This is an excerpt edited by Prof Jason Blakely for pedagogical purposes from Brian Magee's 1977 interview with philosopher Charles Taylor on Marxism for his series Man of Ideas. Full episode here: • Marxist Philosophy - B...
Thanks for posting this. I was able to have a number of encounters with Taylor as a graduate student at McGill, including attending a debate between him and Roger Scruton and once running into him at a Montreal metro station and then sitting beside him on a train. I had so many things I wanted to talk to him about but also didn't want to bother him.
Thanks for that message. I hear you! I feel the same on the occasions when we've spoken. I suppose there are too many of us who would take up too much of his time... You don't happen to know if the Scruton debate is still posted somewhere? I did see it online seems like several (many?) years ago and wasn't ever able to locate it again
@@jasonwblakely Is this it on youtube: "Roger Scruton - On the Sacred and the Secular with Charles Taylor." Unfortunately no video and the audio is poor
I think the point raised by Magee at the end at about 7:05 is very important for reckoning with the contradiction between “scientific” and “liberation theory” that Taylor is pointing out. Recent scholarship on translations has pointed out that Marx used the same word term that’s been translated as “science” as Hegel did, which is better understood as a systematized body of knowledge, something a bit more broad than the “Newtonian” or Baconian sense of empirical science which Taylor refers to. This is complicated of course by the fact that, as Magee said, science was altogether conceived differently at the time. Marx compared himself to Darwin, but it was not take his social science and declare it the same as Darwin’s physical science, because those categories were simply not the ones at play. Marx’s self-comparison to Darwin, a naturalist by profession, terms him a revolutionary in the field of “natural history,” as his own work as doing the same thing for “social history.” All these terms mean something different then but it’s far easier to understand what they all meant at the time by taking their words as they were.
Taylor is saying that human beings are too complex and not smart/rational enough to have a fundamental understanding of ourselves enough to predict human behavior at large scales. Marx thought he was a genius who uncovered fundamental rules that have governed human behavior in the past and will into the future. You are right that the ideas of science have changed, and with those changes Marxism needs to be left in the dustbin of history with all the other failed fundamentalist ideas. We now believe that science is based on falsifiability, which is a concept that Marxism is incapable of incorporating. Therefore it is anti-scientific.
marx = economic cycles don't care about your feelings merchants = plan and prepare the end of economic cycles as jumping boards to technological progress
I had the pleasure of learning about Marxist economic in history of Economic Thought class. Very nice to have a fuller understanding of the economics, and if applicable actual substantative dialogue/critique too.
The self appointed arbiters of thought don’t think. True, Marx went wrong in trying to accurately predict an inevitable future. As Yogi Berra said, “predictions are very hard, especially about the future.” And He was a Yogi! And as an historian of thought I suppose Taylor is almost tolerable. Almost…
_"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."_ Taylor seems to be leaning heavily on some inexorable dogma interpretation when this is simply not the case. In fact, the alternative path is posited immediately in the opening of the Communist Manifesto, _"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles._ _Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes._ The whole conception of "dialectical materialism" is as a continuous process between the subjective/ideological and the objective/material (existence _precedes_ essence, as Sartre succinctly put it), which Taylor captures well initially but then asserts that that foundational _material_ organization of reality which defines a "mode of production" via one's relationship to property in terms of ownership/control is somehow an unbreakable law rather than the material overdetermination that defines class. If that makes sense.
@@moviereviews1446 Yeah and Engels was a traitor to his class. He remains a hero who will be remembered forever. Charles Taylor is a blip, a puff of smoke that nobody cares about
Taylor by simplifying Marx in a very crude way, distorts fundamentally Marx’s argument. Taylor’s major book on Hegel is quite good, no doubt, but his attempt to explain Marx is extremely poor and insufficient.
