James Daly’s Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment  

A Brief Review

 

James Daly’s Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment  (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2000) represents an important contribution to the interpretation of the Marxist tradition. Arguing against those who read Marx as part of a unified, secularizing, Enlightenment tradition, Daly shows that there were in fact two Enlightenments: one bourgeois, utilitarian, and secularizing and the other dialectical.  The first Enlightenment is that of the British Empiricists and Utilitarians and the French philosophes, the second that of Hegel, Marx, and their interpreters. The two traditions could not be more different. The first enlightenment is skeptical about the ability of reason to penetrate behind phenomena to underlying structures –much less to rise to first principles, regards nature as a mechanistic system with no larger meaning or teleological ordering, and approaches ethics –if at all—as simply a way of arriving at a “deal” which reconciles competing interests. The second enlightenment affirms the capacity of reason to grasp the essence of things, understands nature as a organized system, and develops what amounts to a radically historicized natural law ethics on the basis of which it is able to mount a critique of the market order as an obstacle to the full development of human capacities. Both enlightenments, Daly points out, represent extensions of much earlier traditions. The first is essentially a development of the sophistic tradition of Callicles and Protagoras, the second forms part of a unified dialectical tradition which reaches back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. 

 

Daly documents his claims ably, demonstrating an extraordinary grasp of both the history of philosophy and of contemporary debates within the Marxist tradition. It would be difficult for an open-minded reader to contest his thesis. There are, however, a few areas which merit further debate and investigation. First, Daly does not acknowledge the extent to which Marx has been misunderstood in part, at least, because he misunderstood himself.  Marx presents himself first and foremost as the heir and completer of a single, unified, secularizing Enlightenment tradition. As I have argued in “Against Philosophical Appeasement” and elsewhere this Marxist secularism and atheism is one of the mechanisms by which the bourgeoisie has extended its hegemony over the socialist movement. Second, Daly seems to me to be a bit hard on Engels and the Soviet tradition. Specifically, he seems to me to miss the real impetus behind the “dialectics of nature,” namely a desire to show that the universe itself develops towards ever higher degrees of organization, and thus to provide a cosmological, if not quite a metaphysical, foundation for a radically historicized natural law ethics. It was precisely the secularism that Engels shared with Marx which prevented him from understanding fully, or at least owning what he was doing, and which prevented him from adopting a more critical attitude towards some of the results of the mathematical physics of his time –e.g. the claim that the Second Law of Thermodynamics implies an inevitable cosmic heat death—which prevented him from bringing his project to a successful conclusion.

 

These, however, are questions for further discussion. With Deals and Ideals Daly joins Scott Meikle among the leading Marxist scholars writing in English.  Readers of Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society are urged to order the book from Greenwich Exchange Press, 50 Langton Way, Blackheath, London SE3 7TJ, United Kingdom.

 

Anthony Mansueto