[theoh]

They might be seen as iffy because of the damage that has been done in the name of each of their theories. Marx obviously has a lot to answer for if you consider him responsible for everything that went wrong in the USSR; Freud's influence is probably as much bad as good, if you consider it as having brought a compelling but pseudoscientific method to bear on psychology. And so on.

It does sound anti-intellectual to dismiss all those thinkers as iffy, but I'd much rather retain the option of treating their views with skepticism than enrol in a PhD programme where it's implicit that all one can do is write footnotes on the work of these great men. (You seem to imply that — unless, that is, the student is a rare and impertinent genius who has the temerity to take them on.)

[Avshalom]

to steal a line from Stroustrup:

"there are to kinds of philosophies: the ones people kill each other over and the ones nobody uses"

[tim333]

Though some like humanism tend to lead to less killing than might have gone on otherwise.

[xamuel]

Let it run its full course, and humanism will lead to an unimaginably horrific dystopia. Think "Brave New World", by Aldous Huxley. The surest way to make a man stumble and fall is to puff him up with flattery and tell him how wise and sure-footed he is.

[tim333]

Maybe though I rather doubt it. Time will tell.

[Avshalom]

The problem is that humanism is more of a flavor found in philosophies rather than a specific lineage or school.

Marx was humanist, so time already told I guess.

[beat]

I don't consider Marx to be responsible for what went wrong in the USSR, and I think that thinking so is a very poor (and politically loaded) reading of history. And I'll note for the record that the same people who blame Marx for the disasters of the USSR never credit him for the miracle of modern China, where per capita GDP has grown 130x (in constant dollars) over the past 50-odd years.

And back to first principles here. We're not talking about whether Marx is bad; we're talking about whether Hegel is bad, because Hegel's dialectic was fundamental to the thinking of Marx and pretty much everyone who was anyone for the past two centuries of critical thought. And it wasn't just targeted at Marx, either. The broad brush also painted Nietzsche, Heidegger, "existentialism", even Wittgenstein (who was sort of a critical reaction to Hegel) as somehow wrong.

In my shallow, lazy, uncritical mind, this smells a great deal like a political bias masquerading as an idea.

[theoh]

I think Deleuze (who described some of his work as belonging to the genre of "generalized anti-Hegelianism", which I take to mean a kind of inversion of Hegel, i.e. a materialism) would just have laughed if you said his ideas were iffy. It's part and parcel of being on the radical cutting edge "producing concepts" in the philosophical tradition (participation in which necessitates acknowledging Hegel).

Is there a philosopher whose significant ideas were not steps into the unknown, moving beyond accepted thought? No philosophical idea worth considering is incontestable.

[tim333]

I meant iffy mostly as having negative side effects as seen with most attempts at Marxism for example. I also dislike the intellectual style which seems to lead towards grand sweeping but vague and unfalsifiable theories. Give me simplicity and testability.

[theoh]

I think you are essentially dismissing philosophy in general.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

"Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."

[claudiawerner]

It's obviously not the case that we can hold Marx responsible for what was carried out in his name (I'd be happy to point you to Marxist analyses of how the USSR differed from Marx's limited notes on praxis) and it is the case (if one is familiar with the literature) that Marx is treated with skepticism, and Freud probably doubly so.

PhDs and research in political economy, critical theory and sociology - the three most "Marxist" disciplines one can name at universities - are awash with criticisms of Marx, either major or minor. In fact, there seems to be more people criticising (or at least amending) his work than there are still people defending it. This is especially true in the analytic side of political economy, in which many researchers believe (rightly or wrongly) that the last vestiges of Marx have been finally cut off by Sraffa, and the most we can hope for is Ricardian socialism or social-democratic reform. The very author of the piece we are commenting on has published amendments to Marx's consideration of the theory of value in an attempt to dissolve the transformation problem. Even Marxists (considered as those with an affinity to Marx who reject a few or some of his theses) themselves disavow Marx to various degrees - either in his theory of value (Sraffa, Yoshihara, Roemer, perhaps Okishio) or his construction of historical materialism (Elster), the transformation problem (Laibman, Mohun, Veneziani). In fact, the number of people who hold that Marx was absolutely correct and that interpretation can save him from criticisms since the 60s is vanishingly small, though it does wield some influence - Kliman, McGlone, Carchedi, Freeman, Moseley, Patrick Murray. But all of the figures I have mentioned engage in critique and counter-critique of each other, sometimes even stretching to the mean-spirited. They are not isolated or refusing to engage on dogmatic principles. Even the most ardent defenders of Marx to the letter are accomplished academics, often professors of philosophy or economics, with PhDs and tenure.

On the matter of Freud I'm not so familiar other than to point out that psychoanalysis is not psychology and it is not taken as part of psychology. The question of whether it qualifies as science or not, or whether it can become scientific (in its post-Freud incarnations) is still debated. But criticisms of Freud are everywhere, not least from actual philosophers in psychoanalysis - Feminist philosophy has been very critical of Freud, for example. Extremely influential philosophers in the continental tradition have been critical of Freud - Deleuze and Guattari, for example.

It's not at all fair to say that Freud and Marx, at the least, are not treated with skepticism, even in the disciplines they are most popular in. Outside of those disciplines they are dismissed, and in my opinion, dismissed out of hand. They do not hold some great sway that makes them unquestionable today. There may have been a time at which that was true (perhaps when Das Kapital was being used as a textbook at some Japanese universities in the 20s and 30s) but it is certainly not true today, at lesat if we consider published research rather than the (sometimes misguided) opinions of students who may cling dogmatically to Marx and Freud or to anti-Marxists Karl Popper.

[theoh]

That's all fine. I think you will agree, though, that engaging with Marx's writing, however critically, is not the same as offering an explicit correction to Marx's theories or putting them to the test. It's more of a case of "thinking with Marx". The tropes of Marx's thinking are kept alive somehow rather than dismissed — there is faith that Marx and the others had put their finger on something important and that their writing continues to be worth discussing.

An attempt to entirely refute Marx or Freud would not be taken seriously in academia — there's always some kind of affirmative stance in relation to the old theorists. Unless you are some kind of genius or enfant terrible.

[claudiawerner]

>An attempt to entirely refute Marx or Freud would not be taken seriously in academia — there's always some kind of affirmative stance in relation to the old theorists. Unless you are some kind of genius or enfant terrible.

I don't think that's true either; while it's more likely to be true inside the three disciplines I named, it's not true outside them. Samuelson's and Steedman's criticisms of Marx are held to be pretty much the end of Marx in economics, for example - and economics is far larger of a science in academia than political economy is. There are theories of Marx which are held by many to be simply wrong, or perhaps with some insight that he offered but his theories don't live up to, even what Marx called the theories he was most proud of. Obviously nobody can refute Marx entirely in one fell swoop - since Marx's project was multi-disciplinary and very few people nowadays have knowledge in all the requisite fields to a sufficient level - but as I said, Marx and Freud are questioned both sympathetically (thinking with) and unsympathetically (questioning their bedrock philosophies and most proud achievements). I really think they are only held to the esteem that other greats are held - and possibly less. Keynes, Weber and Aristotle in my judgement enjoy far more support than Marx and Freud do today the entire academy considered as a whole.

[theoh]

This is an unsatisfactory discussion, because you are attacking straw men.

Samuelson was a genius and a once-in-a-generation thinker. I specifically avoided excluding the existence of such people who can take on the incumbents of the theoretical pantheon.

You at least concede that great thinkers are all more or less held in a certain level of esteem. It's precisely this pious, respectful attitude that makes unsympathetic critiques rare. I'm not saying that an academic world in which such critiques were commonplace would be better, or even possible. The conservatism and conventionality of the framework in which academic work takes place may well be intrinsic to the social function of the activity. The fact is that a vast amount of work is done which rehearses, builds on, applies, or seeks to recover value from the work of the 'masters'. Skepticism is not the word I would use to describe the way the literature is typically approached. Criticality is circumscribed by a sense of decorum — one must not be too critical of a thinker whose work so many others have engaged with. To be too critical would be arrogant, or at the very least it would indicate that one was in the wrong intellectual milieu.

I really am not aware of highly respected "unsympathetic" engagements in today's academia. Yes, there were high-profile disputes in the past between contemporaries — Einstein and Bergson, for example. But today refutations and dismissals don't seem to be considered appropriate. The overwhelming mood is one of appreciation of classic texts within small specialized interest groups. Rigorous refutations (as in Samuelson's work on Marx) really don't seem to happen very often at all. They almost seem like something rude.

[beat]

That's probably because in no small part, "rigorous refutation" is confused with "vigorous refutation" that is shallow and partisan in nature. Hating on Marx is easy; refuting Marx completely in a rigorous manner is hard; doing it without an obvious axe to grind is even harder.

Even to the extent that Marx was wrong in the particulars, he got a lot of essentials right in new and unique ways. More importantly, it's impossible to have a serious conversation about labor that excludes Marx entirely (unserious conversations are another thing). And we've now had over a century of refutations of various types and degrees, from both right and left. Contributing something actually new and significant to the literature would be even more difficult than developing a thorough and academically rigorous "refutation".

Hence, the nitpicking about details from the left, and the unrigorous blanket rejection from the right. Both are far safer ground than trying to introduce breadth on the left or rigor on the right.

[beat]

One can engage with Marx's writings without being "Marxist", and certainly without being Leninist. I think of when Matthew B Crawford wrote his excellent Shop Class as Soulcraft. He used Marxist terminology about labor in order to critique Taylorism and the social harm of scientific management, in terms of removing worker control over their own production. And he got lambasted from some corners for it, even though his argument was not by any stretch of the imagination socialist, much less "Marxist". He responded by pointing out that if you're going to talk about the value of labor at all, you'd be a fool to not use Marx's terminology, because otherwise, you'd have to reinvent the wheel.