Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx by Robert C. TuckerReview by: Basil ChubbIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 13, No. 51 (Mar., 1963), pp. 281-282Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30021984 .

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REVIEWS 281

PHILOSOPHY AND MYTH IN KARL MARX. By Robert C. Tucker. Pp. 262. Cambridge University Press. 196i. 35s.

G. D. H. COLE said once that he ought, of course, to have known that to call his book on Marx's thought What Marx really meant was asking for trouble. Certainly he repented of it though, characteristically, only a little bit, for he called the next edition The meaning of Marxism. Nevertheless, Cole's original title expresses clearly the first problem facing those who wish to discuss socialism for, like most really great thinkers, Marx has proved a mine for generations of exegesis. He has been seen as 'the scientist of society'; as a moral philosopher with a basically ethical system; and as an essentially 'religious' writer, that is one of those who have ' a moral vision of reality, a vision of the world as an arena of conflict between good and evil forces '.

For Professor Tucker, 'it is to this class of minds . . .that Karl Marx's belongs', but this book is not a general exposition of Marx in these terms. Rather, in the context of this approach to Marx, he attempts to explain Marx's theories as a development of his early philosophical ideas, worked out as early as 1844 and never superseded. Marxism, he thinks, is based on 'the largely hidden master-theme of the system, the idea of a radical "change of self" that is to be effected through world revolution and the establishment of communism.' In the terminology of modern psychiatry he argues that Marx's basic idea is a theory of 'alienation', of man as a 'discordant alienated self ', a concept which he transposes into social life and in terms of which he explains the facts of economic life, class, the class struggle, and the development of society from 'communism lost' through successive epochs to 'communism regained '. 'Self-alienated man at war with himself . . . has broken apart, in Marx's mind, into warring "worker" and "capitalist " . . . the splitting of his personality means the splitting of humanity into warring classes of workers and capitalists. The war of self-alienated men has become a class war across the battlefield of society.'

Professor Tucker's theory derives from a close examination of the early philosophical writings of Marx and of Marx's interpretation of those German philosophers who most influenced him-Hegel, Feuerbach and Moses Hess. It leans heavily on an early and nearly unknown work of Marx, the Economic and philosophic manuscripts of I844, which Marx was unwilling to publish and which was only made available in 1932. He claims to show that Marx was not 'a thinker who originally dabbled in German philosophy and then went on to achieve a new, mature Marxist point of view in his later economic writings'. In fact, by 1844 he had deciphered Hegel in economic terms and he saw scientific socialism in embryo in Hegel's work, 'to be delivered into the world' in his I844 writings in its basic format as a theory of society, 'as a self-system whose inner dynamics are those of alienation '. This is the first and complete exposition of 'Marxism' in its 'initial,

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282 REVIEWS

as yet philosophically formulated version'. The later economic, or sociological, or, as Tucker calls it, ' dehumanised' exposition of it occurs when Marx decides 'that man's self-alienation could and should be grasped as a social relation "of man to man " . . . In this way the inner conflict of alienated man with himself became, in Marx's mind, a social conflict between "labour" and "capital ", and the alienated species-self became the class-divided society. Self-alienation was projected as a social phenomenon, and Marx's psychological original system turned into his apparently sociological mature one.'

There are many who will dispute this view, but no one can, I think, ignore it, for it is a challenging and ingenious hypothesis. But whether it stands up or not-and it is surely going to receive some hard knocks-Professor Tucker has in any case added a valuable study of Marx's early work and of the influence of German philosophy upon him. We shall all have to be a bit less glib about Marx turning Hegel on his head. This is an important book, a book that Cole, had he written it, might have called 'The making of Marxism'.

BASIL CHUBB

THE LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. Pp. xxv, 958. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. 1962. 84s.

THE specifically Irish content of this splendid edition of Wilde's letters is small enough to tabulate. There are early letters filled with uncharacteristic enthusiasm for shooting and fishing in Mayo (24-5); there is mention of lectures at the Gaiety on 'The house beautiful ', and dinner with the Fellows of Trinity College at six o'clock (152); there is a preference for 'the beautiful crosses of Ireland, such as the cross at Monasterboice' as models for funeral memorials, rather than the urns and pyramids of the eighteenth century (169); there are congratulations to Mahaffy on a letter he had written to the Pall Mall Gazette on the subject of 'the hundred best books': ' the manner of it is most brilliant '-but the letter turned out to be an undergraduate hoax (187); there is a chronic inability, or unwillingness, to master the standard English use of will and shall: Wilde always asked others to regularise them in his work (e.g. 289); there is reluctance to have his name bandied about as a contributor to the Scots Observer in I888, and one of the reasons was that 'I hear your paper is anti-Home Rule, and I am a most recalcitrant patriot' (232). He corresponds with Michael Davitt, who had taken up Wilde's charges of prison-cruelty in the house, and always speaks of him with respect. Finally, throughout his life, Wilde speaks of himself as a Celt, and justifies his antagonism to prevailing English customs as a racial difference. There is a plan for a Celtic dinner, to 'show these tedious Angles or Teutons what a race we are, and how proud we are to belong to that race' (287). The Celt

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