The Ghost of Marx

Socialism is again fashionable in the West, and not only among the academics. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are witnessing in the public forum a return of the Marxist ghosts. Why is that the Radical Left so fashionable on the American and British college campuses? What does it mean to be "ideologically possessed" (to borrow here Jordan Peterson's phrase, which echoes the F. M. Dostoevsky's literary work)? I shall answer these questions by arguing that Karl Marx was never a scientist trying to grasp the complexity of the social order. The German philosopher was a rhetorician. This is why Marxism is still alive, today, while the history of the 20th-century has dramatically rejected the Communist Manifesto.

Course Year:

2019

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