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Marx was among the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Henning shows he was also the most misinterpreted.
List of contents
In Place of a Preface
‘Sandblasting Marx’ – a review by Fredric Jameson
1 Introduction
1.1 The problem
1.2 Retaining Marx? A preliminary account of his theory
1.3 The lacuna in contemporary social theory
1.4 On the method employed in this study
1.5 The structure of the study
2 Marx Yesterday: On the Genesis of Erroneous Theoretical Receptions
2.1 Marx in the theory of Social Democracy
2.2 Marx in the theory of communism
2.3 Marx in economic theory
2.4 Marx in (German) sociology
2.5 ‘From Marx to Heidegger’: social philosophy
2.6 Critical theory or the dissolution of critique in religion
3 Marx today: critique of contemporary philosophy
3.1 Jürgen Habermas or the return of the philosophy of law
3.2 John Rawls or the apotheosis of ignorance
3.3 Business ethics: a ‘normatively substantive’ social theory?
3.4 Neo-pragmatism or the persistence of Hegel
4 Conclusions on Philosophy after Marx
4.1 The reality check as a philosophical litmus test
4.2 Topology of social philosophy
4.3 The function and scope of theory after Marx
4.4 Normative theory: ethics as a surrogate for explanation
References
Index
About the author
Christoph Henning: Ph.D. (2003), is a philosopher at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. He has published widely on economic philosophy, Marxism, and critical theory, and recently wrote a book entitled Political Philosophy of Perfectionism.
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy.
Summary
Few would deny that Karl Marx was among the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Yet, as Christoph Henning shows in this important new work, he was also among the most misinterpreted. Focusing on German philosophy from Heidegger to Habermas, and the influence of Rawls and Neo-pragmatism, Henning sketches a historical trajectory of the ways that misreadings in the fields of economics and sociology proliferated into further misreadings across a variety of fields, leading to an accumulation of questionable preconceptions. This historical analysis makes clearly evident where and how academic anti-Marxism first went wrong in their readings of Marx.
Foreword
Features in Historical Materialism
Promotion targeting left academic journals
Published to coincide with the annual Historical Materialism conference
Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking engagements
Additional text
“Christoph Henning’s Philosophy After Marx is a comprehensive, six-hundred page indictment of everyone from Kautsky to present-day left liberals of Habermasian or Rawlsian stripe, and it is well worth standing p to its innumerable provocations. It is a tireless catalogue of what I will call Marx-avoidance, which for all its unremitting zeal remains oddly non-partisan.”
Fredric Jameson,New Left Review
