sawyl | Unearthing an old book review

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that my inherited copy of Elster's Making Sense of Marx contained a longhand draft of pater's review for a journal. Having nothing better to do this afternoon than raid the university's library, I decided to track down the original review. I'm glad I did because its caustic savagery made me laugh out loud. Here's the opening paragraph:

Over 40 years ago, Karl Popper argued, in a series of articles later published as The Poverty of Historicism, that Marxism is a historicism and as such is intellectually bankrupt and politically dangerous. Popper's book was brief, powerful, and to the point. Making Sense of Marx, by Jon Elster, manages to spread the same argument over more than 500 expensive pages of arrogant, self-indulgent, and largely unoriginal pontification. Popper did Marx the honor of regarding him as a clever, but politically dangerous opponent. Elster, in contract, believes that Marx was a well-meaning idiot who made a serious methodological error that vitiated his entire analysis and had potentially unfortunate political consequences. Whereas Popper could condemn Marx and all his works as malevolent, Elster (who does not once refer to Popper's book) feels it necessary to work laboriously through Marx's philosophical anthropology, his economics, and his theory of history, pointing out (to whom?) the error of his ways and awarding Marx the occasional pat on the head for having had a good idea.

The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Nov., 1986), pp. 725-726

Ouch. Talk about not pulling any punches. At least it shows that, despite what people may think, I'm nothing less than the very model of polite, diffident, decorum when dealing with those with whom I have philosophical disagreements...