ABSTRACT
The claim that the real history of the twentieth century can be illuminated by the intellectual history of Marxism is, perhaps, one that could now only be made in the United States. Like Marx's thought itself, the proposition that the intellectual history of Marxism might be deployed to illuminate the crises of our time finds little reception in contemporary Europe. It must be acknowledged at once that Jay's intellectual history of Marxism is always scholarly and is for the most part written felicitously and in civilized tones. In his Against Fragmentation, Gouldner sought to develop earlier analyses in which he attempted to bring to consciousness what Jay calls 'the suppressed secret of Marxism's embarrassing social origins in the radicalized bourgeois intelligentsia'. In the writings of G. A. Cohen and Jon Elster, the analytical school within contemporary Marxism has produced work of considerable intellectual quality, even if it is sometimes doubtful how far Cohen and Elster still deserve to be called Marxists.
