A short, CRITICAL History of Philosophy (Chapter 16)
Who was Karl Marx? And what should we think of him?
Karl Marx is rarely taught in philosophy classes. Yet no writer who appeared between Rousseau and Nietzsche has had so much influence on the field. Indeed, it would be virtually impossible to understand the main currents in twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy without some familiarity with his beliefs.
Marx was the greatest single influence on Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault and such current writers as Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. There are many separate schools of Marxist philosophy. Among these are the Praxis school, the Frankfurt school, the Situationist International faction and autonomist Marxism. Jacques Derrida attempted to found yet another school, which he termed the New International, explaining that it would be “an alliance without institution among those who...continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism. It is a call for them to ally themselves, in a new, concrete and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or a workers’ international, in the critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalise it.” Showing uncharacteristic clarity, Derrida entitled his book on the subject The Spectre of Marx.
Karl Marx in old age. The pose, obviously deliberately chosen, is that usually associated with a general, not a writer.
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