Marx and the disillusionment of Marxism /

If Marxism is dead-what remains? According to this book, what remains is Marx's problematic socioeconomic theory-problematic, for although the theory is suffused with historical consciousness, it ironically displays the stages of its own historical development. Robert Tucker's Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (1961) pioneered the mining of this particular mother lode vein in Marxist studies. Adamson, author of Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (CH, Jan '81), provides additional riches. For him, Marx's thought contains four rather different historical paradigms that he identifies as anthropological, pragmatological, counterevolutionary, and nomological, and he links them to phases in Marx's life. Adamson argues that the principal interpreters of Marxism in the late 19th and 20th centuries-from Eduard Berstein to Jurgen Habermas-naively adopted one or another of those paradigms as the whole Marx, ignoring other possibilities. Not surprisingly, it is easy for the author to show that shortcomings in Marx remained shortcomings in his interpreters. A first-rate contribution to Marxist studies. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate readership.-R. Harvey, Ohio University