Whatever the merits of Heath’s explanation, I think he is right in his observation: between 1985 and 1995 there was a massive decline in the prestige of Marxism in analytical political philosophy, which paralleled what was happening in most other academic disciplines where it had a foothold. I think it is also fair to illustrate this with the difference in preoccupation between the Cohen of KMTH or Habermas of Legitimation Crisis and the Cohen/Habermas of the 1990s, with the hyper engagement with the correct normative principle of justice.
I don’t think it is particularly sensible to explain this development based on rational, immanent developments in the spheres of academic research. Broader social forces made class and socialism passé and gave rise to a “post-materialist” moralism on the left. This story is mostly told in terms of feminism or post-modernism but the obsession with analytical theories of justice fits as well.
I thought the problem he brought up assumed liberalism as a standard for Marxism. I get you see it differently with a "facts/value" distinction but assume for me a second that it's not. You can't measure marxian axiology, in a broader sense than ltv, by reverting to an individual standard. I'm not saying Marx denies individuals but it's clearly not the main focus of Marxism so much as labor relations. Obviously the two diverge somewhere even if only to the degree that Marxism takes it as a specific stage rather than their conception of a whole picture so even to a Marxist I can't see how that can be a standard for Marxism or even why it'd be convincing.
Also, a lot, if not all, even definition 1, of your definitions of liberalism can probably be made equivalent or at least different parts or facets of the same thing. Liberalism dogmatically assumes it is dealing with the base concept of a human as a choosing, willing thing. This is a very non-biological conception of a human and any biological conceptions of human rights are aresonantly attached to the 17/18th century conception of a human. That and politics is rather liberal democracy instead of other democracies.
The facts/value distinction I think is off though and even more so assumes a liberal conception of reality. It almost in itself implies some type of solipsism. In order to know a value, one must know facts about a thing. If you consider it a category error by conflating knowledge of a thing with a fact of a thing then you're stuck with the same issue for values as the "value" doesn't refer to the object but the person separate from the object. That distinction assumes a separate dimension of an individual is a part of the object necessarily rather than the object having a value in and of itself. If we think of values outside sociology, like in scientific terms, we have to deal with the value of the object in and of itself. This could be medicines for example. You're simply never in your life going to assert an individual value participates with a value of medication and to the degree a human does value medication, we all the sudden havethe same standard any medical scientist does. In that sense facts are equivalent with values. Similarly in strong enough ethical systems, like ones in religions, the facts very simply are the value. Religions are strong enough to include complete behavior models for facts where medicines won't so there's obviously a distinction but there's a bridge either way.
I forgot to tie the important part to the first paragraph justifying the bridge there, liberalism is equality of individuals inherently while Marxism is equality of the transcendental worker class through material historical stages inherently. So there's necessarily, as you pointed out, an ethical dimension to these things so where you are either-or your values are reduced into that.
I think I understand your claim that Marxism has an implausible view of how good things will be after the revolution and lacks an appreciation for what would be lost if a revolutionary transformation were to occur. Whether this is fair to all forms of Marxism is a separate issue (Marx sees social revolution as equivalent to a transition between modes of production and a classless society need not be one without suffering).
I do not understand what you are saying about the labour theory of value. Weren’t Smith and Ricardo liberals by your (or any one else’s) definition? Didn’t Marx make a big deal of historicizing value? Could you explain what you are saying?
While liberalism has variety, to be liberalism, any doctrine must contain at least three ingredients: agonism, meliorism, and moderation. Agonism means that conflict (or, more mildly, diversity of interests) is ineliminable from politics, especially in eras of rapid social and technological change. Meliorism implies life is not a vale of tears and that if we seek knowledge and apply it, many problems have available solutions, even if they have an expiration date like anything else. Moderation implies limits and liberty, recognizing that concentrating power -- .gov, .com, religion, etc. -- threatens any space where you can be in charge of your own life.
Marxism is illiberal because it is incompatible with all three. It thinks we can create a magical, happy society where we all get along without being a cog in an ant heap. It seeks not amelioration but revolutionary destruction as a prelude to a new world with new men. The deeper problem is its Ricardian theory of value, which is an ahistorical way of looking at institutional behavior and creates the same issues that vitiate laissez-faire libertarianism. Contemporary iberalism, in contrast, understands that development is path-dependent, value is context-dependent, knowledge is inherently distributed and incomplete, and certainly doesn't hit everyone all at once, etc. That's not to say Marxism doesn't have insights into concrete historical practices with contemporary relevance, e.g., phenomena such as rentier or ownership capitalism, but if that can be absorbed into vanilla liberalism, then what's the point of Marxism? I read Heath's argument with this stuff in mind.
That definition is a total historical non-starter--too many examples everyone agrees are examples of "liberalism" in one or more of the standard senses delineated in the essay lack one or more of them.
A useful definition of liberalism should exclude illiberalism, include left-liberalism and right-liberalism, and be true across time -- modernist liberalism, democratic liberalism, and Enlightenment liberalism.
The definition I gave excludes competitors to liberalism, such as fascism, communism, theocracy, and conservatism. For example, consider its leading adversary, conservatism. It typically has larger units of analysis than liberalism, e.g., an organic theory of society -- conservatism is like a theory of entanglement where everything reciprocally conditions everything else, e.g., state and markets, individual and society, etc. Conservatism is also traditionalist or evolutionary, which makes it suspicious of meliorism, especially when it threatens existing power structures. (Conservatism does support reform, which for them means change which keeps existing power intact.) Lastly, conservatism is anti-theoretical, perhaps even anti-intellectual, preferring experience, intuition, leadership, authority, and prestige -- that which sits outside of formulae and abstractions. Anthony Quinton's starting lineup included Hooker, Clarendon, Halifax, Bolingbroke, Hume, Johnson, Burke, Coleridge, Newman, Disraeli, Salisbury, Fitzjames Stephen, and Oakeshott.
Liberalism just has a different spirit. Think of the combativeness of Macaulay, or Humboldt's belief in education, or Benjamin Constant's emphasis on individual pursuits, or Mill attacking Throne and Altar by proscribing outcome-independent behavior. I think my definition is general enough to include not only democratic liberals from the 19th century, but paternalistic liberals from the Enlightenment era, like Frederick the Great and Kant, and modernist liberals such as Weber, Dewey, and Keynes.
The only ambiguous cases I see are right-liberals (a consequence of 1848), which include Tocqueville and his descendants, such as Hayek, Polanyi, Popper, etc. Here, the machinery of liberalism is used in a conservative spirit to justify opportunism, declinist narratives, nostalgia, apocalyptic visions, revolutionary fears, Burkean worries of a world turned gray and colorless, etc. Whether these are included or not -- do we need the letter, or the letter and the spirit -- is a matter of convenience. But talking about rights is certainly not enough to make one a liberal -- Scruton, for example, was a Wagnerian Kantian who believed in rights but correctly self-identified as a conservative.
But notice that, as part of the criteria for even offering definitions of "liberalism," you're insisting on differentiating it from different political factions (conservatives like Scruton on its right, radical socialist types on its left). In other words, when you say "liberalism," what you have in mind is something at least approximately like Liberalism #1 in the taxonomy in the article (even if you'd draw the borders more expansively). I agree that it's uninterestingly obvious that liberalism in *this* sense is incompatible with Marxism. All the interesting questions about Marxism and its relationship to various things someone could mean by "liberalism" (such as Rawls's "liberal" theory of justice) lie elsewhere.
"Agonism means that conflict (or, more mildly, diversity of interests) is ineliminable from politics, especially in eras of rapid social and technological change."
This seems too vague unless you define the level of conflict, since Marx doesn't ever say that all forms of societal conflict would disappear under communism. What socialists usually think would disappear are the kinds of conflicts that are especially high-stakes because if a certain side loses they may lose out on basic physical needs like food or health care, or their only way of fulfilling such needs may be a life where most of their waking days have to be spent toiling away at tasks they find completely unfulfilling.
"Meliorism implies life is not a vale of tears and that if we seek knowledge and apply it, many problems have available solutions, even if they have an expiration date like anything else."
By "available solutions" do you mean immediately available, as opposed to available in the future with continued technological progress? (liberals can certainly think progress will resolve problems in the future, as with Keynes' paper 'Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren') Marx's original argument for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall suggested that capitalism could only end once automation had reached a sufficiently high level, though he was optimistic they were already on the verge of it, and most historical Marxists have tended to assume no further technological change is needed for a successful transition to socialism. But Marx's historical materialism says in general that certain social changes can only take place when the right material conditions are there, so there is nothing inherent in Marxism that prevents one from believing that it is only likely to occur given further technological progress beyond what we have today, for example some Marxists have floated the possibility that self-replicating machines might be the trigger that causes the self-destruction of capitalism: https://libcom.org/article/africa-and-self-reproducing-automata-george-caffentzis
"Moderation implies limits and liberty, recognizing that concentrating power -- .gov, .com, religion, etc. -- threatens any space where you can be in charge of your own life."
An important difference between “exploitation” and “unjustified inequality” is that the former is an antagonistic relationship and the latter is a misfortune that someone (presumably a Platonic state authority) ought to fix. Heath is right to see these as importantly different and he is also right to see both Cohen and Habermas moving in this direction in the 1980s.
I strongly agree that these are different concepts! In fact, I don't think exploitation is a normative concept at all, but a sociological one.
Reread the end of the essay! I nowhere say that exploitation *is* unjustified inequality but what I do say is that it both rests on and is an important source of unjustified inequality, and this is one of several excellent reason for someone (i.e. the workers movement!) to eliminate it.
I am not saying you (or Cohen for that matter) conflated exploitation and unjustified inequality. Cohen does seem to be sometimes inconsistent on whether exploitation is just a positive concept (defined as the extraction of surplus labour time by a dominant class from a subordinate class) or as a normative one (hence his claim that he had more difficulty responding to Nozick than Rawlsians did). But in any event I think it is undeniable that Cohen (along with lots of other people) moved away from preoccupation with explaining class conflict to normative discussions of social justice.
Cohen was always critical of the sort of Marxism he inherited for ignoring normative issues. That is an early point he makes. Habermas also had a theory in which “practice” (ie normativity) and theory were united by the concept of an ideal speech situation immanent in communication in a situation of solidarity. But in both cases they ended up circling the drain of what Marx would have considered “utopian” moralism (in his specific sense of utopian, which is about trying to pass judgment from outside history).
Whatever the merits of Heath’s explanation, I think he is right in his observation: between 1985 and 1995 there was a massive decline in the prestige of Marxism in analytical political philosophy, which paralleled what was happening in most other academic disciplines where it had a foothold. I think it is also fair to illustrate this with the difference in preoccupation between the Cohen of KMTH or Habermas of Legitimation Crisis and the Cohen/Habermas of the 1990s, with the hyper engagement with the correct normative principle of justice.
I don’t think it is particularly sensible to explain this development based on rational, immanent developments in the spheres of academic research. Broader social forces made class and socialism passé and gave rise to a “post-materialist” moralism on the left. This story is mostly told in terms of feminism or post-modernism but the obsession with analytical theories of justice fits as well.
I thought the problem he brought up assumed liberalism as a standard for Marxism. I get you see it differently with a "facts/value" distinction but assume for me a second that it's not. You can't measure marxian axiology, in a broader sense than ltv, by reverting to an individual standard. I'm not saying Marx denies individuals but it's clearly not the main focus of Marxism so much as labor relations. Obviously the two diverge somewhere even if only to the degree that Marxism takes it as a specific stage rather than their conception of a whole picture so even to a Marxist I can't see how that can be a standard for Marxism or even why it'd be convincing.
Also, a lot, if not all, even definition 1, of your definitions of liberalism can probably be made equivalent or at least different parts or facets of the same thing. Liberalism dogmatically assumes it is dealing with the base concept of a human as a choosing, willing thing. This is a very non-biological conception of a human and any biological conceptions of human rights are aresonantly attached to the 17/18th century conception of a human. That and politics is rather liberal democracy instead of other democracies.
The facts/value distinction I think is off though and even more so assumes a liberal conception of reality. It almost in itself implies some type of solipsism. In order to know a value, one must know facts about a thing. If you consider it a category error by conflating knowledge of a thing with a fact of a thing then you're stuck with the same issue for values as the "value" doesn't refer to the object but the person separate from the object. That distinction assumes a separate dimension of an individual is a part of the object necessarily rather than the object having a value in and of itself. If we think of values outside sociology, like in scientific terms, we have to deal with the value of the object in and of itself. This could be medicines for example. You're simply never in your life going to assert an individual value participates with a value of medication and to the degree a human does value medication, we all the sudden havethe same standard any medical scientist does. In that sense facts are equivalent with values. Similarly in strong enough ethical systems, like ones in religions, the facts very simply are the value. Religions are strong enough to include complete behavior models for facts where medicines won't so there's obviously a distinction but there's a bridge either way.
I forgot to tie the important part to the first paragraph justifying the bridge there, liberalism is equality of individuals inherently while Marxism is equality of the transcendental worker class through material historical stages inherently. So there's necessarily, as you pointed out, an ethical dimension to these things so where you are either-or your values are reduced into that.
I think I understand your claim that Marxism has an implausible view of how good things will be after the revolution and lacks an appreciation for what would be lost if a revolutionary transformation were to occur. Whether this is fair to all forms of Marxism is a separate issue (Marx sees social revolution as equivalent to a transition between modes of production and a classless society need not be one without suffering).
I do not understand what you are saying about the labour theory of value. Weren’t Smith and Ricardo liberals by your (or any one else’s) definition? Didn’t Marx make a big deal of historicizing value? Could you explain what you are saying?
While liberalism has variety, to be liberalism, any doctrine must contain at least three ingredients: agonism, meliorism, and moderation. Agonism means that conflict (or, more mildly, diversity of interests) is ineliminable from politics, especially in eras of rapid social and technological change. Meliorism implies life is not a vale of tears and that if we seek knowledge and apply it, many problems have available solutions, even if they have an expiration date like anything else. Moderation implies limits and liberty, recognizing that concentrating power -- .gov, .com, religion, etc. -- threatens any space where you can be in charge of your own life.
Marxism is illiberal because it is incompatible with all three. It thinks we can create a magical, happy society where we all get along without being a cog in an ant heap. It seeks not amelioration but revolutionary destruction as a prelude to a new world with new men. The deeper problem is its Ricardian theory of value, which is an ahistorical way of looking at institutional behavior and creates the same issues that vitiate laissez-faire libertarianism. Contemporary iberalism, in contrast, understands that development is path-dependent, value is context-dependent, knowledge is inherently distributed and incomplete, and certainly doesn't hit everyone all at once, etc. That's not to say Marxism doesn't have insights into concrete historical practices with contemporary relevance, e.g., phenomena such as rentier or ownership capitalism, but if that can be absorbed into vanilla liberalism, then what's the point of Marxism? I read Heath's argument with this stuff in mind.
That definition is a total historical non-starter--too many examples everyone agrees are examples of "liberalism" in one or more of the standard senses delineated in the essay lack one or more of them.
A useful definition of liberalism should exclude illiberalism, include left-liberalism and right-liberalism, and be true across time -- modernist liberalism, democratic liberalism, and Enlightenment liberalism.
The definition I gave excludes competitors to liberalism, such as fascism, communism, theocracy, and conservatism. For example, consider its leading adversary, conservatism. It typically has larger units of analysis than liberalism, e.g., an organic theory of society -- conservatism is like a theory of entanglement where everything reciprocally conditions everything else, e.g., state and markets, individual and society, etc. Conservatism is also traditionalist or evolutionary, which makes it suspicious of meliorism, especially when it threatens existing power structures. (Conservatism does support reform, which for them means change which keeps existing power intact.) Lastly, conservatism is anti-theoretical, perhaps even anti-intellectual, preferring experience, intuition, leadership, authority, and prestige -- that which sits outside of formulae and abstractions. Anthony Quinton's starting lineup included Hooker, Clarendon, Halifax, Bolingbroke, Hume, Johnson, Burke, Coleridge, Newman, Disraeli, Salisbury, Fitzjames Stephen, and Oakeshott.
Liberalism just has a different spirit. Think of the combativeness of Macaulay, or Humboldt's belief in education, or Benjamin Constant's emphasis on individual pursuits, or Mill attacking Throne and Altar by proscribing outcome-independent behavior. I think my definition is general enough to include not only democratic liberals from the 19th century, but paternalistic liberals from the Enlightenment era, like Frederick the Great and Kant, and modernist liberals such as Weber, Dewey, and Keynes.
The only ambiguous cases I see are right-liberals (a consequence of 1848), which include Tocqueville and his descendants, such as Hayek, Polanyi, Popper, etc. Here, the machinery of liberalism is used in a conservative spirit to justify opportunism, declinist narratives, nostalgia, apocalyptic visions, revolutionary fears, Burkean worries of a world turned gray and colorless, etc. Whether these are included or not -- do we need the letter, or the letter and the spirit -- is a matter of convenience. But talking about rights is certainly not enough to make one a liberal -- Scruton, for example, was a Wagnerian Kantian who believed in rights but correctly self-identified as a conservative.
But notice that, as part of the criteria for even offering definitions of "liberalism," you're insisting on differentiating it from different political factions (conservatives like Scruton on its right, radical socialist types on its left). In other words, when you say "liberalism," what you have in mind is something at least approximately like Liberalism #1 in the taxonomy in the article (even if you'd draw the borders more expansively). I agree that it's uninterestingly obvious that liberalism in *this* sense is incompatible with Marxism. All the interesting questions about Marxism and its relationship to various things someone could mean by "liberalism" (such as Rawls's "liberal" theory of justice) lie elsewhere.
"Agonism means that conflict (or, more mildly, diversity of interests) is ineliminable from politics, especially in eras of rapid social and technological change."
This seems too vague unless you define the level of conflict, since Marx doesn't ever say that all forms of societal conflict would disappear under communism. What socialists usually think would disappear are the kinds of conflicts that are especially high-stakes because if a certain side loses they may lose out on basic physical needs like food or health care, or their only way of fulfilling such needs may be a life where most of their waking days have to be spent toiling away at tasks they find completely unfulfilling.
"Meliorism implies life is not a vale of tears and that if we seek knowledge and apply it, many problems have available solutions, even if they have an expiration date like anything else."
By "available solutions" do you mean immediately available, as opposed to available in the future with continued technological progress? (liberals can certainly think progress will resolve problems in the future, as with Keynes' paper 'Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren') Marx's original argument for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall suggested that capitalism could only end once automation had reached a sufficiently high level, though he was optimistic they were already on the verge of it, and most historical Marxists have tended to assume no further technological change is needed for a successful transition to socialism. But Marx's historical materialism says in general that certain social changes can only take place when the right material conditions are there, so there is nothing inherent in Marxism that prevents one from believing that it is only likely to occur given further technological progress beyond what we have today, for example some Marxists have floated the possibility that self-replicating machines might be the trigger that causes the self-destruction of capitalism: https://libcom.org/article/africa-and-self-reproducing-automata-george-caffentzis
"Moderation implies limits and liberty, recognizing that concentrating power -- .gov, .com, religion, etc. -- threatens any space where you can be in charge of your own life."
Are you confusing the Marxist-Leninist view on the benefits of concentrated power with Marx's own views? Marx had a democratic notion of how the working class would exercise power, with the 1871 Paris Commune taken as an inspiration, see the section titled "Storming Heaven" in the article at https://libcom.org/article/karl-marx-and-state and a Jacobin article on the government of the Paris Commune at https://jacobin.com/2021/03/paris-commune-radical-change-history-revolution
Liberalism is sufficiently exclusive in it being the reduction of the governing sphere into a concept of humans as a concept of individuals.
An important difference between “exploitation” and “unjustified inequality” is that the former is an antagonistic relationship and the latter is a misfortune that someone (presumably a Platonic state authority) ought to fix. Heath is right to see these as importantly different and he is also right to see both Cohen and Habermas moving in this direction in the 1980s.
I strongly agree that these are different concepts! In fact, I don't think exploitation is a normative concept at all, but a sociological one.
Reread the end of the essay! I nowhere say that exploitation *is* unjustified inequality but what I do say is that it both rests on and is an important source of unjustified inequality, and this is one of several excellent reason for someone (i.e. the workers movement!) to eliminate it.
I am not saying you (or Cohen for that matter) conflated exploitation and unjustified inequality. Cohen does seem to be sometimes inconsistent on whether exploitation is just a positive concept (defined as the extraction of surplus labour time by a dominant class from a subordinate class) or as a normative one (hence his claim that he had more difficulty responding to Nozick than Rawlsians did). But in any event I think it is undeniable that Cohen (along with lots of other people) moved away from preoccupation with explaining class conflict to normative discussions of social justice.
Cohen was always critical of the sort of Marxism he inherited for ignoring normative issues. That is an early point he makes. Habermas also had a theory in which “practice” (ie normativity) and theory were united by the concept of an ideal speech situation immanent in communication in a situation of solidarity. But in both cases they ended up circling the drain of what Marx would have considered “utopian” moralism (in his specific sense of utopian, which is about trying to pass judgment from outside history).