As I plow through our department’s graduate theory course which moves through Marx, Weber & Durkheim at breakneck speed, I’ve been looking for materials which can help my students get a handle on the material. So I was very happy to find out that Ernest Mandel’s 1967 pamphlet, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, is available online.
I don’t think its possible to make sense of Marx without having a decent grasp of his theory of value. I also think its important to read Marx in his own words – as we require our students to do; but it is helpful to have a clear and concise explanation which doesn’t dumb things down. Mandel’s introduction manages this feat quite admirably.
And since Marxist economics does require some grounding in Hegel, one also needs a primer on Hegel’s philosophy. Here I found the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry to be quite lucid. I especially liked the following passage:
Hegel’s own pithy account of the nature of philosophy given in the “Preface” to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right captures a characteristic tension in his philosophical approach and, in particular, in his approach to the nature and limits of human cognition. “Philosophy,” he says there, “is its own time raised to the level of thought.”
On the one hand we can clearly see in the phrase “its own time” the suggestion of an historical or cultural conditionedness and variability which applies even to the highest form of human cognition, philosophy itself. The contents of philosophical knowledge, we might suspect, will come from the historically changing contents of contemporary culture. On the other, there is the hint of such contents being “raised” to some higher level, presumably higher than other levels of cognitive functioning — those based in everyday perceptual experience, for example, or those characteristic of other areas of culture such as art and religion. This higher level takes the form of “thought,” a type of cognition commonly taken as capable of having “eternal” contents (think of Plato and Frege, for example).
So, anyone have some suggestions for supporting texts to use when I teach Weber’s Protestant Ethic next week?
There are other (possibly more anthropologically interesting) ways to understand the theory of value – not sure whether it’s fair to plug my own work here… 😉 And the challenge of reading Marx’s own words (although I would ask students to do this too) is that there’s a complex subterranean critique operating in his text, particularly in the first chapter, such that many of the positions he outlines, I would argue, are actually the targets of his critique.
I would love, though, to be back in a place where I could teach a Marx-Durkheim-Weber sequence… I’m envious 🙂
The “Iron Cage” and the “Shell as Hard as Steel” And The Stahlhartes Gehause Metaphor in Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. P Baer History and Theory Vol. 40, No. 2. (May, 2001), pp. 153-169
Just to make sure you Get Past Parsons when you teach Weber.
I taught Weber this year and on reflection if I had one day to do it I’d do the “Objectivity in Social Policy” essay, “Scholarship as a Vocation” and “Nation State and Economic Policy” — I think those three (w/possibly a cut down version of Politics as a vocation) do a good job getting across who he was and how he thought.
La passion du bonheur
a must read on puritan ethics.
CLR James (1947) – ‘Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity’ (A black, Caribbean Marxist, who lived in US and Europe but is still greatly overlooked in the Euro-American theory canon) – brilliantly weaves Hegel’s sense and Marx’s historical materialism through a stage by stage movement from Jesus Christ and Emperor Constantine to the Soviet revolution and a predicted unification of the working class.
A piece of genius, imho, all graduate courses on Marx should appreciate and any fan of theory will fall in love with.
did i mention its great lol!
http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/diamat/diamat47.htm