ABSTRACT

Hobsbawm has written that historians, while drawing a clear-cut distinction between ‘Marxists’ and ‘non-Marxists’ and concerning themselves preferably with the former, have actually widened this group through the inclusion of a large selection of authors. In point of fact, he argued, this distinction is necessary if we are to write a reliable history of Marxism (see Hobsbawm, 1979, 61). In our opinion, instead, the most shared opinion is that the line separating what is ‘Marxist’ from what is not has been progressively blurred. Maxime Rodinson (1969, 9), for instance, has remarked that, despite the efforts of Marx and Marxists to prove previous philosophical systems wrong, it is far from easy to pinpoint what exactly distinguishes the Marxist approach, and some commentators trace this fact to the involvement of an increasing number of intellectuals in academic research on Marxism. Indeed, an attentive Marx commentator such as Rubel has gone so far as to deny the legitimacy of terms such as ‘Marxian’ or ‘Marxist’ (see Rubel, 1974, 20–21).