File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-18.151, message 53


Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 13:45:43 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: On Science and the "Legacy" of the Enlightenment



Adam P writes,  agreeably:

>...The drive to understand the world is inherently progressive and
>this is at the core of the Marxist method.


And then:

> Related to this is the fact that the world is knowable and facts
>approximating reality can be generalised from scientific experiments. This
>is the legacy of the Enlightenment and one that Marxists should indeed
>defend in the face of postmodernist trash about the relativity of truth and
>the uknowable nature of the world.


Well said,  Adam.     However,  rather than *the* legacy of the
Enlightenment,  I would have said the idea that the world is knowable is *a*
legacy of that heady period in human history.     And rather than a legatee
of the Enlightenment,  Marxism is,  rather,  its successor and,  ultimately,
its destroyer as well.

The Enlightenment (and the modern democracy that grew up and spread from its
focus in western Europe over the past three centuries) rested on three main
propositions:  first,  that the individual conscience is the ultimate source
of decisions about what is right and wrong;  second,  that there exists
between different individuals a fundamental harmony of interests strong
enough to enable them to live peacefully together in society;  third,  that
where action has to be taken in the name of society,  rational discussion
between individuals is the best method of reaching a decision on that
action.    The Enlightenment and its concomitants were,  in virtue of its
origins,  individualist,   optimistic and rational.    The three main
propositions on which it is based have all been seriously challenged by
Marxism.    

The balance sheet of what we call the Enlightenment -- together with its
nicknames "The Age of Reason" and "The Age of Discovery" --  bespeaks its
anti-Marxian character.    Even the long held view that a "Golden Age" of
science emerged from its womb has now run into bad trouble (cf., Larry
Stewart,  *The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric,  technology and natural
philosophy in Newtonian Britain,  1660-1760* [Cambridge,  1992: Cambridge
University Press] and,  more recently,  H.  Floris Cohen,  *The Scientific
Revolution: A historiographical inquiry* [Chicago,  1995: University of
Chicago Press]).   And its efforts in the political sphere are far from
unsullied:  Athenian democracy,  which the Enlightenment held up as the
source and exemplar of democratic institutions,  was the creation and
prerogative of a limited and privileged group of the population.    And of
course John Locke,  commonly thought of as the founder of the modern
democratic tradition,   was the chosen philosopher and prophet of the
eighteenth century English Whig oligarchy.    British nineteenth century
liberal democracy was itself built up on a highly restrictive property
franchise.    The economic whip of *laissez-faire* capitalism was the
natural product of those ideas which served as a basic underpinning to the
"Age of Reason".    

So,  I am more comfortable with an interpretation that sets Marxism
*against* the main ideology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
rather than as the natural progeny of a movement that was quite varied,
contradictory and complex and whose true meaning continues to elude us
today.      

Louis Godena



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