This influential Marxist text by the longtime editor of the radical New Left Review studies the development of 20th Century Marxist theory. Anderson defends the political and economic "Classical" tradition of Lenin and Trotsky against the aesthetic and cultural "Western" Marxist tradition of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School.The Economist labeled the book "by far the best guide to modern Marxism," though E.J. Hobbsbawm accused Anderson of idealizing pre-1914 Marsixm. Anderson's weakness, Hobbsbawm said in his New Statesman review, was his assumption that Western Marxism "can return to the main highway after its prolonged detour."

Considerations on Western Marxism

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the East in the early 1920s. It focuses particularly on the work of Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism from 1920 to 1975. The theoretical production of each of these thinkers is related simultaneously to the practical fate of working-class struggles and to the cultural mutations of bourgeois thought in their time. The philosophical antecedents of the various school within this tradition—Lukácsian, Gramscian, Frankfurt, Sartrean, Althusserian and Della Volpean—are compared, and the specific innovations of their respective systems surveyed. The structural unity of 'Western Marxism', beyond the diversity of its individual thinkers, is then assessed, in a balance-sheet that contrasts its heritage with the tradition of 'classical' Marxism that preceded it, and with the commanding problems which will confront any historical materialism to succeed it.

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Considerations on Western Marxism

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