Analytical Marxism and the Academy

The publication of G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence in 1978, marked the beginning of a project that would come to be known as analytical Marxism. It flourished during the 1980s alongside its close cousin, rational-choice Marxism, but by the 1990s it was largely defunct. Analytical Marxism was another in a range of responses to a perceived theoretical and political crisis of Marxism in the 1970s. But while at this time many Marxists struggled to try and connect theory and practice in order to inform socialist strategy, the analytical Marxists took a different tack. They rejected the notion that Marxism should be considered principally as a means of analysing and intervening in current social and political conflict, and instead attempted to construct it as a set of empirically testable abstract theses about historical development and collective action. Accordingly, there was little analysis in analytical Marxism of the role of the intellectual in modern capitalist societies. In this chapter, however, I will argue that analytical Marxism does indeed tell us a great deal about the role of the ‘intellectual’ in contemporary capitalist societies, though more in practice than in its substantive contributions. Nonetheless, by considering the work of G. A. Cohen on history, and Jon Elster on ideology, I shall show how the conceptual and theoretical presuppositions of analytical Marxism enjoin an apolitical, in a specific sense of the term, view of intellectual activity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.