Abstract
The crisis and collapse of Marxism as the dominant intellectual system of the Left was surely one of the seismic shifts in the Ideological history of the late twentieth century This was a crisis already underway well before the collapse of the East Bloc. Indeed, by 1977, the most Influential Marxist thinker in Trance, Louis Althusser, took the “crisis of Marxism” as a given fact, but he pleaded with his readers that instead of writing the epitaph for Marxism, they should give this crisis “a completely different sense from collapse and death.” It was necessary, in Althusser’s words, to show “how something vital and alive can be liberated by this crisis and in this crisis.”1 This is a challenge that remains to this day, lhe questions that animated the Marxist tradition continue to press on us, even If many of that tradition’s answers have lost much of their persuasive power—the critique of and struggle against forms of domination that work through the visible and Invisible channels of social and economic relations, the desire for social justice and equality, as well as the attempt to envision and bring into being modes of collective life and decision making that liberate rather than oppress people.
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Notes
Louis Althusser. “The Crisis of Maoism,” lu Power and Opposition in Post Revolutionary Societies, trans. P. Camiller (Loudon: Ink Links, 1979), 225.
Louis Akhusser, Machiavelli and Us., trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 1999), 3.
Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, December 10, 1513, in Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere a Francesco Vettori e a Francesco Guicciardini (1513–1527), ed. Gtorgto Inglese (Milario: Bibloteca Urnversale Rizzoli, 1989), 195.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau; The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 183.
See especially Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance; Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University’ Press, 1955)
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978)
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machtavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Unversity Press, 1975).
Althusser to Franca Madonia, September 29, 1962, in Louis Althusser, Lettres à Franca (1961–1973), ed. François Matheron and Yann Moulier Boutang (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1998), 225.
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15.
Althusser to Merab Mardashvili, January 16, 1978, in Louis Althusser Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2006), 4.
Merleau-Ponty, “A Note on Machiaveili,” Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleaty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 215
Claude Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 140.
Claude Lefort, “Human Rights and the Welfare State,” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 39.
See the description of Abensour in Marcel Gauchet, “De Texrares au Débat ou la Revue Comme Creuset de la Vie Intellectuelle,” in La Condition Historique. Entretiens avec François Azouvi et Sylvain Piron (Paris: Editions Stock, 2003). 160.
Miquel Abensour, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, trans. Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), xliv.
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© 2015 Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson
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Breckman, W. (2015). The Power and the Void: Radical Democracy, Post-Marxism, and the Machiavellian Moment. In: Smulewicz-Zucker, G., Thompson, M.J. (eds) Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381606_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381606_11
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