Revisiting Marxism: A Bourgeois Reassessment

For some time there has been no direct critique of Marx's ideas from those who value the position he most harshly attacked, bourgeois capitalism. The few who did criticize Marx were economists such as Thomas Sowell, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, and Ludwig von Mises. Others attacked Marx's ideas, but did not actually defend the concept of capitalism. In 1987, shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, David Conway published his Farewell to Marx, which offered a philosophical critique of Marx. This work, however, developed, in part, from a position that uncritically embraces economism, or what the author calls the "homo economicus conception of human life." In Revisting Marxism, Tibor Machan contrasts Marx's historicist collectivism with a neo-Aristotelian individualism as presented by, among others, David L. Norton and Ayn Rand. It criticizes Marxism based on this position, the one he most directly disparaged. Also included in this volume is an exchange between the author and the late Sidney Hook, perhaps the most sympathetic social democratic champion of Marx's ideas.