Basic Problems of Marx's Philosophy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 349 The idiosyncratic criticisms of an earlier day now articulated present and increasingly widespread fears; pessimism and fantasy took on a prophetic ring to be borne out by cataclysms to come. The crucial crisis of our time, when man lost faith in Truth and in himself, is only half a century away. Its tale or its significance has not been told. It would have provided a fitting climax for Swart's book. As it is, his monograph provides some handy signposts for the rash student who would understand a little more about this purgatory so speedily transmogrified into a belle gpoque. EUGEN WEBER University o/Cali]ornia, Los Angeles Basic Problems of Marx's Philosophy. By Nathan Rotenstreich. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Pp. iii + 168. $5.00.) Professor Rotenstreich's brief work is of the same intellectual caliber, and covers essentially the same ground as the early work produced by Gentile1 and the elaborate study written more recently by Jean-Yves Calvez2 Gentile's work (which Lenin recommended as "noteworthy" 8) was published originally in 1899 and has passed largely unnoticed in the English-speaking intellectual community. Calvez's work has attracted the attention of Marx scholars, but because of its length does not recommend itself readily to non-specialists. Rotenstreich's book, on the other hand, provides insights that are as significant and more fully documented (because of the contemporary availability of the early Marx documents) than those to be found in Gentile's work and provides much of the substance (in more compact form) of the work of Calvez. Chapter One affords a brief, but adequate, account of Feuerbach's influence on the young Marx, indicating that Marx's "inversion" of the Hegelian dialectic is of Feuerbachian origin~and the ultimate source of Marx's conception of alienation. Chapter Two is a retranslation of Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach," the same material upon which Gentile based his reconstruction and upon which much of Calvez's interpretation turns. Chapter Three is an insightful explication of the first three theses. It is interesting to note that Rotenstreich's interpretation finds evidence for the influence of Giambatista Vico's verum et ]actum convertuntur, that is to say, "practice, in Marx's sense, is the guarantee that it is possible for man to know reality; in other words, because man creates reality with the strength of his being, called practice, he is likely to know this reality" (p. 48). Gentile identified precisely the same influence.~The "materialism" such an epistemology would support would be difficult to characterize. What this leads to, Rotenstreich argues, is Marx's conviction "that reality is rational in its core" (p. 52). It is a conviction that accords itself ill with materialism, however materialism is to be understood. Chapter Four is a consistently compelling exposition of the fourth through the eighth theses and provides one of the best brief accounts of Marx's conception of man and society. Marx, in some significant sense, construed the two concepts, human and social, as identical. "He said that man is socially active in so far as he is active as man. Social man is a human man" (p. 76). This accords itself with Gentile's account of Marx's view : "In truth the man which we recognize is social man .... The individual.., is real as part of an association, a society ; [he] is a result of social relations .... ,, e Chapter Five, devoted to the final three theses, develops this theme, and the identification of the individual and his historic community provides the justifying grounds for the issuance of normative imperatives. Chapter Six is a searching analysis of the implications of Marx's implicit rationalism and his identification of the individual and society. All the problems which collect around Marxism are reviewed and assessed: the evident tensions between ma1G . Gentile, "La filosofia della prassi," I ]ondamenti della diritto (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), pp. 197-303. J. Calvez, La pens~e de Karl Marz (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1956). 3V. I. Lenin, "Karl Marx," Collected Works, XXI (Moscow: Progress, 1964), p. 88. ' Cf. A. J. Gregor, "Marx, Feuerbach and the Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic," Science and Society, XXIX : 1 (Winter...