When i began writing about class in the mid-1970s, I viewed Marxist and positivist social science as foundationally distinct and incommensurable warring paradigms. I argued that Marxism had distinctive epistemological premises and methodological approaches which were fundamentally opposed to those of mainstream social science. In the intervening period I have rethought the underlying logic of m...

Bhaskar defines the philosopher differently: the philosopher observes the scientist, and sees that the scientist is able to expand knowledge about the world using the methods he is using. The philosopher concludes from this: obviously, the world is such that the methods applied by the scientists allow them to gain knowledge about it. This tells us something very important about the world. The p...

Conßict is of course central to Marxian economics. Consistent with Marx and Engels’ (1848, 3) belief that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” most, but not all, of the conßict described involves classes, either “fundamental” or “subsumed” (Resnick and Wolff 1982). Some of it involves individuals, however, on one or both sides, often in different “cl...

The publication in 1923 of Georg Lukács’s foundational History and Class Consciousness is approaching its centenary. Arising from high revolutionary passion, this book faces bleak prospects a hundred years on. After much influence and attention, western Marxism-and broadly speaking, the western Left-likewise has declined since at least 1968. Perry Anderson, the leading philosophical exponent of...

Ignazio Silone, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, has written strikingly about the role of moral commitment in radical theory. ‘The more Socialist theories claim to be “scientifi c”’, he suggests, ‘the more transitory they are; but Socialist values are permanent. The distinction between theories and values is not suffi ciently recognized, but it is fundamental. On a group of t...