ABSTRACT
By the early 1950s, the radical impulse that had animated students in many universities during the late 1940s had been spent. The Cold War was being waged on many fronts, and casualties were beginning to mount. The comprehensive aspiration of Marx's thought, seeming to illuminate all parts of the social world, was a large part of what had attracted him to his ideas in the first place. Marx was not flat-out anti-Jewish or flat-out anti-Christian. It became even clearer to me after considering the issues that, however distant from them they may seem, many of Marx's moral and social views as well as his eschatology were touched with Judaic and Christian thought. The pragmatists drew upon sociology, psychology, history, culture, and not least aspects of the mind to construct their pragmatist perspective. Marx's aphorism, in his Theses on Feuerbach, that mere contemplative skepticism evaporates in practical sensuous activity, was not much of a solution, in his view.
