:

10:3

6 17

Apr

il 2

009