Mr%20Peter%20Ghosh: List of publications

Publication of a new general biography of Marx is a reminder that no intellectual biography exists. This is an extraordinary omission, and the present article offers a draft outline of such a biography. Some central elements from established 20th century views of Marx are reviewed and upheld, such as the centrality of his early ideas before 1848 and the essential unity of his thought overall. Yet there are also substantial revisions and clarifications: the supreme importance of labour (rather than alienated labour); the revised status of the ‘German Ideology’; the mistaken neglect of the Poverty of Philosophy; Marx’ identity as a synthetic and universalist thinker. More important than any particular finding is the underlying analytical standpoint. Marx is treated as a historical subject like any other. He is removed from the partial isolation created by political constraint or embarrassment, and located unreservedly within the broad stream of the history of ideas, a stream which is continuous with the present. In this history Marx and his bourgeois and Marxist reception are two of the greatest subjects.

Max Weber is important to us today above all because he is a universalist thinker capable of operating under modern conditions, such as specialization and cultural difference, that are radically hostile to universalism. Paying particular attention to his writings on Wissenschaft and higher education, it is argued that Weber had a distinct conception of Wissenschaft, which is significantly broader than the well-worn theme of his “methodology”. Weberian Wissenschaft is shown to be primarily meaningful within the context of society and Kultur, because this was the primary value context. Here, as always, Weber is a social thinker. So the basis of his thinking is in principle the same whether he is considering academic research, the make-up of a methodological tool such as the ideal-type, relations between professors and students, or those between universities and the state. Its strength lies in its ability to combine traditional and universal elements. On the one hand, an insistence that Wissenschaft must remain rooted in personal values and commitment, and that it should continue to seek ‘truth’ and empirical reality (Sachlichkeit); on the other, acceptance of the fundamental, modern reality that there were no longer any agreed and uniform values for society as a whole. Many of the components of this state of affairs were widely recognised at the time, but no-one apart from Weber was prepared to accept it as a datum and theorise accordingly. The centrepiece of his thinking here is familiar – the need to practise a universally accessible “value-freedom” within academic analysis. Even so “value-freedom” is not just a methodological cliché; it can only properly be understood within the social context of a plurality of clashing value-commitments. The relevance today of such a conception of Wissenschaft is clear.

This chapter surveys the work of Ross McKibbin. Among these are four essays on the themes of ‘Social class and social observation’ (1978), ‘Working-class Gambling’ (1979), ‘Work and hobbies’ (1983), and ‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’ (1984); The Ideologies of Class (1990); Classes and Cultures (1998); and the 2008 Ford Lectures, now published as Parties and People: England, 1914–51 (2010). It argues that Ross's work will long continue to be read because it embraces an unprecedented range of the life and activities of the ‘ordinary man’; it combines the most generous human sympathies with a stringent intellectual discipline; and it embodies a radical and novel conceptualization of the recent past, so that we retain a rich sense of the present as part of an ongoing history, in defiance of the attempted repudiation of that past by our political ‘masters’ today.

The article begins by examining Max Weber's relations with Lujo Brentano, much the most important “precursor” to Weber in the field of economics. In particular, Brentano conducted a form of parallel inquiry into the rise of ‘the spirit of capital’ in England 35 years before Weber looked for the origins of “spirit” of capitalism there, and the contrast between these two ideas casts much light both on Brentano and on Weber's Protestant Ethic. This personal history leads into a broader history of the transition in German economic thought between the 1860s – the formative decade for Brentano but also the era of Marx's Capital – and that of Weber's generation coming to maturity c.1890. Marx and Weber remain the two great canonical thinkers and original minds; but any authentic historical comparison between Marx and Weber must take in Brentano. The essence of the contrast between the generations is that between Weber's novel conception of an ethical ‘capitalism’, and the materialism and naturalism underpinning Brentano's and Marx's ‘capital’, although Weber and Brentano are alike as liberals, democrats and bourgeois.

One of the most striking and yet neglected strands in Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic  is the evident interest it displays in the affinity between Puritanism and Judaism. Whilst it would be an exaggeration to describe this as a principal theme, still it is one which recurs, and leads to one of those little essays masquerading as footnotes that highlight points in the text where Weber’s interests exceed the bounds of his avowed historical subject [XXI.91 n. 49] – the formation of an ascetic Protestant ethic in the 17th century and its contribution to the formation of the modern Occidental “spirit” of capitalism. On the face of it Judaism can have very little to do with 17th century Puritanism, whilst in the original text of 1904–5 Weber says nothing directly about the possible links between Judaism and capitalist behaviour, though this would seem the most obvious way to introduce this subject. (The omission is to some extent repaired in the final 1920 text, but clearly this does not explain the original oddity.) [181 n. 2] The sense that Weber has diverged a long way from his “real” subject is greatly enhanced when we see that the Judaism he is most interested in is ‘Talmudic Judaism’ [XX.45; XXI.90] – an entity which cries out for definition and clarification. On the other hand it is well-known that Weber was deeply interested in the study of Judaism, as is evident (to take the best known example) from his book-length study of ‘Ancient Judaism’ (composed 1916–18) within the series of the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ – and even this was only a fragment of the ground he wished to cover. Plainly there are hidden currents at work here, and in charting them we may cast light both on Weber’s thinking about Judaism, and also on the construction of the Protestant Ethic : to what extent was it confined to ‘the Protestant ethic and the “spirit” of capitalism’? and to what extent was it, not merely incomplete but, an “open-plan” text which tacitly embraced a much wider subject area?

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This book assesses Gibbon's Decline and Fall in the light of modern research.

It is a truth sometimes acknowledged in private but not publicly discussed that the only English translation of the most famous work of twentieth century historical sociology is seriously defective. The purpose of this paper is to establish the nature of the defects and to suggest some of their causes and consequences. As I shall seek to show, these involve rather more than matters of technical linguistic competence in German. Although Parsons' translation of Weber is indeed littered with a continuous stream of individual mistranslations, misprints and omissions of up to clause-length which can destroy the meaning of entire paragraphs, a mere catalogue of these would serve little purpose. Nor can one do more than mention his persistent disintegration of Weber's extraordinarily dense and over-burdened sentence structures, which have an average length of something like 8–10 lines: the desire to render Weber into readable English is evident, but so, too, is the damage which necessarily occurs to the meaning and argumentative sequence of the original. In justice to Parsons we must accept that his pioneering achievement was based primarily on an intellectual construction of Weber's meaning; linguistic and stylistic considerations were quite secondary. This order of priorities is one that, rightly, has been observed in almost all subsequent translations of Weber, and one that the present writer also adheres to. On the other hand, precisely the same cause underlies the bulk of Parsons' mistranslations of Weber, since he always believed that the latter required ‘a certain amount of construction’ to bring out his meaning fully [Camic, 22 cf. SOSA 501]. In what follows, then, I shall seek to isolate a series of systematic intellectual distortions occurring in the English-language version of the Protestant Ethic, although this series is selective rather than comprehensive.

Essays by a group of pupils, admirers and critics of the Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling.