Content area
Full text
I found Renzo Llorente's article "Maurice Cornforth's Contribution to Marxist Metaethics" (Nature, Society, and Thought, vol. 16, no. 3 [2003]) of great interest because I am in full agreement with his contention that the works of Maurice Cornforth (1908-1980), have been unjustly neglected by contemporary scholars of left-wing philosophy. In fact, the claim that Cornforth's works, along with the contributions of his entire generation of British Marxist intellectuals, have been unfairly overlooked has been a principal preoccupation of my own scholarship for over a decade. 1 For the most part, Llorente's article is quite well done, especially in capturing Cornforth's direct and rigorous style of argumentation. There remain, however, some key points of contention I should like to raise regarding how we might best reappraise Cornforth's work.
My first point of contention involves Llorente's largely extraneous claim that analytical Marxism represents the most fruitful strain of contemporary Marxist philosophy. Although I admit to having once been enamored with the remarkably innovative qualities of G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978), I have since become disillusioned with his and other subsequent works by analytical Marxists. On the issue of a post-capitalist order, their conclusions are overly vague, tending toward a broad egalitarianism and a soft social-democratic politics over a vigorous challenge to the existing socioeconomic order. More fundamentally, it seems clear that Marxist analysis loses much of its critical edge as compared with other methods-- behaviorism, postmodernism, etc.--when it abandons its Hegelian roots and dialectical foundations. (Smith 1993 and Ollman 2003 provide useful examples of why this is so.) Indeed, Cornforth himself, although he came to doubt the ontological status of Engels's dialectics of nature, never abandoned the central role of dialectical methods in Marxian social science (Cornforth 1980, 66-68).
My second point is that the article lacks an appreciation, or at least an acknowledgment, of the broader historical context out of which Cornforth developed the ethical theory found in Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965). Llorente makes the point that we should appreciate this work as a nondogmatic study by a Communist philosopher of a major trend in (non-Marxist) analytic philosophy. This is not something we would be led to expect from...