Saturday, April 30, 2022

CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

Because my relationship to the Critique is so different from my relationship to Capital, I should like to go a bit more deeply into the matter in the hope that some of you will find it of interest. Kant first.

 

I first studied the Critique in the spring of 1953 when I was a 19-year-old senior at Harvard. As I have said here before, the course I took with Clarence Irving Lewis on the Critique was the greatest educational experience of my life. Four years earlier, as a teenager spending the summer at an eight week sleep–away “work camp” for the children of upper-middle-class lefties, I had encountered the music of Huddie Ledbetter, or Leadbelly as he was known. Alan Lomax, the great folklorist who had recorded Leadbelly and brought his music to the White world, reported that Leadbelly had twice been convicted of murder in Texas and twice reprieved by a governor who heard him sing. Lomax described Leadbelly in this way in the liner notes: “In the Texas pen he was the number one man in the number one gang on the number one farm in the state.” This description stuck with me as the essence of what it was to be big-league, and when I encountered the Deduction of the Pure Concept of Understanding in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, I recognized it immediately as the hardest passage in the greatest book by the greatest philosopher who had ever lived – the number one man in the number one gang on the number one farm in Texas. I was called to wrestle with it, like Jacob with the angel, and not to let it go until it blessed me.

 

Forty years later, when I reviewed Robert Howell’s splendid book, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, I began with that quote from Lomax.  Howell had spent 20 years grappling with the second edition Deduction and had produced a deep, complex, magnificent interpretation of the text. It was an interpretation that was completely incompatible with and totally at right angles to my reading, but it was the product of the same sort of committed engagement and I praised it to the skies. 

 

I did not find Plato or Aristotle or Leibniz or Descartes or Locke or Hobbes or Rousseau all that difficult to understand, and while I confess that I was mystified by Hegel, it was pretty clear to me that that was his problem and not mine. But Kant was different. Did I think that what Kant said was true? I cannot recall that the question ever occurred to me. The Critique was to philosophy what the B Minor Mass was to music, and I was compelled to engage with it until I understood it. This was, by the way, not a particularly good career choice in the late 1950s, for all that it might have become so 20 or 30 years further on. Logic was the royal road to success in philosophy in those days and in my earlier undergraduate years at Harvard I had gone as deeply into it as the available courses would allow. But logic did not bless me, if I may continue my Genesis metaphor. (One of the oddities of my career is that although my first book was well received and has continued to be so, in none of the four philosophy department jobs that I got – at Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, and UMass – was I actually hired to teach Kant or, for that matter, the history of philosophy.)

 

My relationship to the thought of Karl Marx has been completely different. Although I came from a socialist family, as I have often remarked on this blog, I did not read much by Marx when I was a young man and in fact taught only several of the early writings for the first 20 years or so of my career. I read volume 1 of Capital in 1960 in preparation for the sophomore tutorial that Barrington Moore and I co-taught during the first year of the Social Studies program at Harvard, but I read it rapidly and was unimpressed by it. It was not until 1977, when I decided to offer a graduate seminar on Classics of Critical Social Theory and assigned Capital that I read the book seriously. It was then that I launched on the years of study that led to my two books on Marx – Understanding Marx and Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.

 

Almost immediately, I realized that Marx had done something utterly unique in social theory and indeed perhaps in all of intellectual work. He had found a way to combine philosophy, economic theory, economic history, institutional theory, and literary art seamlessly so as to capture the mystified structure of capitalism. I brought to the text the discoveries of a group of brilliant mathematical economists around the world who had undertaken a re-examination of the classical and Marxian political economy with the use of modern mathematical techniques.

 

Did I think that what Marx said was true? You are damned right I did! Oh, not all of it, not by a longshot. Marx is the greatest social theorist who has ever lived and written but he was not a prophet or seer. He was wrong about all sorts of things, as every great social theorist inevitably is, but about his central claim he was completely correct: that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.

16 comments:

  1. I am not sure what she meant. If she meant that it is better to have a job in a capitalist economy (enhanced to be exploited) than not to have a job at all, she is right. If she meant that it is better to be at work or in capitalism than a surf in feudalism, where technically capitalist exploitation does not take place, she is almost certainly right once capitalism gets established and indeed Marx would agree. Do you know what she meant?

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  2. I have a couple of questions.
    - When you taught Capital with B. Moore in 1960, did he express a view on the book?
    - What else was on the syllabus in your grad seminar on classics of critical social theory?

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  3. Moore do not "express an opinion" about Capital But it was clear from the way in which he taught it he had a very high opinion of it. The graduate seminar included Capital, several works By Freud plus Richard Wollheim's book on Freud, and Karl Mannheim's ideology and utopia.

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  4. P.s. In 1976-77, I was taking Social Studies 10 and reading Capital and some Freud, among other things. (I've recently been writing some memoir-ish stuff so have been thinking about that.)

    Speaking of Freud, a quick thought or two re Civilization and Its Discontents. I'm not inclined to be quite as dismissive of the book today as when I was 19, but I still don't think it's Freud at his best. To say it's pessimistic wd be sort of an understatement. I learned recently that in the '50s, Lionel Trilling and some other intellectuals appropriated the book, so to speak, as a defense of individual autonomy against societal pressures, with the Freudian "drives" seen as marking out an individual preserve that society couldn't encroach on. One sees how this reading fits the 1950s concerns about conformity and "mass society." I'm getting this at second hand and not checking sources so take it fwiw. But it is the case that Trilling, once his brief leftist "fellow-traveler" phase ended, became an admirer of Civ and Its Discontents (and published in 1955 _Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture_).

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  5. "I recognized it immediately as the hardest passage in the greatest book by the greatest philosopher who had ever lived."

    Why is Kant the greatest philosopher who had ever lived in your opinion?

    I tried to read the Critique of Pure Reason when you were doing your Kant lectures and didn't get very far so I'm genuinely puzzled why you consider Kant the greatest philosopher who had ever lived. I ask that as a question, not to start a polemic by the way.

    Here's a Leiter poll of the most important philosophers of all time ("most important" is not the same as "the greatest") and Kant ranks third, after Plato and Aristotle.

    https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/the-20-most-important-philosophers-of-all-time.html

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  6. The pedant speaks: I think the professor's memory is playing tricks. He said that he co-taught the seminar with Moore in 1960 and included Wollheim's book on Freud. But Wollheim's book was published in 1971. Richard underwent psychoanalysis in the 1960s after the break-up of his first marriage, and only thereafter wrote on Freud. A first product was his novel A Family Romance in 1969, and then the Freud book. There really wasn't much published in English on Freud by 1960 that was philosophically sophisticated (perhaps John Wisdom's old book Philosophy and Psychoanalysis would count). I would think it was far more likely that the book used would have been Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of a Moralist, which was published in 1959.

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  7. John Rapko
    You misread. RPW said he used the Wollheim bk in his 1977 grad seminar at U Mass. The 1960 course he co-taught w Moore was an undergrad seminar (tutorial) at Harvard (in the then-new Soc Studies program). He was responding to my questions about two different courses.

    You're a Californian, I've gathered, so maybe the northeast is just one big blur to you ;)

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  8. Marco Aurelio DenegriApril 30, 2022 at 6:23 PM

    Professor Wolff, I am curious about the tools from the mathematical sciences that have been most useful to you in exploring Marx's thought. What are books that survey these applications?

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  9. J Rapko

    In fairness, I can see why it might have seemed, reading quickly as one does in comment threads, that I was asking two questions about the *same* course, but in fact I wasn't.

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  10. To all:

    Perhaps a brief buffer to disputes about the chronology of this and that... and a tribute to a philosopher Professor Wolff pays tribute to:

    Robert Howell was a near-contemporary of mine in the University of Michigan Philosophy program... and I had the pleasure of reading his thesis on Kant's First Critique [when it was a "mere" thesis], which ultimately became the book on Kant that RPW so admires.

    Bob went on to teach for many years at SUNY-Albany.

    Cheers to RPW and to Bob.

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  11. Dear LFC, You are as always correct. I misread and conflated the 1960 sophomore tutorial with the 1977 graduate seminar. Pedant, correct thyself! My mistake is, I hope, the world's gain; now you know a bit about the course of Wollheim's interest in and writings on Freud.

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  12. J Rapko
    Yes, thank you for that info re Wollheim.

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  13. My comment, which at one point was the first one on this thread, has disappeared. It has been replaced at the top by RPW's response to it which begins with "I am not sure what she meant". Missing my preceding comment, his response has become rather cryptic! So I will first repeat the now missing comment (which referred to the second clause of the final sentence of the OP, to wit He [Marx] was wrong about all sorts of things, as every great social theorist inevitably is, but about his central claim he was completely correct: that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.

    My comment IIRC: What then do you think about Joan Robinson's epigram: The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited all.

    RPW's response (currently at the top of this thread): I am not sure what she meant. If she meant that it is better to have a job in a capitalist economy (enhanced to be exploited) than not to have a job at all, she is right. If she meant that it is better to be at work or in capitalism than a surf in feudalism, where technically capitalist exploitation does not take place, she is almost certainly right once capitalism gets established and indeed Marx would agree. Do you know what she meant?

    My answer: I have always understood her to mean to mean the former, but on tracking down the quote in her book Economic Philosophy, I see that the full sentence is "As we see nowadays in South-East Asia or the Caribbean, the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited all." Given the state of economic development in those regions 60 years ago when her book came out, it appears to me that she meant the latter.

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  14. It seems to me that all the responses are saying the same thing.

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  15. marcel proust,

    I read that quote from Joan Robinson as being equivalent to the argument popular in some quarters that slavery was a blessing for blacks.

    Robinson does not seem to have considered where the people of Southeast Asia and the Caribbean might have ended up had their ancestors not been punished by centuries of capitalist exploitation prior to when she was writing in the mid-twentieth century.

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