Marxism, Pragmatism, and Narrative

While the renaissance of pragmatism has led to many important and fruitful discussions, the relationship between pragmatism and Marxism has played hardly any role in this context. This relationship was discussed by Richard J. Bernstein and George Novack in the 1970s and by Cornel West in the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, this important discussion has been neglected.  This essay seeks to reactivate this discussion. It offers the first analysis of the relation between Marxism and pragmatism that concentrates on the dialectics of narrative and totality and thus on the constellation narrative-totality-nominalism.