Abstract
Marxist democratic political ethics overlap with a liberal version of republican ethics. The minimal necessary conditions for republican ethics are (1) self-rule by some or all, (2) under law, and (3) for the common good. However, more than a minimal republicanism would also add (4) public-spiritedness as a necessary condition. I consider republican public-spiritedness to be a form of global solidaristic identification of the individual with society’s goals—an identification that emphasizes political and legal, as well as social virtue. The question of whether a group of sufficient conditions for republican ethics can be isolated is more complicated, and it may be that there is no one canon of republicanism. Nevertheless, it is true that virtually all forms of republicanism opt for a thickened concept of commitment to the common good than when that idea is used by many liberal writers on ethics. Commitment to the common good in republican ethics is almost always linked to a concept of citizen public-spiritedness, which in the case of republican Marxism is thickened still further and interpreted as a form of communitarian global solidarity.1
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Notes
Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 45.
See Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 16; Benjamin Barber, “The Reconstruction of Rights,” The American Prospect, 2 (1991): 35–46.
Lenin, State and Revolution, Evgeny Pashukanis, Law and Marxism (London: Ink Links. 1978);
Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3 The Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Ibid., 1–12; Karl Marx, “Okonische und Philosophische Manuscripte,” in Marx, Texte zu Methode und Praxis II (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970), 36–37.
Bok, Skinner, and Viroli, eds, Machiavelli and Republicanism; Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 244, 246, 253; Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, “Introduction to Machiavelli,” Discourses on Livy, xvii–xliv.
C. E. Vaughan, “Introduction to Rousseau,” Political Writings Vol. 1 (New York: Wiley, 1972), 50–71;
J. L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy; (New York: Praeger, 1960), 38–491; Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 27–49; Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers, 262–293. For a republic an interpretation see
Graeme Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
Marx, “Exzerpte und Notizen,” 96; Rousseau, Du contrat social, 97–98, Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” 1, in Karl Marx Early Writings (New York: Penguin, 1975), 224; “Judenfrage,” in
Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1955), 199. This article is Marx’s 1844 review of Bruno Bauer’s Die Judenfrage, republished. In both the 1843 excerpt and in the published “Judenfrage,” Marx omits the two very same passages. Between “his being” and “of substituting,” he omits “Of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it,” and between “he must” and “take humanity’s” he omits “in a word.”
Of the vast literature on this topic, both in regard to modern communitarians and liberals and to the Kant — Hegel debate, I would cite Benjamin Barber, The Conquest of Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 3–21, for the communitarians, and Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 147 for the liberals. Letting Kant and Hegel speak for themselves, I would choose
Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956) 49, and Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 33.
Jürgen Habermas, Zur Rekonstruction des Historischen Maaterialismus. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976). See my “Jürgen Habermas’ Recent Philosophy of Law and the Optimum Point between Universalism and Communitarianism,” in Radical Critiques of the Law, ed. Stephen Griffin and Robert Moffat (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 67–82.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1971), 23.
Georg Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” in Lukács, Tactics and Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
For the republican Hegel, see also Charles Taylor, “Hegel’s Ambiguous Legacy for Modern Liberalism,” 65; Steven B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State,” in Early Writings, 87; “Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsphilosophie,” in Fruhschriften. For an alternate account of Marx’s political writings of 1843–1844, see Paul Thomas, Alien Politics (New York: Routledge, 1994).
John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–9, links Machiavelli and class theory.
Miguel Abensoure, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Movement (London: Polity Press, 2011) links Machiavelli and Marxism.
See Jacques D’Hondt, Hegel en son Temps (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1968), 99–120;
Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 62–80, for the elements of monarchism that Hegel rejected in the Prussian State.
For Feuerbach, see especially the Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie, in Kleine Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1966), 128. For the relation between Rousseau, Feuerbach, and the young Marx, see Richard Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968).
Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–7.
Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 121–141; also see
Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 23–44, for an account of a more reflective and liberal Hegel.
Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 6, 42–81.
See Lucio Colletti, “Introduction to Marx,” Early Writings, 40–43; Zenon Bankowski, “Anarchism, Marxism and the Critique of Law,” in David Sugarman, Legality, Ideology and the State (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 273–280.
Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume II: The Politics of Social Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 115–168.
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Fischer, N.A. (2015). Roots of Marxist Republican Democratic Ethics. In: Marxist Ethics within Western Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137447449_2
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