The Influence of Marxism 1945 – 83

Badge of Marx

The changing social composition of the Marxist population reinforced the tendency to pluralism, but also (through the new intellectual constituency for Marxism) tended to extend Marxism beyond the strictly political field into the general academic and cultural sphere.

The most influential economic textbooks decided in the 1970s to include a special section on Marxist economics. In France, for example, Marxism thus became just one component of an intellectual universe which also contained others – de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or whoever else was influential in the senior classes of French lycées or discussed in the fifth and sixth arrondissements of Paris. Marxist intellectuals who grew up and acquired their Marxism in such a culture might find it desirable to translate Marxism into whatever was the prevalent theoretical idiom, both to make it comprehensible to readers unused to Marxist terminology. A typical product of such a period is G.A. Cohen’s reformulation of the materialist conception of history in the terminology of, and applying "those standards of clarity and rigour which distinguish twentieth-century analytic philosophy". Or else they might simply produce some combination of Marxism with other influential theories – structuralism, existentialism, psychoanalysis or the like.

Eric Hobsbawm

1917 - 2012