1925
First Published
3.35
Average Rating
59
Number of Pages
From Content: " No name in the history of social ideas occupies a place more remarkable than that of Karl Marx. Save Machiavelli and Rousseau, no thinker has been the subject of a condemnation so unsparing, and, like Rousseau, it has been his fortune to preside after death over a revolution conceived in his name. His books have received from a chosen band a scrutiny as earnest as ever the Bible or the Digest have obtained. Yet the precise grounds of the position he occupies among "Socialists is a more complex problem than is usually assumed. His theory of value is no more than a formidable adaptation of a concept already worked out in full by a group of English predecessors. Men like Harrington and James Madison realized, hardly less clearly than he, the significance of the materialist interpretation of history. His appreciation of the fact of class antagonism had been anticipated in detail by Saint-Simon. Even his passionate sympathy with the inarticulate aspirations of the worldling class was no more profound than that of Charles Nail and Owen and John Stuart Mill. His position, indeed, cannot be appreciated unless it is seen in its historical perspective. Born between too revolutions, he utilized the method produced by the reaction from the excesses of France to the service of its fundamental principles. The disciple of Hegel, he was the first of those who felt his master's influence to apply his dialectic to the analysis of social facts. Hardly less important was the material of which he made use. Beginning to write when the full implications of capitalism were becoming visible, he utilized its own description of its economic consequences as the proof of its moral inadequacy. The evidence was impressive and complete; and the induction therefrom of a social order at once new and inevitable, suited to a nicety the yearnings of his generation. "
Avg Rating
3.35
Number of Ratings
23
5 STARS
13%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
39%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
4%
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Author
Harold J. Laski
Author · 8 books
Harold Joseph Laski was a British Marxist, political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer, who served as the chairman of the Labour Party during 1945-1946, and was a professor at the LSE from 1926 to 1950.
