ABSTRACT
The central question of this book is why so many intellectuals, in a remote and non-economic field like literary theory, went Marxist. One possible answer is the intellectual merit of the Marxist tradition itself. This could seem surprising only to those who identify Marxism with a narrow economic determinism and a highly politicised attitude to literature. If we take the Marxist tradition back to its idealist origins in the work of Kant and Hegel we shall find that Marxism offered a profound redefinition of our ideas about human subjectivity, human culture and the nature of history. It is these issues over which theorists have been arguing in the last thirty years.
The battle between idealism and materialism, which preoccupied all Marxist thinkers from Marx himself to Althusser, goes back at least to Plato in the fifth century BC, as does the question of the comparative validity of the analytical and dialectical method. The concept which anti-humanist theorists have spent thirty years or more attacking, that of a universal human rationality, which is a part of a universal human nature, was given its philosophical definition by Kant; and it is with modern forms of Kantianism — logical, biological and social, in the work of, say, Lévi-Strauss and Chomsky — that Marxists have recently needed to contend.
Is there, as Kant believed, a universal human nature, giving rise to a universal conception of literature and culture? Or is 'human nature', as Hegel's dialectic suggested, something historically constructed, which 32changes with time? Is human nature and the culture that seems to express it something based on universal properties of human biology, or even of reason itself? Or is it, as Marx proposed, merely the side-effect of a system of social relations, ultimately, perhaps, determined by the features of the current mode of production? Is the nature that we feel to be ours, and all the values that seem to rest upon it (taste in books and literature, taste in people, love or hatred for war) merely, as the vulgar Marxists claimed, our class-consciousness, playing out underlying conflicts with other classes in a disguised, ideological form so that we do not recognise them?
