Karl Marx: Socialism as Secular Theology. A Philosophic Study (review)

BOOK RV.VIEWS 689 Catherine Reigger Harris. Karl Marx: Socialism as Secular Theology. A Philosophic Study. St. Louis, MO: Warren Y. Green, Inc., 1988. Pp. xiii + 3o2. Paper, $19.95. For what can we hope? This question impelled Kant to write his critique of teleology and his essays on history. According to Catherine R. Harris, Marx's response to it reveals his philosophy to be a secular theology: "philosophical doctrines are theological when they relate humanity and society to a cosmic order thought to have a morally significant connection with human life. It can be demonstrated, from textual evidence, that Marx's philosophy comes within this definition" (v). Closer analysis of "morally significant connection" would be desirable, but Harris's claim that, for Marx, "Nature was organically and morally linked with Man in such a way as to ensure the ultimate victory of the human spirit" (48) is plenty definite. Such assertions that Marx presumed to have knowledge of nature's benevolent teleology stand side by side with mention of his secular faith (vi), without reflection on the differences. Similarly, Harris's discussion of Kant calls no special attention to his insistence that the idea of historical progress is practically necessary, not speculatively justified. She leaves us wondering if and how reason and hope intermingle in Marx's philosophy of history. Harris interprets historical materialism as a natural science descending from I-Iegel : Marx's "well-known inevitability thesis was a teleological doctrine derived from the historical teleology and dialectical method of Hegel" (77). Since she does not recognize the interpenetration of Marx's critique of abstract morality with his methodological criticisms of scientific positivism, she is left with a schizophrenic Marx tacking on moral supplements to a deterministic science of history. Harris never works through the depth and subtlety of Marx's critique of Hegel. She sidesteps Marx's repeated attacks on Hegelian and other forms of teleology and "absolutism" and does not take into account Marx's abrasive identification of Hegel's encyclopedic philosophy with the religious logics of Christianity and capitalism. Nonetheless, Harris is pressing good questions regarding nature's place in humanity's progress toward communism. It would be interesting to dig into Marx's belief that human sensibility (internal human nature) can resonate with morality, pushing behind Kant to the moral sentiment theorists Hutcheson and Hume. Contemporary concerns regarding ecology, feminism, and the integrity of nonWestern cultures enter in at several points, and Marx is presented as a Western ethnocentrist, a masculinist, and a speciesist (communist society is a "dominant caste community"). Atomism is a preoccupation for Harris as she oddly labels Marx a "metaphysical atomist" (257,280), describes Epicurus as "the philosopher whose views were most congenial to his own" (13), and idiosyncratically organizes two of her twelve chapters around Marx's relationship to Hobbes. Good questions turn up again as Harris plows into morality, war and peace, crime and punishment, the proletariat, and communist society. Marx adopted Hegel's classical conception of rationality as the harmonizing of universal and particular but determined that Hegel's appeal to the universality of the state papered over civil society's antagonism of individual and social interest. Moral hypocrisy, war, and crime witness to capitalism's irrationality. History's executioner, the proletariat, has the mission of 690 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:4 OCTOBER 1991 inaugurating a new society, and, though Marx came to see its fissures and failings, he never lost confidence in the proletariat's revolutionary nature. Harris portrays communist society as a world order without war or crime, even without need for law or external moral authority. She questions Marx's inattention to nationalism, stretches certain texts to assert that he would eliminate the family as a moral unit, assumes that capitalist technology will be uncritically adopted by communism, and incautiously conjectures that Marx recognized no terrestrial limits to growth. The resultant picture of communism chillingly puts us in mind of Hegel's observation that an immediate identification of the particular and universal is fanatical. We wonder: How well did Marx think through the social foundations of individuality? Caution must be taken, however, with an interpretation weighted toward Marx's brash predictions...