Word: marxist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...think Mao Tse-tung believes, which is why he has unleashed this "Cultural Revolution"--that China is in grave danger, from his viewpoint (I do not regard is as a danger) of gradually evolving more in the direction of the Soviet state, toward a more pragmatic, revisionist form of Marxist Leninism...
When I asked the Student Faculty Advisory Council yesterday why there were no Marxists on the Harvard Faculty I was not "pushing for more Marxists" as your reporter claims. My primary concern in asking the question was not the University's personnel policies. My intention was to ask a much more serious question. "How could members of the Council account for the absence at Harvard (and at most American universities) of serious intellectuals falling within the Marxist tradition...
Professor Handlin's answer (which your writer reported with somewhat more accuracy than my question) that Marxist intellectual work is comparable to phlogiston chemistry was entirely predictable. To this it was pointed out that the Marxist intellectual tradition is very much alive and thriving, that contemporary Marxists have a great deal to contribute to the search for truth about society and history, and that one could find without looking too hard a great many fine Marxist thinkers who observed all of the traditional standards of scholarship in their work, and whose presence would do credit to any university...
Professor Handlin's remarks to the effect that intellectual traditions had a way of developing over time, and that such developments at Harvard and in American universities had led in a distinctly non-Marxist (not to say anti-Marxist) direction were more to the point. For it was precisely a serious explanation of such developments in American intellectual life which I sought in my questioning. The Marxist approach stresses social conflict, the primacy of economic life and the role of the common man in the workings of society and in social change. What in American society and in the social...
...read Marx," he continued. "I have been significantly influenced by the Marxist tradition ... But to ask why there are so few Marxists here is to ask why there are no chemists here who teach the phlogiston tradition...