Recently, I received in the mail a copy of the new second edition of Kevin M. Brien's book, *Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom* (Humanity Books - Prometheus, 2006), from Professor Robert S. Cohen of Boston University. Now, while I am generally not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, the receipt of this book left me slightly bewildered. There was no letter or note of explanation enclosed with the book. Although a couple years ago, I did attempt to contact Professor Cohen at Ralph Dumain's request, my attempts to reach him had ended in failure. He doesn't do email. And a philosophy professor that I know there had attempted to contact him at my request, but that too ended in failure. So why would Professor Cohen now be sending me free books? And how did he get my home address? After all, my name does not appear in the phone book, and I have never posted my street address on the Internet.
So I tried making contact with him. First I started with his official Boston University email address. But my emails to him immediately bounced back. He apparently still doesn't do email. I then tried his phone number at Boston University. Well, apparently he doesn't have an answering service either. I suppose when you are 82 years old, you are probably not going to bother with email and answering services, if you had never bothered with those things before. So, I next tried contacting the philosophy department at BU. I received a response back from the department's program coordinator. So I suggested that she forward my thanks (as well as my questions concerning how he got my home address) to Professor Cohen. Lo and behold, this past Friday, I received a phone call from the big man himself. He said that Kevin Brien was a former student of his, and that as a favor to him, he was mailing out copies of his book to people, whose names and addresses that Brien had forwarded to him. It was Professor Cohen's understanding that Kevin Brien had obtained access to the subscription lists of some leftwing publications. Well I subscribe to Monthly Review and Science & Society, and I l know from past experience that these publications do release their subscription lists to certain favored progressive organizations and people. So there was my answer. Anyway, I started to read the book itself. It is work on Marxist philosophy written from the standpoint of a humanistic Marxism. Professor Brien strongly defends the position that Marx's work from his youthful writings like the 1844 Paris Manuscripts to his most mature writings like Capital constitute a unity. In other words he rejects the contentions of the old Stalinists and the Althusserians that there is a fundamental disjunction between the young Marx and the more mature Marx. In fact he rejects the idea that there is a bifuracted Marxism: a 'positivist' Marxism versus a 'humanist' Marxism, a 'voluntarist' Marxism versus a 'determinist' Marxism, or a 'reductionist' Marxism versus an 'emergentist' Marxism. On the other hand, Brien does clearly opt for a Marxism that is humanist, that is volunatarist, and that is emergentist, so he might be charged with simply privilaging one Marxism over the other, while not really resolving the apparent bifurcation that exists within the Marxist tradition. Having said that, he does attempt to do justice to the views of those Marxists that one would not expect him to be particularly sympathetic with. While he is no Althusserian, he does see much that is valuable in Althusser's analysis of social structures, and he attempts to incorporate this into his own analysis of capitalist society. While Kevin Brien is certainly not an old fashion dialectical materialist, he does, unlike some other noted humanist Marxists like Lukacs, attempt a defense of Engel's belief in a dialectics of nature. In doing this, he draws heavily upon the work of the quantum physicist, David Bohm, especially Bohm's *Causality and Chance in Modern Physics*. That book, as I have noted elsewhere, represented an attempt by Bohm to provide an updated version of Engels' philosophy of nature in the light of modern physics. Brien suggests that Engels' dialectics of nature might provide a basis for for what he describes ass a "third-order heuristic for the ongoing dialectic of inquiry in the nonhuman natural sciences." While he does not see this as essential for Marxism, Brien believes this to constitute a reasonable extrapolation of Marx's method from the social to the natural sciences. Some other noteworthy features of the book include his drawing upon Bertell Ollman's work on dialectics, including his use of the notion of internal relations as that concept was developed and elaborated by Brand Blanshard. Brien goes out of his way to rebut the critiques that were made of this concept by the empiricist philosopher, Ernest Nagel. He also makes a limited engagement with analytical Marxism as represented by the work of Dan Little. Apparently, Little had critiqued some of Brien's ideas so this inspired him to answer Little. Brien embraces Little's depiction of Marx as an empirical social scientist (as presented in his *The Scientific Marx*) but argues contrary to most analytical Marxists, that Marx was a dialectial empirical social scientist. In this way, he attempts to incorporate into his own thinking what he regards as some of the valid insights of analytical Marxists like Little, while remaining true to his own dialectical, humanist Marxism. This is sort of the same tac that he had taken with Althusser. Curiously enough, he makes no mention at all of people like G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, or E.O. Wright, people who are much better known analytical Marxists than Dan Little. Another noteworthy feature of the second edition, is his attempt to find common ground between Marxism and Buddhism. Apparently, in the time following the writing and publication of the first edition of this book, Professor Brien has become deeply interested in Buddhist thought, and is now obsessed with reconciling Marxism with Buddhism. As he points out, Marxism and Buddhism do share a number of things in common. Both modes of thought are non-theistic in character, and both systems as naturalistic. Here, Brien makes the argument that one can have a spirituality without theism, citing Buddhism as a prime example of a nontheistic spirituality. He then goes on to argue that Marxism is compatible with a nontheistic spirituality and that in fact Buddhism and Marxism both share the objective of trying to lead man into living a non-alienated existence, He recognizes that there are definite distinctions between the ways that Buddhists have traditionally attempted to attain this goal and the ways that Marxists have approached it. But he suggests that the Marxist and Buddhist approaches may be more complementary than antagonistic. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
