The intention of this book is clearly expressed in its title—to rediscover Marx’s philosophy after the end of politics that has been using it as an ideological cliché during an entire century. After the “wind of change” and whirlpool of events that led to the fall of the Berlin wall, it can be seen that the end of history has not come yet. Today, we are asking ourselves whether a new epoch is emerging or the old capitalism is transforming itself into a financial/silicon mode.
Tom Rockmore himself is convinced that Marx’s philosophy “will be worth reading as long as capitalism lasts.” He ironically observes that the statement that Marx’s theory is dead is “as accurate as the idea that ideology is at end.”
Rockmore’s study belongs resolutely to the field of the History of Philosophy. Marx’s texts are the object of a research wherein both description and interpretation are pursued. As Rockmore emphasizes, the description itself is impossible “without picking up what is significant in the texts, hence without interpreting them”. Unlike the Marxists “who claim to speak in Marx’s name, we should enable his texts to speak for him.” Rockmore’s message is that we need to regard Marx’s philosophical insights not only as a completed result and theory sui generis but in “the way they emerged in the debates of his own time.” This means that Marx should not be opposed to Hegel, but rather viewed within the larger Hegelian framework.
Such an approach is welcomed by Eastern European readers. Why? Because during the times of the old regimes, the official publications on Marx were supposed to follow the Party directives. However, in the Universities, in particular after 1968, a clandestine movement of intellectuals opposed to power began to form. For them the issue of Hegel’s influence on Marx and, especially, the issue of the dialectical method were matters to be discussed with scholarly precision and scrupulousness.