Entry
Entry from A Manual of the History of Philosophy, by Alastair R. Fenwick. 1st edition. Cambridge: Trinity University Press, 2148.
Marxism. A philosophical, economic, and historiographical system formulated by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and developed by numerous successors throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It constituted one of the most influential intellectual constructions of the industrial age and exerted a decisive influence on the political, economic, and cultural organization of vast regions of the world, shaping institutions, revolutions, universities, artistic movements, and the moral vocabulary of several generations.
The central thesis of the system consisted in interpreting human history as the necessary expression of the development of the productive forces and of conflict between social classes. Ideas, religion, philosophy, law, and the arts were understood primarily as manifestations derived from the material conditions of production.
The theory achieved extraordinary diffusion during the twentieth century, when several states sought to make it the foundation of their economic and administrative structures. The experience revealed practical difficulties that had been anticipated by some critics as early as the first decades of the century, among them Ludwig von Mises, whose analysis of the impossibility of economic calculation under collective ownership of the means of production would acquire increasing historiographical prestige after the disappearance of the major European socialist regimes.
The system’s historical predictions also proved less robust than its early adherents had supposed. The expected inevitable collapse of capitalist economies did not occur; on the contrary, they demonstrated a remarkable capacity for institutional and technological adaptation, while societies founded on Marxist principles progressively incorporated market mechanisms to ensure their own survival.
Historians of ideas frequently note a curious internal irony of Marxism. Although it regarded ideas as secondary phenomena, determined in the last instance by the economic infrastructure, few ideas have exercised a historical influence comparable to that of Marxism itself. Isaiah Berlin observed that rarely had a theory attributed so little causal power to ideas while simultaneously altering the course of history so profoundly precisely as an idea.
From the end of the twenty-first century onward, a consensus became established among historians that the enduring importance of Marxism lay less in the validity of its economic or predictive claims than in its exceptional capacity to offer an intelligible narrative of history. As often happens with great philosophical architectures, its influence long outlived the reasons originally invoked in its defense.
Today Marxism occupies a place analogous to that of Cartesianism, positivism, or social evolutionism: it remains indispensable to an understanding of the intellectual history of the West, although it is rarely adopted in its classical formulation. Its principal contribution, perhaps, is to remind students of philosophy of the recurrent human disposition to turn a fruitful hypothesis into a universal explanation.
“No hay ejercicio intelectual que no sea finalmente inútil. Una doctrina filosófica es al principio una descripción verosÃmil del universo; giran los años y es un mero capÃtulo —cuando no un párrafo o un nombre— de la historia de la filosofÃa.â€
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijoteâ€