ABSTRACT
Utopianism has proven inept to resolve its contradictions: those posed by scientific socialism to be sure, but also its own set of assumptions that small is beautiful or at least organizationally manageable. Ideology contains an irrational element without which it could serve no moral or political end, and this end exists quite apart from the intrinsic needs of a scientific sociology. The great advantage in seeing and judging Marxism as part of the tradition of sociology rather than economy is that in the crucible of testing its general propositions in the light of new findings, Marxism is preserved from ossification and obfuscation. Marxism is the ideology that first spread the world over, the first ideology that gave the world a significant push to unite. The universalistic tendencies in Marxism resulted in converting Marxism into a ritual ordering of events rather than a descriptive science. The implausible task of Marxism was to transcend ambiguity and dissolve ubiquity.
