It is always a pleasure to read a review that precisely captures a book's central claims and offers thoughtful criticisms. Paul Gray's (Reference Gray and Shoikhedbrod2023) review is especially welcome given that it was written by someone who has rigorously examined the place of justice in Marx's thought and reached the opposite conclusions of those stated in Revisiting Marx's Critique of Liberalism.
There is a great deal of agreement between us, particularly over the “enduring importance of rights,” though the devil lurks in the details. Gray takes me to task for mischaracterizing as “orthodox” the dominant view that Marx ultimately rejects rights and legality. In Gray's words, “this [description] discounts the variety of disagreements between commentators and the different schools of thought in the long-running debates about Marx and justice.” It was not my intention to disregard the diverse range of interpretations that have informed debates about Marx and justice. While the best-known representatives of these debates in the Anglophone world (for example, Evgeny Pashukanis, Robert Tucker, Allen Wood, Allen Buchanan, Steven Lukes, G. A. Cohen, Derek Allen, Norman Geras, Rodney Peffer, Leszek Kolakowski and Jürgen Habermas) are acknowledged, the book is more concerned with bringing to light a peculiar convergence among interpretations concerning Marx's supposed rejection of justice, legality and rights among admittedly different schools of thought; hence my reference to what has become the “orthodox” view.
As for approaching Marx's ambivalent statements about rights in the German Ideology and elsewhere, the book tries to assess Marx's positions in “real time”—that is, by examining where he stood when issues of justice, legality and rights were critically at stake. Examples include the 1843 petition by leaders of the Rhenish Jewish community for equal rights, which Marx endorsed; his consistent defence of civil and political rights during the European Revolutions of 1848; and his detailed reflections on legally enforced limits on the working day in Capital. In all these critical instances, Marx's political actions speak louder than his ambivalent statements about rights. As Gray dutifully acknowledges, Revisiting Marx's Critique of Liberalism offers a “ ‘reconstruction’ of Marx's critique of liberal rights and law.” In Habermas’ terminology, a critical reconstruction “signifies taking a theory apart and putting it back together in a new form in order to attain more fully the goal that it has set for itself” (Reference Habermas1979: 95). There are retrospective and prospective dimensions to the critical reconstruction that was pursued in the book. Retrospectively, the book revisits Marx's critical reflections on justice, legality and rights, as well as their political reverberations in the twentieth century, taking stock of possible paths that remained untravelled.Footnote 1 Prospectively, it looks to the present and foreseeable future, identifying features of Marx's thought that remain prescient for a world confronting vast inequalities and exhibiting widespread assaults on hard-won rights and liberties.
