Marx launched a revolution in social thought that has been largely ignored. We locate this revolution in the context of two major reassessments of modern philosophy, Heidegger’s Being and Time and Donald Davidson’s new anti-subjectivism. We argue that the philosophical significance of Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production—his critique of the bourgeois horizon—has been overlooked. The paper exposes the bourgeois mindset that runs through political economy, “traditional” Marxism, and much of modern and postmodern philosophy. Bourgeois thinking is marked (...) by a series of “purist splits,” conceptual distinctions that are mishandled as actual separations: conceptual vs. empirical, conceptual scheme vs. thing in itself, individual vs. society, production vs. distribution, preference vs. the preferred object, and subjective vs. objective. Marx shows how capitalist social forms that produce the notion of “value added” inculcate the purist, bifurcating bourgeois horizon. (shrink)

Hegel and Marx both understand the Enlightenment as a failed project at liberation. For Hegel, the failure lies in the form of consciousness that he calls pure insight. For Marx, the failure lies in the commercial practices that perpetuate pure insight. Pure insight may win its battles with superstitious faith, but its view of human activity as purely subjective risks lapsing into skepticism. Pure insight cannot arrive at the truth that it seeks and ultimately reduces all things to utility. Utility (...) is the pseudo-notion that imposes its own emptiness on things, thereby unleashing the violence of terror. Marx, too, regards utility as an imposter, one that offers a phony answer to the question “What gives commodities their value?” while disguising the exploitation inherent in capitalist society. The essay closes with a discussion of how Max Horkheimer’s account of instrumental reason presupposes the purist splits of the Enlightenment that it seeks to overcome. (shrink)

Value free no longer, the bones of positivism are trampled by scientists who proclaim crisis, envision spiritual awakenings, and search for new faiths. Statistics line up alongside poetry and diagrams of meditation postures, as if the errors of theoretical neutrality might be corrected by a confessional style in which the investigator's own lost faith sets the context of inquiry. Nowhere is the zest for the apocalyptic so evident as in the study of the new religions that have sprung up over (...) the last two decades, groups dubbed by some sociologists as the “successor movements to the sixties.” With few exceptions, their evaluations are positive, ranging from the tolerant — “a natural response to the anomie of late capitalism” — to the enthused — “new myths for a new age.”. (shrink)