All entries for Saturday 25 June 2005

Radio 4, Philosophy and Marx

BBC Radio 4’s show In Our Time is running a survey aimed at uncovering the nation’s favourite philosopher. The show’s website provides audio clips of various individuals putting forward the case for the various candidates.

Michael Grove of The Times questions the popularity of Marx, the likely winner of this survey and explains the appeal of his philosophy to those who tend to dwell in academia.

A sample –

The author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital may be the godfather of more misery, death and criminality than any other figure from the last 200 years. But he speaks, across the decades, and over a mountain of corpses, to an eternal yearning on the part of intellectuals. Marxism appeals to the thwarted dignity of the intellectual, flattering the academically inclined by playing to their sense that the world does not value them as it should.

Karl Marx has the answer to the central question that most troubles contemporary intellectuals. Not, “what is the meaning of life?” but “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”. For all those who form our intellectual classes, the readers of the New Statesman and the London Review of Books, the lecturers in sociology and cultural studies, the Arts Council England administrators and LEA curriculum advisers, life is plagued with a nagging injustice. They possess what they believe to be superior insights to the majority, a more cultivated mind, a more refined sensibility, a broader intellectual range. And yet they don’t enjoy the worldly success, or esteem, of those coarser souls who devote themselves to the grubby business of commerce and exchange. How can this injustice be explained? There must be something deeply, systemically, wrong with the way society is organised.

Read the full article here.

: 25 Jun 2005 12:32 |  Tags: Economics |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem