Dick Howard

Dick Howard (he seems to use the forms Dick and Richard equally) has written "The Specter of Democracy" as a series of essay-like philosophical conceptions of the relation between Marx and modern day democracy. Of itself, this is an interesting idea and his clearly intelligent discussion of matters on the intersection between philosophy and political science shows considerable talent for using the difficult concepts of these fields. Unfortunately though, Howard's theses are largely untenable as he fails to appreciate the thouroughness of Marx' commitment to opposing bourgeois civil society.

Howard himself describes his goal in the book, which is also the point of the title, as trying to demonstrate that modern democracy, not communism, is really the 'specter haunting Europe'. Democracy, he says, is really the 'solution to the riddle of history', because it allows the full development of the autonomous nature of the political which is the real overcoming of alienation.

This is an increasingly common argument used by political scientists and philosophers (as well as many anti-Marxist intellectuals in general) to reject the criticisms aimed at bourgeois civil society by Marx & Engels, the Frankfurter Schule, and the apparent challenges of (preventing) totalitarianism. In this view, Marx' undertaking was in reality an idealist philosophy primarily aimed at, in Hegelian tradition, showing ways for mankind to overcome alienation: with the difference between Hegel and Marx being that the latter used a critique of political economy as his philosophical weapon and a theory of revolution as his replacement of the Hegelian Geist.

This reading is however impossible to maintain. Extremely careful reading of Marx' early works, often cited in support to show alienation as the root of all evil with Marx, shows that in fact the political economy was always conceived by Marx to be the primary cause of the alienation of modern man. Even excellent scholars such as Allen Wood have misunderstood this though, so it cannot be held against Howard too much. Much more damaging is the extremely idealist (and very superficial) reading of both "Das Kapital" and the "Grundrisse" that Howard applies. Stating that Marx merely wanted to demonstrate the misconceptions that capitalists have about capitalism as a summary of the content of "Das Kapital" entirely misses the actual content of the critique, which is strongly materialist and historical in nature and far too deeply reliant on the particularities of capitalist production to allow for such a purely Hegelian reading. Marx did not intend to show that capitalists failed to understand capitalism as "political", as Howard thinks - that is precisely an idealist view of civil society itself which historical materialist critiques are an attack on! The political is itself a mirror of social relations between men engaged in production for their own survival, and it is THAT which has analytical priority at all times in Marxist thinking.

Strangely enough the lion's share of Howard's book is spent on discussing totalitarianism and its critiques, only tangentially related to Marx by way of the Frankfurter Schule and the liberation of the political. Howard is clearly enamored of the approach of Lefort and Castoriadis in their later period, which interprets totalitarianism as a democratization that undermines itself by its radicalness (again we notice Hegelian idealist tendencies in this book's analysis!). Lefort's analysis, shared by Howard, finally posits totalitarianism as an attempt to combine radical democratization with an infusion of meaning to history, which must lead to the totalitarian domination of this particular meaning (robbed of its real content, as seen in Stalinism). Howard then argues that it is precisely the indeterminacy of modern democracy that allows itself to be saved from this - the less meaning given, the more people can give, he seems to say. Interesting parallels to Rorty could be made, but Howard does not engage him much, preferring to use the obvious subject of the French Revolution vs. the American one as demonstration.

This review may seem at this point a little disjointed, but this is because the book itself is rather disjointed. There is but a very thin connection between on the one hand the idealist reading of Marx as overcomer of alienation by releasing the political, and on the other hand the critique of totalitarianism and the critiques of those critiques (we are dealing with philosophers here...). What really dooms the book, despite the clear intelligence and erudition of the author, is the way in which a really faulty and overly convenient reading of Marx is used to support a notion of the political common only to liberal pragmatists, namely the political as the (peaceful) battlefield of conflicting meanings. Not only does Marxism not permit such a view of things, meaning one can either involve Marx or pragmatism but not both, but it is also very much a pity that the focus on Marx prevents Howard from actually defending this notion of the political itself. Because of this, the reader is left with a lot of interesting smaller ideas but two faulty cores: an undefended but controversial concept of the political as fair 'vessel' for subjective determinations, and Marxism as an economic Hegelianism.… (meer)