Marx and the Politics of Abstraction (Studies in Critical Social Sciences)

Through examining Marx's methods of critique and abstraction, this book presents a series of problems in conventional social thought and the alternatives Marx's approach poses. It demonstrates how sound social science abstraction cannot but have political, often radical, implications. Many scholars see science and politics as mutually exclusive realms, where the latter's influence contaminates former's purity. Karl Marx's critics often interpret him within this framework, where his value-laden judgments render his analysis of capitalism moot. Though defenders argue that Marx rejects an objective-subjective dichotomy, this book offers a different interpretation. Through the method of critique Marx examines problems and biases in putatively neutral forms of scientific knowledge, specifically models that fail to capture the relations of power and knowledge dominant in capitalist society. By incorporating these relations into his abstractions and tracing their historical movement, Marx's corrective to malformed approaches to scientific knowledge more readily lays bare capitalist society's exploitative and distortive nature. This book demonstrates these principles and applies them to conventional sociological methods, theories of religion, and class analysis. Marx and the Politics of Abstraction 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Author’s Foreword 8 Chapter One Science and Politics 14 Chapter Two Critique and Method 40 Chapter Three Inquiry and Abstraction 68 Chapter Four Relational Sociology and Dialectic 98 Chapter Five Teleology and Dialectic 150 Chapter Six Marx’s Political Science 192 Afterword 222 References 230 Index 240 By Paul Paolucci. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.